Tomb(e)

A trenchant, darkly humorous, and unsentimental look at Calcutta society. 

Set in Calcutta in the mid-1980s, Truth/Untruth is a fast-paced thriller built around the death of the pregnant Jamuna—a maid in a newly affluent residential apartment complex—and Arjun, the upwardly mobile businessman who seduced her. Packed with a cast of colourful characters, this novel is a trenchant, darkly humorous, and unsentimental look at the different segments of Calcutta society: from the middle-class culture vultures to the unscrupulous ‘promoter’ class and the domestic helpers and slum goons who form an intrinsic part of the city’s life. All are implicated in a complex web of guilt and bizarre twists and turns. Sex, lies, death—the great modernist themes—run like a thread through this book, exposing societal greed, lust, corruption, and moral hypocrisy with a sardonic tone that spares none. An unusual novel by an author who is otherwise known for her hard-hitting activist-feminist stories, Truth/Untruth underlines the exploitative vicious cycle that defines urban relations between the haves and have-nots.

‘Although not of the margins herself, Devi was accomplished in writing from the margins [ . . . ] However, it is indeed worth it if you are looking for an exhilarating social commentary and biting satire that remains relevant today. Devi also reflects the jargon and dialects of the lower classes as deftly as the peculiarities of upper-class speech patterns. A feat of this work is Katyal’s ability to mediate these multiple registers, rewarding the reader with sharp writing that is at once funny, sardonic, and darkly pleasurable to read.‘—Jack Greenbert, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal.

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.

Living Translation offers a powerful perspective on the work of distinguished thinker and writer Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, revealing how, throughout her long career, she has made translation a central concern of the comparative humanities.

Starting with her landmark "Translator's Preface" to Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology in 1976, and continuing with her foreword to Mahasweta Devi's Draupadi and afterword to Devi's Chotti Munda and His Arrow, Spivak has tackled questions of translatability. She has been interested in interrogating the act of translation from the ground up and at the political limit. She sees at play at border checkpoints, at sites of colonial pedagogy, in acts of resistance to monolingual regimes of national language, at the borders of minor literature and schizo-analysis, in the deficits of cultural debt and linguistic expropriation, and, more generally, at theory's edge, which is to say, where practical criticism yields to theorizing in untranslatables.

This volume also addresses how Spivak's institution-building as director of comparative literature at the University of Iowa—and in her subsequent places of employment—began at the same time. From this perspective, Spivak takes her place within a distinguished line-up of translator-theorists who have been particularly attuned to the processes of cognizing in languages, all of them alive to the coproductivity of thinking, translating, writing.

What is sleep? How can this most unproductive of human states—metaphorically called death's shadow or considered the very pinnacle of indolence—be envisioned as action and agency? And what do we become in sleep? What happens to the waking selves we understand ourselves to be?

Written in the spring of 2013, as the Egyptian government of President Mohammed Morsi was unraveling in the face of widespread protests, The Book of Sleep is a landmark in contemporary Arabic literature. Drawing on the devices and forms of poetry, philosophical reflection, political analysis, and storytelling, this genre-defying work presents us with an assemblage of fragments that combine and recombine, circling around their central theme but refusing to fall into its gravity.  

"My concern was not to create a literary product in the conventional sense, but to try and use literature as a methodology for thinking," El Wardany explains. In this volume, sleep shapes sentences and distorts conventions. Its protean instability throws out memoir and memory, dreams and hallucinatory reverie, Sufi fables and capitalist parables, in the quest to shape a question. The Book of Sleep is a generous and generative attempt to reimagine possibility and hope in a world of stifling dualities and constrictions.

A woman replays her abandonment by her mother, who is sometimes addressed as a male mother-god. She is also abandoned by her lover, to whom she is in thrall. She tries repeatedly to make or receive phone calls with the beloved figures, without success. She waits for their letters and imagines their contents. In a dream-like, torrid sequence, suffering, fear, fatigue and imperfection are apostrophised. Forgetting is examined and toyed with from every angle. Mythical hybrid creatures are invoked: a snake-headed lion, wolf-snakes, a wolf-peacock. How did this come to be? In a cunningly, wittily wrought rush, the unique, unpredictable voice of the narrator speaks from multiple perspectives to express powerful anguish and, ultimately, catharsis.

