A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None

A poetics for reading the everyday objects that populate a hard drive. 

Bespoke online archives like PennSound and Eclipse host an astounding array of “old media” artifacts, posing a handcrafted counterpoint to the immense databases aggregated by digital titans like Google and Facebook. In The Little Database, Daniel Scott Snelson argues for the significance of these comparatively “small” collections, exploring how digital archives dramatically transform the artifacts they host and how they might help us better understand our own private collections in turn.

Examining curated collections such as Textz, UbuWeb, and the Electronic Poetry Center, Snelson explores media-specific works by poets and artists, including William Carlos Williams, Tracie Morris, bill bissett, Nam June Paik, and Vicki Bennett. He develops creative tools and contingent methods for reading cultural data, whether found on the internet or in our own collections of TXT, JPG, MP3, and MOV artifacts, presenting case studies to show how these objects have come to find revised meaning in their digital contexts. Along the way, experimental poetic interludes give readers practical entry points into the creative practice of producing new meanings in any given little database.

Inventive and interdisciplinary, The Little Database grapples with the digitized afterlives of cultural objects, showing how the past is continually reconfigured to shape the present. It invites readers to find playful and personal means for unpacking their own data collections, in the process discovering idiosyncratic ways to explore and connect with digital archives.

Electrifying, provocative, and controversial when first published thirty years ago, Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" is even more relevant today, when the divisions that she so eloquently challenges—of human and machine but also of gender, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and location—are increasingly complex. The subsequent "Companion Species Manifesto," which further questions the human-nonhuman disjunction, is no less urgently needed in our time of environmental crisis and profound polarization.

Manifestly Haraway brings together these momentous manifestos to expose the continuity and ramifying force of Haraway's thought, whose significance emerges with engaging immediacy in a sustained conversation between the author and her long-term friend and colleague Cary Wolfe. Reading cyborgs and companion species through and with each other, Haraway and Wolfe join in a wide-ranging exchange on the history and meaning of the manifestos in the context of biopolitics, feminism, Marxism, human-nonhuman relationships, making kin, literary tropes, material semiotics, the negative way of knowing, secular Catholicism, and more.

The conversation ends by revealing the early stages of Haraway's "Chthulucene Manifesto," in tension with the teleologies of the doleful Anthropocene and the exterminationist Capitalocene. Deeply dedicated to a diverse and robust earthly flourishing, Manifestly Haraway promises to reignite needed discussion in and out of the academy about biologies, technologies, histories, and still possible futures.

Donna J. Haraway is distinguished professor emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she is also affiliated with the departments of anthropology, feminist studies, environmental studies, and film and digital media. She is an active participant in UCSC's Science and Justice Research Center and the Center for Cultural Studies.

Published 2016

Drawing on a range of sources, including the fiction of Toni Morrison and Luisa Valenzuela (He Who Searches), Avery Gordon demonstrates that past or haunting social forces control present life in different and more complicated ways than most social analysts presume. Written with a power to match its subject, Ghostly Matters has advanced the way we look at the complex intersections of race, gender, and class as they traverse our lives in sharp relief and shadowy manifestations.

“Ghostly Matters immediately establishes Avery Gordon as a leader among her generation of social and cultural theorists in all fields. The sheer beauty of her language enhances an intellectual brilliance so daunting that some readers will mark the day they first read this book. One must go back many more years than most of us can remember to find a more important book.” —Charles Lemert

Moulded from clay, between 2021 and 2023, The subtle rules the dense is a series of ceramic chest plates, by the artist Phoebe Collings-James. Inspired by Makonde and Yoruba body masks and Roman muscle cuirasses, the sculptures explore the interplay between ritualistic objects’ violent histories and their contemporary presentation as fetishistic ornaments. This publication brings together responses to the series from artists SERAFINE1369 and Rehana Zaman and geographer Professor Kathryn Yusoff; exploring layered references to tarot, Shakespeare and post-colonial theory; probing the materiality and extractive politics of geology; and reflecting the plural multifaceted nature of Collings-James’ practice.

A series by Phoebe Collings-James

With Texts by Serafine1369, Rehana Zaman, Kathryn Yussof.

