MsHeresies 5 — We Are Going to Lose

This is a book of failure and mistakes; it begins with what is stolen from us and proposes only an invitation to imagine.

In these playful written experiments, Lola Olufemi navigates the space between what is and what could be. Weaving together fragmentary reflections in prose and poetry, this is an exploration of the possibility of living differently, grounded in black feminist scholarship and political organising.

Olufemi shows that the horizon is not an immaterial state we gesture toward. Instead, propelled by the motion of thinking against and beyond, we must invent the future now and never let go of the otherwise.

Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and CREAM/Stuart Hall Foundation researcher from London. Her work focuses on the uses of the feminist imagination and its relationship to futurity, political demands and imaginative-revolutionary potential. She is the author of Experiments in Imagining Otherwise and Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power, the co-author of A FLY Girl’s Guide to University, and a member of ‘bare minimum’, an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective.

This book charts the journey of Black feminist, artist, researcher and curator Nydia A Swaby as she pieces together a biography of Pan-Africanist and feminist Amy Ashwood Garvey from her scattered archive. In turn, it offers a reflection on the future of Black feminist archival practice.

Often referred to as the first wife of Marcus Garvey, Amy Ashwood Garvey’s contributions to movements for social justice, and in particular Black women’s rights, have largely been forgotten, not least since archives about her life and work are spread across the various places she lived.

After helping Marcus Garvey set up the UNIA, one of the most influential Pan-African movements in the world, Amy moved to New York, where she thrived in the Harlem Renaissance. In the 1930s she emigrated to Britain, where she set up a boarding house and social centre called the Afro People’s Centre, and a club called the Florence Mills Social Parlour. Swaby recovers Amy’s life and work as an important political activist, cultural producer and Pan-Africanist in her own right, retracing her steps across the Caribbean, US, Britain and West Africa.

In addition to conducting traditional archival research, Swaby creates a series of ‘curatorial fabulations’, imagining into the gaps in the archive with her autoethnographic practice. Drawing on the work of contemporary Black feminist researchers, archivists, curators and artists, and her own creative practice, Swaby animates the process of creating and curating Ashwood Garvey’s archive. In doing so, she reflects on the practice of Black feminist archiving past, present and future.

This is the third book in LW’s Radical Black Women Series. It will be essential reading for scholars and students of Black feminism, Pan-Africanism, Black British history, Black arts and archival practice. Endorsements forthcoming from leading scholars in the field including Carole Boyce Davies, Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski, Kelly Foster, Kesewa John and Lola Olufemi.

This tale about seduction, obsession, family, and the confines of capitalism is one of director Pier Paolo Pasolini's most fascinating creations, based on his transcendent film of the same name.

Theorem is the most enigmatic of Pier Paolo Pasolini's four novels. The book started as a poem and took shape both as a work of fiction and a film, also called Theorem, released the same year. In short prose chapters interspersed with stark passages of poetry, Pasolini tells a story of transfiguration and trauma.

To the suburban mansion of a prosperous Milanese businessman comes a mysterious and beautiful young man who invites himself to stay. From the beginning he exercises a strange fascination on the inhabitants of the house, and soon everyone, from the busy father to the frustrated mother, from the yearning daughter to the weak-willed son to the housemaid from the country, has fallen in love with him. Then, as mysteriously as he appeared, the infatuating young man departs. How will these people he has touched so deeply do without him? Is there a passage out of the spiritual desert of modern capitalism into a new awakening, both of the senses and of the soul? Only questions remain at the end of a book that is at once a bedroom comedy, a political novel, and a religious parable.

In Bab Al-Saha, a quarter of Nablus, Palestine, sits a house of ill repute. In it lives Nuzha, a young woman ostracized from and shamed by her community. When the Intifada breaks out, Nuzha’s abode unexpectedly becomes a sanctuary for those in the quarter: Hussam, an injured resistance fighter; Samar, a university researcher exploring the impact of the Intifada on women’s lives; and Sitt Zakia, the pious midwife.

In the furnace of conflict at the heart of the 1987 Intifada, notions of freedom, love, respectability, nationhood, the rights of women, and Palestinian identity—both among the reluctant residents of the house and the inhabitants of the quarter at large—will be melted and re-forged. Vividly recounted through the eyes of its female protagonists, Passage to the Plaza is a groundbreaking story that shatters the myth of a uniform gendered experience of conflict.

In the twelve stories of Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Published originally in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, praised for their dry and gentle humour, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq’s years as a journalist and lawyer, in which she tirelessly championed women’s rights and protested all forms of caste and religious oppression. Written in a style at once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating, it’s in her characters – the sparky children, the audacious grandmothers, the buffoonish maulvis and thug brothers, the oft-hapless husbands, and the mothers above all, surviving their feelings at great cost – that Mushtaq emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style. Her opus has garnered both censure from conservative quarters as well India’s most prestigious literary awards; this is a collection sure to be read for years to come.

Winner of the 2025 International Booker Prize.

In a tonal mash-up of Jenny Holzer’s Truisms, confessional poetry, and fortune telling, Self-Romancing draws you into the amorous and obsessive inner life of an unnamed romantic. Relatable and snarky, heartfelt and horny, L Scully fortifies irony with vulnerability, bringing readers into a narrative as intimate as slumber parties and ordinary as Trader Joe’s. Bursting with the giddy charm of the everyday, Self-Romancing plays with form, turning a book into a crush, a crank call, a manifesto. 

Tout geste est renversement – Every gesture is reversal is a publication by artist Laurianne Bixhain comprising an imahe captured and silkscreen printed by Bixhain and a text written by Chloe Chignell. The work addresses the potential for mutual transformation between language and materials, whether human or non human. How does language traverse the body? What are its resonances? How does it shape physical presence, gestures or thoughts? 

A2 silkscreen printed poster
Designed by Morgane Le Ferec.
Printed in 300 Copies.