‘Cixous reminds us that women have long spoken from a wound… To be is already to be abandoned, already to have lost, and still to love. To read Cixous is to tarry with this open wound, to hear how writing becomes testimony to its own possibility.’  Jamieson Webster

‘Language in Cixous’s hands is molten, constantly opening onto fresh possibilities.’  Maggie Nelson

‘With Hélène Cixous you must close your eyes and open your mouth. Wider. So open your throat opens. Your esophagus. Your lungs. Wider. So open your spine unclatters. Your hips swim loose. Your womb worlds itself. Wider. Open the well of your sex. Now speak your body from your other mouth. Yell corporeal prayer. This is writing.’  Lidia Yuknavitch

Foreword by Jamieson Webster

One Big Bang brings together 78 charcoal and pastel drawings from Adel Abdessemed's recent series Nature Morte and Politics of Drawing, where everyday objects, animals, and flowers are subtly charged with tension. Through these works, Abdessemed explores the intersections of beauty, fragility, and unrest. With texts by Hélène Cixous and David Elliott, One Big Bang offers a thoughtful entry into an artist's visual language shaped by memory, myth, and political urgency.

Published following the eponymous exhibition at Projeckt Brussels in 2024.

Adel Abdessemed (born 1971 in Constantine, Algeria, lives and works in Paris and Berlin) deconstructs identity codes, tackling head-on the tensions that permeate our society. His works, with their typical simplicity—sculptural installations, drawings, photographs, videos and performances—echo precise facts and familiar situations, but go beyond narrative commentary and militant criticism. Adel Abdessemed questions, among other things, the social and economic status of the artist in a system where his foothold is slight, by shrewdly keeping a distance in a gesture of subversive and committed resignation.

Abdessemed refuses to be limited to a single ideology. In his early works he passionately tackled religious, sexual, and taboos subjects and his later exhibitions have often focused on the theme of global violence. In an interview with Elisabeth Lebovici he stated, "I do not live between two cultures. I am not a postcolonial artist. I am not working on the scar and am not mending anything. I am just a detector … In the public sphere, I use passion and rage. Nothing else. I don't do illusions."

Sometimes reduced to a simple word, as in "Mohammedkarlpolpot" (1999), a condensation of names evoking totalitarism and religion, and sometimes complex and monumental installations such as "Habibi" (2004), a suspended skeleton of 17 meters propelled by a jet engine, Abdessemed's practice belongs to a new generation of artists who appeared recently on the French art scene, looking to offer another perspective on culture and identity.

From the 1970s through the 1990s more than one hundred feminist bookstores built a transnational network that helped shape some of feminism's most complex conversations. Kristen Hogan traces the feminist bookstore movement's rise and eventual fall, restoring its radical work to public feminist memory. The bookwomen at the heart of this story—mostly lesbians and including women of color—measured their success not by profit, but by developing theories and practices of lesbian antiracism and feminist accountability.

At bookstores like BookWoman in Austin, the Toronto Women's Bookstore, and Old Wives' Tales in San Francisco, and in the essential Feminist Bookstore News, bookwomen changed people's lives and the world. In retelling their stories, Hogan not only shares the movement's tools with contemporary queer antiracist feminist activists and theorists, she gives us a vocabulary, strategy, and legacy for thinking through today's feminisms.

Collectively authored by Louky Bersianik, Nicole Brossard, France Théoret, Gail Scott, Louise Cotnoir, Louise Dupré, Lisa Robertson, and Rachel Levitsky. Twenty-five years after its first French language publication, Theory, A Sunday (2013), a collaborative feminist poetics text, marks the first in Belladonna’s new Germinal Texts series. Written through Sunday meetings in Montreal, this volume gathers six women’s theoretical feminist texts, with a new introduction by Lisa Robertson and afterword by Gail Scott and Rachel Levitsky. Translators of this text include Erica Weitzman, Luise von Flotow, Popahna Brandes, and Nicole Peyrafitte.

