Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism

A collection of published and unpublished writings of the groundbreaking Chicana writer and self-described "chicana dyke-feminist, tejana patlache poet, writer and cultural theorist" Gloria Anzaldua.

Gloria Anzaldúa (1942-2004) was a visionary writer whose work was recognized with many honors, including the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award, a Lambda literary award, the National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Award, and the Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies. Her book Borderlands/La frontera was selected as one of the 100 Best Books of the Century by Hungry Mind Review and the Utne Reader. AnaLouise Keating, Professor of Women's Studies at Texas Woman's University, is the author of Women Reading, Women Writing: Self-Invention in Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde; editor of Anzaldúa's Interviews/Entrevistas and EntreMundos/AmongWorlds: New Perspectives on Gloria Anzaldúa; and co-editor, with Anzaldúa, of this bridge we call home: radical visions for transformation.

AnaLouise Keating, Professor of Women's Studies at Texas Woman's University, is the author of Women Reading, Women Writing: Self-Invention in Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde; editor of Anzaldúa's Interviews/Entrevistas and EntreMundos/AmongWorlds: New Perspectives on Gloria Anzaldúa; and co-editor, with Anzaldúa, of this bridge we call home: radical visions for transformation.

The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternatives—to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives.

Jack Halberstam proposes “low theory” as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is derived from eccentric archives. It runs the risk of not being taken seriously. It entails a willingness to fail and to lose one’s way, to pursue difficult questions about complicity, and to find counterintuitive forms of resistance.

Tacking back and forth between high theory and low theory, high culture and low culture, Halberstam looks for the unexpected and subversive in popular culture, avant-garde performance, and queer art. Halberstam pays particular attention to animated children’s films, revealing narratives filled with unexpected encounters between the childish, the transformative, and the queer. Failure sometimes offers more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of being in the world, even as it forces us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido.

In this bold new work of cultural criticism, Ann Cvetkovich develops a queer approach to trauma. She argues for the importance of recognizing—and archiving—accounts of trauma that belong as much to the ordinary and everyday as to the domain of catastrophe. An Archive of Feelings contends that the field of trauma studies, limited by too strict a division between the public and the private, has overlooked the experiences of women and queers. Rejecting the pathologizing understandings of trauma that permeate medical and clinical discourses on the subject, Cvetkovich develops instead a sex-positive approach missing even from most feminist work on trauma. She challenges the field to engage more fully with sexual trauma and the wide range of feelings in its vicinity, including those associated with butch-femme sex and aids activism and caretaking.  

An Archive of Feelings brings together oral histories from lesbian activists involved in act up/New York; readings of literature by Dorothy Allison, Leslie Feinberg, Cherríe Moraga, and Shani Mootoo; videos by Jean Carlomusto and Pratibha Parmar; and performances by Lisa Kron, Carmelita Tropicana, and the bands Le Tigre and Tribe 8. Cvetkovich reveals how activism, performance, and literature give rise to public cultures that work through trauma and transform the conditions producing it. By looking closely at connections between sexuality, trauma, and the creation of lesbian public cultures, Cvetkovich makes those experiences that have been pushed to the peripheries of trauma culture the defining principles of a new construction of sexual trauma—one in which trauma catalyzes the creation of cultural archives and political communities.

From the 1970s through the 1990s more than one hundred feminist bookstores built a transnational network that helped shape some of feminism's most complex conversations. Kristen Hogan traces the feminist bookstore movement's rise and eventual fall, restoring its radical work to public feminist memory. The bookwomen at the heart of this story—mostly lesbians and including women of color—measured their success not by profit, but by developing theories and practices of lesbian antiracism and feminist accountability.

At bookstores like BookWoman in Austin, the Toronto Women's Bookstore, and Old Wives' Tales in San Francisco, and in the essential Feminist Bookstore News, bookwomen changed people's lives and the world. In retelling their stories, Hogan not only shares the movement's tools with contemporary queer antiracist feminist activists and theorists, she gives us a vocabulary, strategy, and legacy for thinking through today's feminisms.

In The Hundreds Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart speculate on writing, affect, politics, and attention to processes of world-making.

The experiment of the one hundred word constraint, each piece is one hundred or multiples of one hundred words long, amplifies the resonance of things that are happening in atmospheres, rhythms of encounter, and scenes that shift the social and conceptual ground.

What's an encounter with anything once it's seen as an incitement to composition? What's a concept or a theory if they're no longer seen as a truth effect, but a training in absorption, attention, and framing? 

