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Cover of Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good

AK Press

Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good

Adrienne Maree Brown

€20.00

How do we make social justice the most pleasurable human experience? How can we awaken within ourselves desires that make it impossible to settle for anything less than a fulfilling life? Author and editor adrienne maree brown finds the answer in something she calls "pleasure activism," a politics of healing and happiness that explodes the dour myth that changing the world is just another form of work. Drawing on the black feminist tradition, she challenges us to rethink the ground rules of activism. Her mindset-altering essays are interwoven with conversations and insights from other feminist thinkers, including Audre Lorde, Joan Morgan, Cara Page, Sonya Renee Taylor, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Together they cover a wide array of subjects—from sex work to climate change, from race and gender to sex and drugs—building new narratives about how politics can feel good and how what feels good always has a complex politics of its own.

Building on the success of her popular Emergent Strategy, brown launches a new series of the same name with this volume, bringing readers books that explore experimental, expansive, and innovative ways to meet the challenges that face our world today. Books that find the opportunity in every crisis!

adrienne maree brown, author of Emergent Strategy and co-editor of Octavia's Brood, is a social justice facilitator focused on black liberation, a doula/healer, and a pleasure activist. She lives in Detroit.

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Cover of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals

AK Press

Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals

Alexis Pauline Gumbs

€17.00

Undrowned is a book-length meditation for social movements and our whole species based on the subversive and transformative guidance of marine mammals. Our aquatic cousins are queer, fierce, protective of each other, complex, shaped by conflict, and struggling to survive the extractive and militarized conditions our species has imposed on the ocean. Gumbs employs a brilliant mix of poetic sensibility and naturalist observation to show what they might teach us, producing not a specific agenda but an unfolding space for wondering and questioning. From the relationship between the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale and Gumbs's Shinnecock and enslaved ancestors to the ways echolocation changes our understandings of "vision" and visionary action, this is a masterful use of metaphor and natural models in the service of social justice.

With Foreword by Adrienne Maree Brown

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a poet, independent scholar, and activist. She is the author of Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist FugitivityM Archive: After the End of the World, and Dub: Finding Ceremony; coeditor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines; and the founder of Brilliance Remastered, an online network and series of retreats and online intensives serving community accountable intellectuals and artists.

Published Nov 2020

Cover of Loving Corrections

AK Press

Loving Corrections

Adrienne Maree Brown

Essays €19.00

Ethical, pondering, and wondrous, adrienne maree brown’s Loving Corrections is a collection of love-based adjustments and reframes to grow our movements for liberation while navigating a society deeply fractured by greed, racism, and war. In this landmark book, brown invigorates her influential writing on belonging and accountability into the framework of “loving corrections”; a generative space where rehearsals for the revolution become the everyday norm in relating to one another. 

Filled with practical wisdom on how to be a trustworthy communicator while providing bold visions for a shared future, Loving Corrections can speak to everyone caught in the crossroads of our political challenges and potential. No matter how new to the struggle, or how numerous our failures, brown’s indispensable writing is an invitation to us all. Includes an afterword by Janine de Novais.

Cover of After Sex

Silver Press

After Sex

Alice Spawls, Edna Bonhomme

Essays €18.00

Who decides what happens after sex? The last decade has seen many significant changes to the laws governing women’s reproductive rights around the world, from liberalisation in Ireland to new restrictions in the USA. After Sex offers personal and political perspectives from the mid-20th century to the present day, setting feminist classics alongside contemporary accounts. These essays, short stories and poems trace the debates and tell the stories; together, they ask us to consider what reproductive justice might look like, and how it could reshape sex.

The writers pay special attention to people — both fictional and real — who have sought control over their sexual lives, and the joy, comedy, difficulties and disappointments that entails. But above all, After Sex testifies to the power of great writing to show us why that freedom is worth pursuing — without shame and without apology.

With contributions from: 
Lauren Berlant, Joanna Biggs, Edna Bonhomme, Gwendolyn Brooks, Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe, Storm Cecile, Lucille Clifton, Rachel Connolly, T.L. Cowan, ’Jane Does’, Maggie Doherty, Nell Dunn, Andrea Dworkin, Anne Enright, Deborah Friedell, Tracy Fuad, Kristen Ghodsee, Vivian Gornick, Donna Haraway, bell hooks, Barbara Johnson, Jayne Kavanagh, Lisa Hallgarten and Angela Poulter, Jamaica Kincaid, Patricia Knight, R.O. Kwon, Ursula K. Le Guin, Natasha Lennard, Sophie Lewis, Audre Lorde, Amelia Loulli, Erin Maglaque, Holly Pester, Adrienne Rich, Denise Riley, Sally Rooney, Loretta J. Ross, Madeleine Schwartz, SisterSong, Sophie Smith, Annabel Sowemimo, Amia Srinivasan, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Alice Walker and Bernard Williams.

