Manifesto Handbook, The
by Julian Hanna

The Manifesto Handbook is an insider's guide to an incendiary genre that has sparked the most important revolutionary movements in history.

The Manifesto Handbook describes the hidden life of an undervalued genre: the conduit for declarations of principle, advertisements for new “isms,” and provocations in pamphlet form. Often physically slight and small in scale, the manifesto is always grand in style and ambition. A bold, charismatic genre, it has founded some of the most important and revolutionary movements in modern history, from the declaration of wars and the birth of nations to the launch of countless social, political and artistic movements worldwide.

Julian Hanna provides a brief genealogy of the genre, analyses its complex speaking position, traces the material process of manifesto making from production to dissemination, unpacks its extremist underbelly, and follows the twenty-first century resurgence of the manifesto as a re-politicised and reinvigorated digital form.

Reviews:
"Julian Hanna’s absolutely wonderful little book ... does the best job anyone ever could of showing us the true hand of the manifesto." ~ Tom Tomaszewski, 3:AM Magazine, https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-words-dont-give-a-fuck/
Growing up in post-revolutionary Iran, I was always in love with the idea of manifestos; as texts, movements, gestures for resistance and mobilization. Yet I hardly found myself in them, for it being such a male, Western, white dominant genre of "making claims and occupying space." Julian Hanna's book does a beautiful and necessary job of showing both the limits and the possibilities of manifestos; giving us the chance to re-imagine its potential for a new kind of world-building and re-claiming. ~ Morehshin Allahyari, artist and co-author of The 3D Additivist Manifesto
The Manifesto Handbook is something like a meta-manifesto, which proclaims the joy and necessity of the manifesto form. Julian Hanna shows us how to both read them and write them, to have some fun and maybe change the world. He also shows how this once distinctive form has soaked into the general style of writing of the internet age. But then the Manifesto has always found ways to outflank the received ideas and media habits of its era, no matter what the era. And in an era of cultural burnout and generalized depression, the short, sharp shot of mania that is the ground tone of the manifesto might not be a bad idea. Read this book, find your people, expose the enemy of the good life - and write your own! ~ McKenzie Wark, author of A Hacker Manifesto
A Wunderkammer of the aesthetics of revolution via revolutions in aesthetics, instructions included. ~ Joanna Walsh, author of Break.up
Julian Hanna is an astute observer and critic of our world dominated by corporations and driven by technology. He is also a brilliant writer in his own right. Definitely one to watch. ~ Andrew Gallix, Editor-in-Chief, 3:AM Magazine
I am often suspicious of manifestos: they remind me of a more certain, mostly male-dominated, age, and I have grown impatient. But Julian Hanna’s book, which might also be described as a love letter to the manifesto, has pierced my doubts, offering the manifesto as a tender literary object whose optimism still upholds the word as a dynamic, almost magical, device out of which whole worlds are created. His book has been an antidote to my cynicism. ~ Lucía Sanromán, Director of Visual Arts at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco
A full-length book like this is long overdue, and it couldn't be better timed with the current climate of polarizing rhetoric, post-truth, Antifa, engaged art, etc. The brief history plus how-to lesson is a winning combination. ~ Mark Yakich, Distinguished Professor of English, Loyola University, New Orleans
Julian Hanna makes wisdom out of the most unreasonable of genres. A precious companion in a time of too much anger and not enough revolt. ~ Marta Peirano, author of El Pequeño libro rojo del activista en la red (The Little Red Book of the Network Activist)