The Hundreds includes four indexes in which Andrew Causey, Susan Lepselter, Fred Moten, and Stephen Muecke each respond with their own compositional, conceptual, and formal staging of the worlds of the book.

Dreaming Water is the most thorough monograph dedicated to the work of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña to date. Vicuña coined the term “Arte Precario” in the mid-1960s as a new category for her works composed of debris and structures that disappear in the landscape, and which also include her quipus (“knot” in Quechua), envisioned as poems in space.

Dreaming Water brings together over 200 works—including paintings, drawings, screenprints, collages, textiles, videos, photographs, installations, poetry, artist books and performances—created throughout the artist’s remarkable career. It also features several stimulating texts—a lengthy epistolary piece by curator and editor Miguel A. López as well as new essays by anthropologist Elizabeth A. Povinelli, curator Catherine de Zegher and art historian José de Nordenflycht. Vicuña herself contributes two texts, reflecting on her drawings from the “Palabrarmas” project and the activism of the group Artists for Democracy, which she cofounded in 1974. A rousing conversation between Vicuña, anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena and curator Camila Marambio also figures in the book, blending the artist’s voice with those who are experts in fields pertinent to her practice.

This book on the films of Anton Vidokle features essays and conversations by theorists, curators, and artists exploring the themes of technological immortality and resurrection informed by Cosmist philosophy.

Citizens of the Cosmos examines the artist Anton Vidokle's films and the Cosmist philosophy underpinning them. It features essays and conversations with Vidokle by seminal contemporary theorists, curators, and artists: Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Keti Chukhrov, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Daniel Muzyczuk, Miguel Amado and Georgia Perkins, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Raqs Media Collective. This is the first book to survey Vidokle's Cosmism-related filmic output, begun in 2014, and includes full scripts from the films.

The book's contributors speculate on Vidokle's Cosmist conceptions of technological immortality, utopian resurrection, museology, and space travel, grappling with how these ideas embroil or crystallize contemporary theories, practices, and technologies: atmospheric manipulation, cryonics, biopolitics, extraplanetary prospecting, geo-engineering, transhumanism, genetics.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi disagrees with the Cosmist conjecture of death as a flaw in the conception of the human being. Elizabeth Povinelli digests the life-nonlife mattering of dust through relationships to and from the human and more-than-human ancestors to come.

Boris Groys contemplates the gravitational forces between Cosmism and communism according to cosmic and social orders, grounded as they are in the laws of both physics and socialist politics. Keti Chukhrov considers the formation of thinking through madness, dying, and reasoning according to Cosmist philosophical and religious debates and beliefs.

Raqs Media Collective and Anton Vidokle discuss different cultures of death, finitude, and rituals. Miguel Amado and Georgia Perkins examine the in-betweeness of the categories of life and death through the designs of terraforming vehicles navigating interplanetary space travel.

Daniel Muzyczuk investigates Vidokle's interests in the context of the history of the collection at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, while Liam Gillick and Anton Vidokle converse about filmmaking references and methods, from voiceover narrative to editing processes.

Edited by Miguel Amado. Contributions by Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Keti Chukhrov, Raqs Media Collective, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Daniel Muzyczuk, Miguel Amado and Georgia Perkins, Elizabeth A. Povinelli.

Riots are extraordinary events that have been recurring with increasing frequency and occupy a highly controversial space in the political imagination. Despite their often negative portrayals, it is undeniable that riots have played a pivotal role in the confrontation between authority and dissent. Recently, with the deepening crises of capitalism, racial violence, and communal tension, an “age of riots” has powerfully begun. As master fictions of the sovereign nation-state implode, and the hegemonic silencing of the dispossessed reveals the cracks in governability, Nights of the Dispossessed: Riots Unbound brings together artistic works, political texts, critical urban analyses, and research projects from across the world in an endeavor to “sense,” chronicle, and think through recent riots and uprisings—evoking a phenomenology of the multitude and surplus population.

With contributions from Asef Bayat, Joshua Clover, Vaginal Davis, Keller Easterling, Zena Edwards, Nadine El-Enany, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Gauri Gill, Natasha Ginwala, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Louis Henderson, Satch Hoyt, Hamid Khan, Gal Kirn, Josh Kun, Léopold Lambert, Margit Mayer, Vivek Narayanan, Ai Ogawa, Oana Pârvan, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, SAHMAT, Thomas Seibert, Niloufar Tajeri, Chandraguptha Thenuwara, Dariouche Tehrani, and Ala Younis.