Cover of Tee A. Corinne: A forest fire between us

MACK

Tee A. Corinne: A forest fire between us

Tee A. Corinne, Charlotte Flint

LGBTQI+ €52.00

A forest fire between us is an ambitious publication that uncovers Tee A. Corinne’s radical and expansive photographic practice, offering a new perspective on the intersections of her work as photographer, lesbian sex activist, educator, and author. Edited by curator Charlotte Flint, this book charts a route through Corinne’s practice with never-before-seen photographs, slides, contact sheets, and ephemera uncovered from her archive. Showcasing the pioneering work that established Corinne as one of the foremost lesbian photographers of her time, this publication places Corinne alongside friends, fellow artists, writers, and activists who helped define radical counterculture, from Audre Lorde to Joan E. Biren (JEB), Ruth Mountaingrove to Honey Lee Cottrell, among others.

At the book’s heart are the Feminist Photography Ovulars, gatherings of women in the Oregon countryside which were the setting for DIY photographic workshops exploring image-making against the natural landscape, which Corinne co-organized in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The photographs made during these annual gatherings speak to the incredible community that Corinne fostered, and an understanding of the ways in which play and pleasure can come together to create something radical.

Delving into an extensive array of archival material, A forest fire between us is a call to action that shows us the ways in which photography, activism, and community can come together to create a powerful new visual language around desire.

With an extensive chronology and texts by Ruth Mountaingrove, JEB, and Charlotte Flint.

Cover of Public Health in Crisis

Kyklàda.press

Public Health in Crisis

Dimitra Kondylatou, Nicolas Lakiotakis and 2 more

Essays €12.00

Epidemics and pandemics undermine societies and highlight the vulnerability of relations people have created to the land, other species, and each other. This book presents fragments of disease management in the Mediterranean from the 15th-century onwards and in the Aegean Archipelago in the last two centuries. From religious to medical approaches to the Bubonic Plague, through the creation of lazarettos, to the famine in occupied Syros, to ghost ships drifting on the Mediterranean: citizens are forced to avoid citizens. Public health in crisis: confinement versus mobility, awakening memories of totalitarian regimes.


CONTENTS

Impending Arrivals by Dimitra Kondylatou
Cruises to Nowhere
Covid-19 stricken Ships
Ghost Ships drifting on the Mediterranean

Suspended Arrivals by Dimitra Kondylatou
Le Corbusier Confined
Venice, Lazaretto and Black Death

Confined Spaces by Dimitra Kondylatou
Religious versus Medical Approaches to the Plague
Public Health and Public Order
Architectures of Control
The Lazaretto at Syros

Confinement and Totalitarianism, Famine in Occupied Syros
by Nicolas Lakiotakis

Panic Room. Waiting Room. Island.
by Hulya Ertas

Cover of De-/Anti-/Post-colonial Feminisms in Contemporary Art and Textile Crafts

Kt Press

De-/Anti-/Post-colonial Feminisms in Contemporary Art and Textile Crafts

Katy Deepwell

Twelve essays discussing De-/Anti-/Post-colonial Feminisms in contemporary art and textile craft. This book discusses the theoretical problems of each of these 3 approaches and each author in the book takes a different perspective on the relationships between them. These differences matter. The authors come from France, Sweden, USA (Chicano/First Nation/Black American communities), India, South Africa, The Netherlands, Pakistan, India and UK. They discuss a wide range of practices from contemporary women artists, independent teaching initiatives, experimental film and its histories, avantgarde theatre and women's craft practices in rural communities in conflict areas.

Cover of Notes on Anti-capitalist Solidarity: An Essay for the Working Class Artist

GenderFail

Notes on Anti-capitalist Solidarity: An Essay for the Working Class Artist

Be Oakley

Labor €16.00

Notes on Anti-capitalist Solidarity: An Essay for the Working Class Artist was first commissioned by former Artspeak Director/Curator Bopha Chhay and published as part of their BEACON series.

In the essay, Oakley states:

Why do so many artists, designers, and low-wage workers still embrace this system of exploitation without question? Are we so compromised by the false promise of success that we have become numb to the exploitation we endure for the chance of being in a place to exploit others ourselves? Do we want to be in this position? And if not, what can we do to change this?

BEACON is a series that examines how artists’ commitment to wider social movements informs contemporary artistic practice. It will feature texts by artists whose practices engage with language and visual arts. Former Artspeak Director/Curator Bopha Chhay edited the series.