Germinal Texts trace feminist avant-garde histories and the poetic lineages they produce. Focused on authors and texts that provide generative grounds for other writers and their work, Germinal Texts gesture to networks of affiliation, whether explicit or subterranean; to kinships and inheritances; to the unfolding of a text through its readership; and to always provisional origins without endings. Germinal Texts are works that gather dense histories and, for this reason, the series is designed to hold a space for critical discussion, with contextualizing front and back matter that launches new conversations.

Louky Bersianik (1930-2011) is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose. Essayist, novelist and poet, her much admired novel L’Eugélionne is considered Québec’s first feminist novel (translated by Howard Scott as The Eugélionne (1996). Her novel Permafrost, 1937-38, won the Governor General’s award in 1997. Louky was born in Montréal and studied at Université de Montréal, the Sorbonne, and Centre d’études de radio et de television.

Nicole Brossard was born in Montréal. Poet, novelist and essayist, she has published more than forty books. Her work has been influential on a generation of poets and feminists. Her work has been widely acknowledged and translated in many languages. Her most recent book, translated into English by Erin Mouré and Robert Majzels, is WHITE PIANO (Coach House Books, 2013). Nicole Brossard lives in Montréal.

Louise Cotnoir has published seventeen books of poetry, fiction and drama. She was twice nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, most recently for Les îles (2005). Dis-moi que j’imagine was a finalist for the prestigious Académie des lettres du Québec poetry prize (1996). She has participated in numerous conferences on women and writing, notably “Women and Words” (Vancouver, 1983), “L’écriture des femmes au Québec” (Sweden, 1992), “L’originalité de l’écriture au féminin au Québec” (New Jersey, 1995). She has contributed to or served on the editorial boards of Sorcières (Paris), Estuaire, Arcade, Tessera, Matrix, Moebius, Room of One’s Own, Ellipse, Trivia (USA), Silencíada Festada Palabra (Barcelona), El Ciervo (Barcelona) and Cahiers internationaux du symbolisme (Brussels). Her work has been translated into English, Spanish, Catalan, Finnish and Chinese. Her last collection of poetry, Les soeurs de, appeared with Éditions du Noroît (2011), with a stage adaptation in Ottawa (2012) and Montréal (2013). Les îles, translated by Oana Avasilichioaei, appeared as The Islands in 2011. She lives in Montréal.

Poet, novelist and essayist, Louise Dupré has published twenty books. Her work has received numerous awards and has been translated in various languages. She has collaborated with artists of visual arts, cinema, video and dance. Her play Tout comme elle was produced on stage and directed by Brigitte Haentjens in Montréal in 2006 and in Toronto in 2011, during the Luminato Festival. Plus haut que les flammes won the Governor General’s Award for poetry as well as the Grand Prix du Festival international de la poésie de Trois- Rivières in 2011. She is a member of the Académie des lettres du Québec and the Royal Society of Canada. She was professor of creative writing and women’s writing in Université du Québec à Montréal for twenty years.

Gail Scott’s fourth novel, THE OBITUARY (Nightboat Books, 2012), was a finalist for the 2011 Montréal Book of the Year (Grand prix du livre de Montréal). Scott’s other experimental novels include My Paris (Dalkey Archive), HEROINE (Talonbooks, 1999), and Main Brides. She has published collections of essays, stories, manifestos, and collaborations with Robert Glück et al BITING THE ERROR (Coach House Books, 2004), shortlisted for a Lambda award (2005). Scott’s translation of Michael Delisle’s Le Déasarroi du matelot was a finalist for the Canadian Governor General’s award in translation. The Canadian journal Open Letter devoted its autumn 2012 edition to Scott’s work. She lives, mostly, in Montréal and teaches Creative Writing at Université de Montréal.

France Théoret is a Montreal poet, novelist and essayist. She holds a doctorate in French studies from the University of Sherbrooke, and taught literary studies from 1968 to 1987. She was a member of the editorial board of the journal La Barre du jour from 1967 to 1969, and is the author of one of the monologues in the 1976 theatre piece La Nef des sorcières. In that same year she co-founded the feminist journal Les Têtes de pioche and in 1979, the cultural magazine Spirale, which she directed from 1981 to 1984. She has published over twenty books and been nominated for many prizes. Most of her work has been translated into English. Her poetry is available in Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese and has appeared in anthologies in Quebec and abroad. In 2012, she was awarded the Athanase-David Prix du Québec for her entire oeuvre. She lives in Montreal.