Weaving together the matter of geology, migration, and computation, kathy wu’s debut book She Will Last as Long as Stones mines data from the United States Geological Survey, pairing it with (mis)translations of conversations with the author’s mother, narratives of racialized and gendered labor, and elegies on end-of-life care. Through text, photo-collage, and diagrammatic circuitry, wu mobilizes language toward the edges of things, where glitch and failure meet grief, outpour.

kathy wu's She Will Last as Long as Stones is the 2024 Open Reading Period Book Prize winner, and was selected by guest judge Bhanu Kapil. 

kathy wu is a Chinese–American artist, poet, and designer living in Providence, Rhode Island, on Narragansett land. She works across digital media, fiber, book arts, and language to pull at histories of science and technology. Her work has appeared via The New School, Dialogist, Rain Taxi, NatBrut, and Tilted House, and has been anthologized by Fonograf Editions and Nightboat Books. She has been awarded fine arts residencies at Blue Mountain Center, Black Mountain College Museum, and Pao Arts Center. She currently teaches full-time at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and holds an MFA from Brown University’s Literary Arts program.

She Will Last as Long as Stones has the inter-genre brilliance of asking where materials originate, and following that question until writing becomes a kind of listening with stone, with metal, for magnetic reverberations, for the thinking at the back of the cave.
— Bhanu Kapil

There just might be currents coursing through landscape, language, software, and labor—presences that escape extraction and will not be denied. She Will Last as Long as Stones looks into the multiple temporalities and operations of many things: material place, mining, social and scientific documentation, computation, migrant women's work, and mother-daughter relations, constellating them into a poetics of wondrous design and resonant beauty. 
— Kimberly Alidio

She Will Last as Long as Stones is a subtle circuit that conducts a charge but (paradoxically) remains open. wu's intricate parataxis offers readers fertile resistance, while simultaneously leading us to grounded revelations about the intertwined materialities of technology, language, and memory.
— Allison Parrish

The reception of art and performance is changing.

Smartphones and social media have troubled the old model of individual appreciation and close looking, giving rise to new forms of mediated perception, such as sampling, skimming and scrolling.

Charting recent trends in contemporary practice - research-based installations, performance exhibitions, interventions, and invocations of modernist architecture - leading art critic Claire Bishop challenges the assumption that fully focused attention is automatically good and distraction necessarily bad.

The contributors to Otherwise Worlds investigate the complex relationships between settler colonialism and anti-Blackness to explore the political possibilities that emerge from such inquiries. Pointing out that presumptions of solidarity, antagonism, or incommensurability between Black and Native communities are insufficient to understand the relationships between the groups, the volume's scholars, artists, and activists look to articulate new modes of living and organizing in the service of creating new futures. Among other topics, they examine the ontological status of Blackness and Indigeneity, possible forms of relationality between Black and Native communities, perspectives on Black and Indigenous sociality, and freeing the flesh from the constraints of violence and settler colonialism.

Throughout the volume's essays, art, and interviews, the contributors carefully attend to alternative kinds of relationships between Black and Native communities that can lead toward liberation. In so doing, they critically point to the importance of Black and Indigenous conversations for formulating otherwise worlds.

Contributors. Maile Arvin, Marcus Briggs-Cloud, J. Kameron Carter, Ashon Crawley, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Chris Finley, Hotvlkuce Harjo, Sandra Harvey, Chad B. Infante, Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro, Lindsay Nixon, Kimberly Robertson, Jared Sexton, Andrea Smith, Cedric Sunray, Se’mana Thompson, Frank B. Wilderson

David Graeber's interviews (with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Nika Dubrovsky, and Assia Turquier-Zauberman) redefine the contours of what an anarchist morality could be today.

David Graeber's influential thinking was always at odds with the liberal and left-wing mainstream. Drawing on his huge theoretical and practical experience as an ethnologist and anthropologist, activist and anarchist, Graeber and his interlocutors develop a ramified genealogy of anarchist thought and possible perspectives for 21st-century politics.

Diverging from the familiar lines of historical anarchism, and against the background of movements such as Occupy Wall Street and the Gilets Jaunes, the aim is to provide new political impulses that go beyond the usual schemata of unavoidableness. The spontaneous and swift-moving polylogue shows Graeber as a spirited, unorthodox thinker and radical activist for whom the group can always achieve more than the individual.

David Graeber (1961-2020) was an American anthropologist, anarchist, political activist, the author of several books, and a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Until 2007 he was assistant and associate professor of anthropology at Yale University, until 2013 a reader for Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and until last a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics.