Skip to main content
rile*books

Search books

Search books by title, author, publisher, keywords...

Cover of The Haitian Chronicles

Boo-Hooray

The Haitian Chronicles

Douglas Turner Ward

€26.00

The Haitian Chronicles is a graphic and brutal history of the Haitian Revolution told across three plays. It is the final work by the influential and groundbreaking playwright Douglas Turner Ward (1930-2021) and the first play of his to be published in several decades. Though much of his earlier work has been short one-act satires, The Haitian Chronicles takes place across three long plays: The Rise of Toussaint L'Ouverture, The Fall of Toussaint L'Ouverture, and the one-man drama, Dessalines.

The Haitian Chronicles is an example of Ward's political commitment to satirizing, dramatizing, and revealing the structures of white supremacy throughout the history of this so-called civilization. His first play, Star of Liberty, written at 19 years of age, was based the life of Nat Turner and the slave revolt he led. With The Haitian Chronicles, Ward returns to armed Black rebellion, taking as its subject matter the first and only slave revolt to successfully establish a free state. It is a self-consciously ambitious work of astounding narrative and theatrical scope, featuring over 80 speaking roles and logistically demanding production design. The narrative onslaught chronicling the disgusting brutality of colonial French society and the bloody force it took to overthrow it overwhelms the reader and challenges one to question the structures on which society is built and the violence it continues to perpetuate.

Ward was one of the central, driving forces of the Black Theater movement in the United States. After moving to New York in 1948, he became immersed in the radical political scene in Harlem, writing for The Daily Worker, and studying as an actor. He served as understudy to Sidney Poitier in A Raisin in the Sun, and began a long friendship with fellow actor Robert Hooks. In 1966, Hooks helped produce Ward’s double bill Happy Ending / Day of Absence. Following the success of these plays, Ward was asked to write an editorial for the New York Times in 1966. His article, titled "American Theatre: For Whites Only?", surveyed the ubiquitous, stifling racism of the American theatre and was widely circulated, earning Ward further recognition for his political and theatrical work. With funding from the Ford Foundation, Ward and Hooks, together with Gerald Krone, founded the Negro Ensemble Company (NEC) in 1967. Writing and directing for the NEC over the next several decades, Ward worked with icons such as Paul Carter Harrison, Gus Edwards, Leslie Lee, Errol Hill, Charles Fuller, Derek Walcott and Wole Soyinka. He directed dozens of plays throughout his career including Song of the Lusitanian Bogey, The River Niger and Pulitzer Prize-winning A Soldier’s Play. Ward continued to write until his death in 2021– The Haitian Chronicles is the result of over four decades of work, a superb series of plays by an inimitable writer and artist.

Boo-Hooray proudly placed the Douglas Turner Ward Archive at Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library in 2017. The Archive includes many working drafts of the numerous plays Ward directed and wrote, manuscript materials, and correspondence with other icons of the Black Arts.

The Haitian Chronicles was a winner of the AIGA 50 Books & 50 Cover Award for the work of book designer Martha Ormiston.

recommendations

Cover of The My Comrade Anthology

Boo-Hooray

The My Comrade Anthology

Linda Simpson

Periodicals €30.00

The My Comrade Anthology collects pages from past issues of My Comrade selected by Linda Simpson, printed in a substantial 256-page volume on newsprint.

My Comrade was an underground gay culture zine that set itself apart from the deluge of Xeroxed zines popping up in New York in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Through parody of both mainstream tabloid magazines and the self-serious gay press, a campy and ironic sensibility, and radical left sympathies and sloganeering, My Comrade captured the zeitgeist of the gay downtown scene. Publishing 11 issues between 1987 and 1994, and three issues since, My Comrade documents the last years of underground gay culture before marriage equality and representation at elite levels of American society became the primary drivers of gay politics and aesthetic production. My Comrade was briefly revived from 2004 to 2006, and again on the occasion of the exhibition “My Comrade Magazine: Happy 35th Gay Anniversary” at Howl! in 2022.

Cover of Acoustic Thought

The Last Books

Acoustic Thought

Snejanka Mihaylova

Acoustic Thought is an exegesis of the Gospel of Thomas, an apocryphal gospel found at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt in 1945.
 
