Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire

'Femme' describes a constellation of queer, gendered expressions that uproot expectations of what it means to be feminine. Building upon experiences of transformation, belonging and harm, this book is a transfeminist call for collective liberation.

Trans Femme Futures envisions the future through everyday actions that revolutionise our lives. Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift discuss struggles around trans healthcare, the need for collectives over institutions, the importance of mutual care, and transfeminism as abolition.

The authors show how social change can be achieved through transformative practices that allow queer life to thrive in a time of climate, health, political and economic crises.

'A brilliant, useful, and immensely moving book that deals a critical blow to the epistemic austerity of our times' - Jordy Rosenberg

An impassioned discussion about the alternative ways to form relationships and resist capitalism.

Capitalist ideology wants us to believe that there is an optimal way to live. 'Making connections' means networking for work. Our emotional needs are to be fulfilled by a single romantic partner, and self-care equates to taking personal responsibility for our suffering. We must be productive and heterosexual, we must have babies and buy a house. But the kicker is most people cannot and do not want to achieve all, or any of these life goals. Instead we are left feeling atomised, exhausted and disempowered.

Radical Intimacy shows that it doesn't need to be this way. A punchy and impassioned account of inspiring ideas about alternative ways to live, Sophie K Rosa demands we use our radical imagination to discover a new form of intimacy and to transform our personal lives and in turn society as a whole.

Including critiques of the 'wellness' industry that ignores rising poverty rates, the mental health crisis and racist and misogynist state violence; transcending love and sex under capitalism to move towards feminist, decolonial and queer thinking; asking whether we should abolish the family; interrogating the framing of ageing and death and much more, Radical Intimacy is the compassionate antidote to a callous society.

Feminist Theory established bell hooks as one of international feminism’s most challenging and influential voices. This edition includes a preface by the author, reflecting on the book’s impact and the development of her ideas since it was first published. 

In this beautifully written and carefully argued work, hooks maintains that mainstream feminism’s reliance on white, middle-class, and professional spokeswomen obscures the involvement, leadership, and centrality of women of colour and poor women in the movement for women’s liberation. Hooks argues that feminism’s goal of seeking credibility and acceptance on already existing ground – rather than demanding the lasting and more fundamental transformation of society – has short-changed the movement.

A sweeping examination of the core issues of sexual politics, Feminist Theory argues that contemporary feminists must acknowledge the full complexity and diversity of women’s experience to create a mass movement to end women’s oppression.

In this influential lecture, Edward Said explores Freud’s foundational work Moses and Monotheism to rethink the relationship between identity, politics and psychoanalysis. The result is a study illuminating both Freud’s thinking and that of Said, on whom the great psychoanalyst was a formative influence.

Was Moses Jewish or an Egyptian? The question undermines any simple ascription of identity, highlighting the limits of these categories. Said suggests that such an unresolved, nuanced sense of identity might, if embodied in political reality, form the basis for a new understanding between Jews and Palestinians. In contrast, Israel's relentless march towards an exclusively Jewish state denies any sense of a more complex, inclusive past.

With an introduction by Christopher Bollas and a response by Jacqueline Rose. 

In 1972 Bernadette Mayer began this project as an aid to psychological counseling, writing in parallel journals so that, as she wrote in one (in bed, on subways, at parties, etc.), her psychiatrist read the other. Using colored pens to “color-code emotions,” she recorded dreams, events, memories, and reflections in a language at once free-ranging and precise—a work that creates its own poetics. She sought “a workable code, or shorthand, for the transcription of every event, every motion, every transition” of her own mind and to “perform this process of translation” on herself in the interest of evolving an innovative, inquiring language. STUDYING HUNGER JOURNALS registers this intention within a body of poetry John Ashbery has called “magnificent.”

The first publication dedicated to Glissant's art collection and project for a museum of memory-in-transit. 

Titled after Édouard Glissant's (1928–2011) anthology, La Terre, le feu, l'eau et les vents (2010), this publication offers a polyphonic extension of the writer's foundational thinking on art to museology, philosophy and poetry. The Museum of Errantry reflects Glissant's conception of the museum itself as an archipelago—a space open to ruptures, disappearances, and reinventions without forced synthesis. The Earth, the Fire, the Water, and the Winds features detailed artist entries, archival fragments and visual documents to illuminate the many relational, diasporic, migratory trajectories that inform Glissant's personal art collection and meditations. The volume also features never-before-published excerpts from L'Abécédaire d'Édouard Glissant (2008), a long-form recorded dialogue between the author and acclaimed Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau, as well as a facsimile of Notebook of a Journey on the Nile (1988), a poetic-philosophical travelog composed during a felucca trip through Egypt.

Edited with text by Ana Roman, Paulo Miyada. Foreword by Sylvie Séma Glissant, Mathieu Glissant, Isabelle Vestris, Manuela Moscoso, Anne Louyot. Text by Catalina Bergues, Patrick Chamoiseau, Sabrina Fontenele, Édouard Glissant, Cecília Vilela.

18 July 1936, Bayonne. After hearing the news of the Fascist uprising, the Spanish dancer and bailaora Antonia Mercé y Luque, known as La Argentina, suffers a syncope and dies in fateful synchrony with the Second Republic. History, and the artist’s body, have been seized and broken by the event.

In close dialogue with images and historical documents, Isabel de Naverán pursues the reverberations of that shock and how it resonates with collective pain and artistic translations (by Federico García Lorca, Gertrude Stein, Kazuo Ohno and others). How does history affect and move through bodies? How do living bodies carry and pass on cultural legacy and collective memory? What do these complex movements reveal about the present? Wrap, History and Syncope is an affective journey that invites the reader into tracing and revisiting other bodies, to ultimately dance their difference and multiplicity for oneself.

Isabel de Naverán is a writer and researcher. Concern with the passage and use of time is the backbone of her work, which focuses on bodily transmission and the examination of the concept of historical time by way of ephemeral and fugitive practices. She holds a PhD in art from the University of the Basque Country.  

Translation from Spanish: Toni Crabb
Graphic design: Michaël Bussaer

A Map of Absence presents the finest poetry and prose by Palestinian writers over the last seventy years. Featuring writers in the diaspora and those living under occupation, these striking entries pay testament to one of the most pivotal events in modern history – the 1948 Nakba.

This unique, landmark anthology includes translated excerpts of works by major authors such as Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani and Fadwa Tuqan alongside those of emerging writers, published here in English for the first time. Depicting the varied aspects of Palestinian life both before and after 1948, their writings highlight the ongoing resonances of the Nakba.

An intimate companion for all lovers of world literature, A Map of Absence reveals the depth and breadth of Palestinian writing.