Suites décoloniales

« Et ensuite quand le calme est revenu, plantez à la place une femme noire qui lève le poing, même un instant, comme pour faire semblant. Une femme noire fera le job, avec le poing levé, c’est mieux, c’est cool. » Écho ou fantôme de Suites décoloniales, ce recueil de poésie prolonge et complète les chemins parcourus par Olivier Marboeuf dans son essai, au moyen de ce que l’auteur appelle une « pratique théorique de la poésie ».

Fragments de mauvaises rencontres, haïkus sur le beat accéléré d’un train, hommages à la banlieue chérie, Olivier Marboeuf se fait conteur polyphonique, poreux au monde et dépositaire des histoires étendues et vues dans de multiples nuits.

A virtuosic inquiry into the forms and uses of healing, from ancient and modern medicine to contemporary literature, ecology, and protest.

In the era of the “chronic acute” long predating COVID-19, Eleni Stecopoulos set out to investigate the imagination, aesthetics, and ideology of healing—its mysteries and mystifications, its many channels and codes. Fusing lyric inquiry with cultural criticism, Dreaming in the Fault Zone explores art’s treatment of our conditions at a time of both increased cynicism about healing and longing for it. Stecopoulos talks to physicians, poets, psychotherapists, disability activists, ethnographers, spiritual seekers; curates performances and takes part in community rituals; documents pilgrimages and visits therapeutic landscapes. Whether writing about the poet H.D.’s psychoanalysis with Freud or madness and apartheid in Bessie Head’s novel A Question of Power, the salve of demagogues or a global alliance of people with contested illnesses, Stecopoulos confronts the poetics and politics of affliction, empathy, memory, and survival. Weaving together esoteric scenes and everyday practice, with flashes of humor, these essays travel in a space of impasse and unending experiment.

The Conspiracy of Equals (1796) is often hailed as the first revolution against a revolutionary state. Even if the conspirators were soon found out and put on trial, their ideas of radical equality and liberty shaped future generations of revolutionaries worldwide. An Anarchist Playbook—the first publication in Tenement’s new imprint, No University Press—gathers together many of the key documents from their trial across a myriad forms, with a number of these texts appearing herein in their first English-language translation.

Assembled in the Playbook are the last words of Gracchus Babeuf, the leader of the conspiracy and a radical proponent of the abolition of private property, and of his fellow conspirator Augustin Darthé, as they faced the guillotine. We’ve a letter, written in the popular idiom of the sans-culottes, that urges the common soldier to rebel; the score and lyrics of a street song that names the new class enemy: the wealthy bourgeoisie who have profited from the revolution; a first-time English translation of ‘The Last Judgement of All Kings’—an extraordinary one-act play by Sylvain Maréchal, the unofficial poet of the Conspiracy, that was performed to considerable acclaim in Year II of the Revolution (and that the Workshop is in the process of adapting for contemporary audiences). 

Many of these texts were never published in their own time, and form a part of the testament left behind by Philippe Buonarroti, a leading conspirator who inspired new generations of revolutionaries across Europe over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among the best known works included is the Manifesto of Equals, long considered a founding text of social, communist and anarchist revolutions. The Playbook presents a translation of the Manifesto alongside other key texts by the conspirators, reconstructing the richness and variety of revolutionary communication that informs the editorship, shape, and scope of this volume.

Delirious Verse presents the first English translation of a talk given by the Italian poet Amelia Rosselli in the early 1980s, in which she read aloud from and expanded upon her seminal essay “Metrical Spaces.” Drawing on intensive literary and musical studies, and shaped by her trilingual upbringing as a refugee from fascist Italy, Rosselli conceptualizes a new kind of poetic form: a graphic-prosodic “time-space” capable of containing “all possible imaginable rhythms.”

The book includes a new translation of “Metrical Spaces” by Jennifer Scappettone and an afterword by Andrea di Serego Alighieri.

Edited and translated by Andrea di Serego Alighieri and Phil Baber.

An exploration of the Witch, as radical archetype, in ancient and contemporary life. 

An adult woman haunted by her childhood muses on the foster system, institutions, and the medieval tale of a girl given to a witch. A genderqueer Brooklynite learns of their past life as a murdered sorceress. An uptight participant at a Northern California witch camp finds community in the kitchen. A professor uses magic to help students under attack by right-wing politicians.

In this collection of manifesto, poetry, playscripts, and prose, the archetype of the Witch is honored and unpacked, poked and prodded, owned and othered. From work centered in antiquity to writing which illustrates how primordial occult energies continue to enliven our world today, WITCH: Anthology lays bare a wilderness of myth, magic, trickery, and power swarming beneath the surface of contemporary life.

With work from CAConrad, Edgar Fabián Frías, Amanda Yates Garcia, Ashley Ray, Brooke Palmieri, Yumi Sakugawa, Kai Cheng Thom, Ariel Gore, Myriam Gurba, Fariha Róisín, and many others.

In the fourth title of the acclaimed DecadentEditions series, Dennis Lim explores the oeuvre of South Korean auteur Hong Sangsoo via his 2005 film. Forty minutes in, we realise we’ve been watching a film within the film. The ‘real’ characters leave the cinema and find themselves reenacting what they just saw, as a chance encounter invites a suicide pact. Is it life imitating art, or the other way around? Dennis Lim is a film curator, teacher, and writer. He is currently the Artistic Director of the New York Film Festival.