Hope Against Hope

Critical conversations and reflections about lessons learned at the intersection of social movements and artist production. 

Diversity of Aesthetics collects powerful and timely conversations among leading cultural critics, artists, and organizers to connect the threads between some of the most pressing social struggles and conflicts of our time: policing, war, borders and migration, economic crisis. 

Across three themes—infrastructure, migration, and riots—militant thinkers, artists, educators, and others discuss aesthetic production, forms of social organization, modes of struggle against gendered and racialized capitalism, and revolutionary theory. Common to all three conversations is a commitment to rethinking the relationship between forms of critique and forms of struggle undertaken by collective social practices, offering lessons for tactics, strategies, and practices.

With contributions by Claire Fontaine, Iman Ganji, Saidiya Hartman, Vicky Osterweil, Andreas Petrossiants, Christina Sharpe, Stevphen Shukaitis, Michael Rakowtiz, Shellyne Rodriguez, Jose Rosales, Rinaldo Walcott, Andreas Petrossiants, Jose Rosales

Andreas Petrossiants is a writer and associate editor of e-flux journal. His work has appeared in Historical Materialism, Social Text, New Inquiry, AJ+ Subtext, Frieze, Bookforum.com, Roar Magazine, the Verso blog, the Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic. He is a PhD candidate in performance studies at NYU where he is researching anti-eviction, squatting, and tenants’ movements as they relate to the production of social space.

Jose Rosales is an independent researcher and journalist based in Lisbon, Portugal. His work has appeared in e-flux notes, Lumpen: A Journal of Poor and Working Class Writers, and has contributed a chapter called “Communism As the Riddle Posed to History” in Double Binds of Neoliberalism (2022).

No Place Press is collaborating with Jalal Toufic on an ambitious publishing project: The Collected Writings (1991–2024) of a Mortal to Death: Jalal Toufic. Spanning three volumes of more than six hundred pages each, the series gathers re-edited versions of his earlier works alongside two newly written books, arranged and organized by the author himself. For new readers, the volumes provide an introduction to Toufic’s central concepts—including the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster, radical closure, silence-over, the 180-degree over-turn, and the dancer’s two bodies—while for longtime readers they offer a comprehensive view of more than three decades of thought, presented in their most rigorous and fully articulated form. Yet, in keeping with Toufic’s practice—which participates in untimely collaboration (including with future filmmakers, thinkers, and artists) and abides in the suspension of the avenir of messianism/Mahdism—some of these works remain forthcoming even after their inclusion in the Collected Writings.

Volume 1 (2025) includes newly revised editions of Toufic’s first three books—Distracted (1991/2003); (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (1993/2003); and Over-Sensitivity (1996/2009)—together with the script Jouissance in Postwar Beirut (2014) and, new, The Unreviewed Writings of a Peerless Thinker (2024).

A new edition of Anzaldúa's classic text.

Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza is a 1987 semi-autobiographical work by Gloria E. Anzaldúa that examines the Chicano and Latino experience through the lens of issues such as gender, identity, race, and colonialism. Borderlands is considered to be Anzaldúa’s most well-known work and a pioneering piece of Chicana literature.

Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa's experience as a Chicana, a lesbian, an activist, and a writer, the essays and poems in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza profoundly challenged, and continue to challenge, how we think about identity. Borderlands/La Frontera remaps our understanding of what a border' is, presenting it not as a simple divide between here and there, us and them, but as a psychic, social, and cultural terrain that we inhabit, and that inhabits all of us.

Many bulbous plants have been dubbed ‘heralds of spring’, but none is more deserving of the title than those carrying actual megaphones to spread the word – daffodils. To know a daffodil is to love a daffodil. Come join our cult.

Including:
I Like the Daffodils – An introduction by Lou-Lou van Staaveren to the genus Narcissus, with amazing photographs by Elspeth Diederix from her garden.
Dafs in Art History – Painters, poets and writers all over the world, have been inspired by the daffodils’ dual aura of macabre and threatening elegance.
The Daffodil Society – The members of The Daffodil Society in the UK promote the genus Narcissus for everyone’s greater pleasure. Photographer Luke Stephenson followed them to various shows where their flowers are reviewed.
How to follow your nose – Philosopher Christopher F. Julien invites us into his fragrant garden where scent mixes with memories with drawings by Pom Koolen.
Artist Tina Farifteh digs into her personal archive and writes a beautiful account of her memories growing up in Iran, and how daffodils have become a staple for New Year’s celebrations and a symbol of hope.

Cover and inside cover by Lou Buche
Centrefold miniatures by Jesse Fischer

Saidiya Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana. Following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, she reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy and vividly dramatizes the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and African American history.

Saidiya Hartman, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, is a scholar of African American literature and cultural history.

Preface by Maboula Soumahoro.

Translated from the English (American) by Maboula Soumahoro (original title: Lose Your Mother. A Journey Along The Atlantic Slave Route, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).

Dans Palma africana, l’anthropologue australien Michael Taussig explore la production d’huile de palme en Colombie. Alors que cette dernière envahit tout, des chips au vernis à ongles, l’auteur examine les conséquences écologiques, politiques et sociales de cette exploitation.

Bien que la liste des horreurs induites par la culture du palmier à huile soit longue, nos terminologies habituelles ne permettent plus de rendre compte des réalités qu’elles décrivent. À travers cette déambulation anthropo-poétique au cœur des marécages colombiens, c’est donc la question du langage que l’auteur interroge. Comme William Burroughs, pour qui les mots sont aussi vivants que des animaux et n’aiment pas être maintenus en pages – Michael Taussig souhaite couper ces dernières, et les rendre à leur liberté.

Pensé à partir d’une vie d’exploration philosophique et ethnographique, Palma africana cherche à contrecarrer la banalité de la destruction du monde et offre une vision pénétrante de notre condition humaine. Illustré de photographies prises par l’auteur et écrit avec la verve expérimentale propre à l’anthropologue, ce livre est le Tristes Tropiques de Michael Taussig pour le XXIe siècle.

Traduit de l’anglais par Marc Saint-Upéry.