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Cover of Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

The New Press

Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

Sunaura Taylor

€26.00

A beautifully written, deeply provocative inquiry into the intersection of animal and disability liberation, and the debut of an important new social critic.

How much of what we understand of ourselves as "human" depends on our physical and mental abilities, how we move (or cannot move) in and interact with the world? And how much of our definition of "human" depends on its difference from "animal"?  

Drawing on her own experiences as a disabled person, a disability activist, and an animal advocate, author Sunaura Taylor persuades us to think deeply, and sometimes uncomfortably, about what divides the human from the animal, the disabled from the nondisabled, and what it might mean to break down those divisions, to claim the animal and the vulnerable in ourselves, in a process she calls "cripping animal ethics."  

Beasts of Burden suggests that issues of disability and animal justice—which have heretofore primarily been presented in opposition—are in fact deeply entangled. Fusing philosophy, memoir, science, and the radical truths these disciplines can bring, whether about factory farming, disability oppression, or our assumptions of human superiority over animals, Taylor draws attention to new worlds of experience and empathy that can open up important avenues of solidarity across species and ability. Beasts of Burden is a wonderfully engaging and elegantly written work, both philosophical and personal, by a brilliant new voice. 

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Cover of If They Come in the Morning...

Verso Books

If They Come in the Morning...

Angela Y. Davis

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.

Cover of Cruel Optimism

Duke University Press

Cruel Optimism

Lauren Berlant

A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. Offering bold new ways of conceiving the present, Lauren Berlant describes the cruel optimism that has prevailed since the 1980s, as the social-democratic promise of the postwar period in the United States and Europe has retracted. People have remained attached to unachievable fantasies of the good life—with its promises of upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and durable intimacy—despite evidence that liberal-capitalist societies can no longer be counted on to provide opportunities for individuals to make their lives “add up to something.”

Arguing that the historical present is perceived affectively before it is understood in any other way, Berlant traces affective and aesthetic responses to the dramas of adjustment that unfold amid talk of precarity, contingency, and crisis. She suggests that our stretched-out present is characterized by new modes of temporality, and she explains why trauma theory—with its focus on reactions to the exceptional event that shatters the ordinary—is not useful for understanding the ways that people adjust over time, once crisis itself has become ordinary. Cruel Optimism is a remarkable affective history of the present.

Cover of Mon musée de la Cocaïne

Éditions B42

Mon musée de la Cocaïne

Michael Taussig

L’or et la cocaïne sont les deux matériaux bruts de Mon musée de la Cocaïne. C’est au cours de leur transformation et raffinement que ces deux substances ramènent avec elles une histoire de l’oppression et de l’esclavage.

Dans ce livre, l’anthropologue australien Michael Taussig prend comme point de départ la proposition de bâtir un musée de la Cocaïne (qui serait l’image reflétée du musée de l’Or de la Banque de la République à Bogotá) et dresse un portrait sans concession de la vie des mineurs afro-colombiens aspirés dans le monde dangereux de la production de cocaïne au fin fond de la forêt tropicale, sur la côte pacifique de la Colombie. Il décrit la violence, la pauvreté, mais aussi les croyances qui surgissent des marais envahis de mangroves et des rivières tropicales qui, pendant plus de cinq cent ans, ont attiré, ruiné et décontenancé Amérindiens, orpailleurs, conquistadors et pirates, esclaves africains, ingénieurs russes et guérilleros marxistes.

Mon musée de la Cocaïne se présente comme un assemblage éclectique d’histoires et d’anecdotes, présenté comme autant de salles d’un hypothétique musée de la Cocaïne, au sein desquelles le lecteur est invité à déambuler, en croisant des références qui vont de Charles Dickens à Franz Kafka en passant par la poésie de Seamus Heaney.

Cover of Logique Du Genre

Éditions Sans Soleil

Logique Du Genre

Jeanne Neton, Maya Gonzalez

Qu’est-ce que le genre dans le capitalisme contemporain ? C’est à cette question qu’invite à répondre ce recueil, à partir d’une démarche théorique inspirée du féminisme et du marxisme. Il s’agit de penser, depuis une analyse systématique du rôle joué par le travail domestique et les violences de genre dans notre système économique, un monde au-delà de l’exploitation, et donc du genre et des ses contraintes. Un communisme au présent, qui s’empare de tous ces questionnements, trop souvent ignorés dans l’histoire du mouvement ouvrier. 

Jeanne Neton et Maya Gonzalez participent à la revue anglo-américaine Endnotes, dont le présent volume constitue la première traduction française. Elles se placent dans la lignée du féminisme autonome italien (on songe à Silvia Federici, Leopoldina Fortunati ou Mariarosa Dalla Costa) pour proposer une contribution originale et stimulante. 

Cover of Writing on Raving

OR Books

Writing on Raving

McKenzie Wark, Zoë Beery and 1 more

Writing on Raving is the definitive mix of voices from the Brooklyn underground rave scene and beyond, providing fresh language for the shared and infinitely varied experience of dancing through the night until the morning.

New York rave culture is having a moment. The music, mostly, is techno, certain flavors of which became the soundtrack to a dancefloor culture that is queer in a different way to house music centered gay nightlife. Wark, Mak and Beery want to document and annotate and celebrate, but also critique, this world in the making. Writing on Raving centers the New York scene, but isn't limited to it.

This is a book for all of those who need the rave. Who need to dance. Who have at some point needed that beat in their lives. This is a book for all those who have journeyed through the night, through sound, through movement, through chemistry, into other places, other times, other encounters.

This seeking gives us hours, years, on the dance floor to think about why we rave, to locate these reasons in our bodies and the space around us. But the rave is not the place to articulate them. It is too loud; our friends are too distracted, or too high. At the afters, tired and drained and covered in schmutz, we think some more. We look around at our raver friends, and wonder: How did we get here? What happened to us? What is this tentacular, thrashing, swelling thing that we all made together? That thing that is now slumped and aching and coming down now into our fragmentary, singular lives

Between all of us, there are many answers to such questions. Wark, Mak and Beery have gathered their favorite ones to share in this first-ever anthology of writing on raving.

McKenzie Wark is a writer and scholar based in New York City. She is the author, among other things, of Raving (2023) and Life Story (2024).

Geoffrey Mak is the author of Mean Boys: A Personal History (Bloomsbury, 2024).

Zoë Beery is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn, and a nightlife harm reduction organizer at parties and festivals in the U.S. and Europe.