With a score for six female voices by Lisa Holmqvist; a collage of writings by medieval female mystics; and photographs taken by Jeff Weber at the Coptic Museum in Cairo, during a research period at Beirut project space.
 
The book’s covers reconstruct patterns found on the covers of Nag Hammadi Codex II, which, as well as the Gospel of Thomas, contains the Apocryphon of John, the Gospel of Philip, the Hypostasis of the Archons, On the Origin of the World, the Exegesis on the Soul, and the Book of Thomas the Contender.
 
Presented and performed during Perfomance Days, Amsterdam (November 2014) and Hotel Theory, REDCAT, Los Angeles (November 2015).

Cover of DEAR EAR

Vibrational Semantics

DEAR EAR

Cia Rinne

DEAR EAR is a fragmentary text, moving through subvocalization, lingual acrobatics, ingressive speaking and rhythmic reading in various experiences of the visualised voice.

Cover of High Shine

De Nieuwe Dansbibliotheek

High Shine

Tamara Antonijevic

Performance €12.50

High Shine is boek zes van de groeiende collectie van De Nieuwe Dansbibliotheek en boek nul van de Notebooks die opgezet zijn door de fellows van THIRD, het derde cyclus onderzoeksprogramma van DAS Graduate School, ondersteund door DAS Publishing (lectoraat van de Academie voor Theater en Dans) en gefinancierd door de Quality Funds.

Als co-publicatie van DAS Publishing en De Nieuwe Dansbibliotheek, luidt High Shine een nieuw partnerschap in tussen nieuwe platforms en oude vrienden.

Cover of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha – Berkeley – 1968

Les Presses du Reel

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha – Berkeley – 1968

Elvan Zabunyan

Première publication dédiée à l'œuvre singulière de l'artiste coréenne-américaine Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982), à la croisée de la performance, de l'art conceptuel, de la vidéo et de la poésie, dont l'un des motifs principaux concerne sa représentation de l'Histoire, marquée par l'expérience de l'exil et de la migration, de la dislocation temporelle, culturelle, géographique et sociale.

Dans le courant de sa brève vie, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha a produit un travail artistique, littéraire et critique qui en fait une figure exemplaire, même si encore trop méconnue, de l'art contemporain américain. Est ici retracé ce parcours singulier qui se forge à la lumière d'une période exceptionnelle à la fois de l'histoire et de l'histoire de l'art. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha est à Berkeley en 1968, à Paris en 1976, à New York en 1980 et s'engage dans une pratique de l'art et de la pensée où sont brassés les concepts les plus novateurs des théories visuelles ou filmiques, de la philosophie, de la linguistique et de la littérature comparée. 

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Berkeley, 1968 est aussi une réflexion inédite sur la représentation de territoires culturels déplacés et leur rapport à la mémoire.

Historienne de l'art contemporain, Elvan Zabunyan est maître de conférences habilitée à l'université Rennes 2 et critique d'art. Ses recherches portent sur l'art nord-américain depuis les années 1960 et notamment le tournant 1970 autour des questions raciales et féministes. Elle travaille depuis le début des années 1990 sur les problématiques issues des cultural studies, des théories postcoloniales et des études de genre en cherchant à construire, grâce à ces pensées critiques, une méthodologie de l'histoire de l'art contemporain articulée autour d'une histoire culturelle, sociale et politique. Elle a publié Black is a color, une histoire de l'art africain américain (Dis Voir, 2004), co-dirigé plusieurs livres et a écrit de nombreux articles dans des ouvrages collectifs, des catalogues d'exposition et des périodiques.

Cover of I am Welton Santos.

Self-Published

I am Welton Santos.

Sofia Caesar

I am Welton Santos reenacts a dialogue between the Brazilian geo-bio-architect Welton Santos and an Interviewer. The book, which is always read collectively, is used in reading performances by groups of at least 3 people.

Printed on the occasion of an artist residency at PAV, Parco d’Arte Vivente, Turin, July 2016. Texts based on transcripts of interviews with Welton Santos.