Are Prisons Obsolete?

'My aim for Mother Reader has been to bring together examples of the best writing on motherhood of the last sixty years, writing that tells firsthand of the mother's experience.

Many of the writings in Mother Reader comment on and interpolate one another, in citations, in footnotes, in direct homage. As I was assembling this collection one text would lead to one another, treasure-hunt fashion, the clue provided by an acknowledgement or bibliography. And just as often the writing circles back.

In Mother Reader chapters are excerpted from autobiographies, memoirs, and novels; entries are lifted from diaries; essays and stories are culled from collections, anthologies, and periodicals. My project has been to assemble a compendium or sampler of these ''kindred spirit'' works on motherhood, so that readers, and especially mothers with limited time on their hands, can access in one volume the best literature on the subject and know where turn to continue reading." [Moyra Davey in the introduction]

Writings by Margaret Atwood, Susan Bee, Rosellen Brown, Myrel Chernick, Lydia Davis, Buchi Emeta, Annie Ernaux, Mary Gaitskill, Susan Griffin, Nancy Hutson, Mary Kelly, Jane Lazarre, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing, Ellen McMahon, Margaret Mead, Vivian Montgomery, Toni Morrison, Tillie Olsen, Alicia Ostrker, Grace Paley, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Sara Ruddick, Lynda Schor, Mira Schor, Dena Schottenkirk, Mona Simpson, Elizabeth Smart, Joan Snyder, Elke Solomon, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Alice Walker, Joy Williams, Martha Wilson, Barbara Zucker.

The sequel to Pendleton's acclaimed Black Dada Reader, compiling an anti-canon of radical experimentation and thought.

In 2011, artist Adam Pendleton (born 1984) assembled Black Dada Reader, a compendium of texts, documents and positions that elucidated a practice and ethos of Black Dada. Resembling a school course reader, the book was a spiral-bound series of photocopies and collages, originally intended only for personal reference, and eventually distributed informally to friends and colleagues. The contents - an unlikely mix of Hugo Ball, W.E.B. Du Bois, Adrian Piper, Gertrude Stein, Sun Ra, Stokely Carmichael, Gilles Deleuze -formed a kind of experimental canon, realized through what Pendleton calls radical juxtaposition. In 2017, Koenig Books published the Reader in a hardcover edition, with newly commissioned essays and additional writings by the artist. A decade later, Pendleton has composed another reader, building upon the constellation of writers, artists, filmmakers, philosophers and critics that emerged in the first volume.

Source texts by Sara Ahmed, Mikhail Bakhtin, Toni Cade Bambara, Amiri Baraka, Augusto de Campos, Hardoldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari, Angela Davis, Gilles Deleuze, Julius Eastman, Adrienne Edwards, Clarice Lispector, Achille Mbembe, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Charles Mingus, Piet Mondrian, Leslie Scalapino, Leonard Schwartz and Michael Hardt, Juliana Spahr, Cecil Taylor and Malcolm X.

One of America's most historic political trials is undoubtedly that of Angela Davis. Opening with a letter from James Baldwin to Davis, and including contributions from numerous radicals such as Black Panthers George Jackson, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale and Erica Huggins, this book is not only an account of Davis's incarceration and the struggles surrounding it, but also perhaps the most comprehensive and thorough analysis of the prison system of the United State.  

Since the book was written, the carceral system in the US has seen unprecedented growth, with more of America's black population behind bars than ever before. The scathing analysis of the role of prison and the policing of black populations offered by Davis and her comrades in this astonishing volume remains as pertinent today as the day it was first published.  

Featuring contributions from George Jackson, Bettina Aptheker, Bobby Seale, James Baldwin, Ruchell Magee, Julian Bond, Huey P. Newton, Erika Huggins, Fleeta Drumgo, John Clutchette, and others.

Humanity has always excluded Others on the basis of race and gender. What happens to people who choose to flee, following in the footsteps of those who resisted enslavement?

This audacious manifesto draws on the legacies of bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis and others to consider the ways in which Black women have been excluded from, struggled to achieve and opted to reject the category of ‘human’. Sociologist Akwugo Emejulu argues that it is only through embracing the status of the ‘fugitive’ that Black women can determine their own liberation. Fugitive Feminism is a call for the collective process of speculative dialogue and a bold new model for action.

From intimate relationships to global politics, Sarah Schulman observes a continuum: that inflated accusations of harm are used to avoid accountability. Illuminating the difference between Conflict and Abuse, Schulman directly addresses our contemporary culture of scapegoating. This deep, brave, and bold work reveals how punishment replaces personal and collective self-criticism, and shows why difference is so often used to justify cruelty and shunning.

Elizabeth Povinelli's anthropology of the otherwise locates itself within forms of life that run counter to dominant modes of being under late settler liberalism. In these essays, she considers the emergence of new worlds and the extinguishment of old ones, seeking to develop a social imaginary that can sustain radical potentiality without turning a blind eye to our deep interdependence.

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. In wrestling with the question of what a free life is, many young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship indifferent to the dictates of respectability and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how to live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work. Here, for the first time, these women are credited with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments recovers these women's radical aspirations and insurgent desires.

A political and aesthetic critique of racial capitalism and modes of social experimentation in the form of resistance to the colonial commons.

Stefano Harney (born 1962) is Honorary Professor at The Institute of Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia and a Visiting Critic at Yale School of Art. He has held teaching positions in New York, Leicester, London, and Singapore. He now teaches at the Dutch Art Institute. An interdisciplinary scholar, his research spans (the intersections of) social sciences, arts and humanities, as well as the fields of business and management.

Preface by Jack Halberstam.
Collective translation (original title: The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Minor Compositions, 2013).

Graphic design: Sophie Demay & Maël Fournier-Comte (In the Shade of a Tree).
 
published in February 2022
 
French edition
12,5 x 19,5 cm (softcover)
208 pages

This bootleg edition collects scanned copies of Monique Wittig's writing. It includes; The Lesbian Body, Les Guérillères, The Opoponax, and Lesbian Peoples: material for a dictionary— In true bootleg style, punk enough to carry the truly radical words of Wittig: scans, a little grainy, with marginalia of unknown origins. Now, we can dress ourselves in the ravishingly erotic, violent splendorous brilliance to become baby Wittigs.  

This edition was assembled out of a deep love of Wittig's work by Chloe Chignell.

Monique Wittig was a French author and feminist theorist particularly interested in overcoming gender and the heterosexual contract. She published her first novel, L'opoponax, in 1964. Her second novel, Les Guérillères (1969), was a landmark in lesbian feminism.