Stories about witches are by their nature stories about the most basic and profound of human experiences—healing, sex, violence, tragedies, aging, death, and encountering the mystery and magic of the unknown. It is no surprise, then, that witches loom large in our cultural imaginations. In academia, studies of witches rarely emerge from scholars who are themselves witches and/or embedded in communities of witchcraft practitioners. The Witch Studies Reader brings together a diverse group of scholars, practitioners, and scholar-practitioners who examine witchcraft from a critical decolonial feminist perspective that decenters Europe and departs from exoticizing and pathologizing writing on witchcraft in the global South. The authors show how witches are keepers of suppressed knowledges, builders of new futures, exemplars of praxis, and theorists in their own right. Throughout, they account for the vastly different national, political-economic, and cultural contexts in which “the witch” is currently being claimed and repudiated. Offering a pathbreaking transnational feminist examination of witches and witchcraft that upends white supremacist, colonial, patriarchal knowledge regimes, this volume brings into being the interdisciplinary field of feminist witch studies. 

Contributors: Maria Amir, Ruth Asiimwe, Bernadette Barton, Ethel Brooks, Shelina Brown, Ruth Charnock, Soma Chaudhuri, Carolyn Chernoff, Saira Chhibber, Simon Clay, Krystal Cleary, Adrianna L. Ernstberger, Tina Escaja, Laurie Essig, Marcelitte Failla, D Ferrett, Marion Goldman, Jaime Hartless, Margaretha Haughwout, Patricia Humura, Apoorvaa Joshi, Govind Kelkar, Oliver Kellhammer, Ayça Kurtoğlu, Helen Macdonald, Isabel Machado, Brandy Renee McCann, Dev Nathan, Mary Jo Neitz, Amy Nichols-Belo, Allison (or AP) Pierce, Emma Quilty, Anna Rogel, Karen Schaller, Jacquelyn Marie Shannon, Shashank Shekhar Sinha, Gabriella V. Smith, Nathan Snaza, Shannon Hughes Spence, Eric Steinhart, Morena Tartari, Nicole Trigg, Katie Von Wald, Tushabe wa Tushabe, Jane Ward

In the late 1970s, Lindiwe Mabuza, a.k.a. Sono Molefe, sent out a call for poems written by women in anc camps and offices throughout Africa and the world. The book that resulted, published and distributed in Europe in the early 1980s, was banned by the apartheid regime.

Authorised by the editor, this re-issue of Malibongwe re-establishes a place for women artists in the history of South Africa's liberation. These are the struggles within the Struggle: a book that records the hopes and fears, the drives and disappointments, and the motivation and resilience of women at the front lines of the battle against apartheid. Here we see the evidence, too often airbrushed out of the narratives of national liberation, of a deep and unrelenting radicalism within women; of a dream of a South Africa in which not only freedom reigned, but justice too.

The first monograph dedicated to the Neapolitan feminist and pacifist artists' collective: unpublished documents, images, photographs, and manifestos are accompanied by new creative, political, and historical contributions, evoking the collective joy of Le Nemesiache's history so as to bring a sense of myth back into the world, rewriting and embodying it anew.

Nemesiache is an informal feminist group co-founded in Naples in 1970 by the multidisciplinary and visionary artist and writer Lina Mangiacapre (1946-2002). The collective, which included up to twelve women (centered around Claudia Aglione, Fausta Base, Silvana Campese, Consuelo Campone, Conni Capobianco, Bruna Felletti, Anna Grieco, and Teresa Mangiacapre), fostered an experimental artistic practice and a way of being in the world rooted in feminism, mythology, folktales, sci-fi, and radical imagination, while also introducing "transfeminism" in the early '80s. 

Throughout their long-lasting practice spanning several decades, the group retrieved an androgynous mythosophy to transcend art as mere representation and challenge the feminine as a modern identity category. Their distinct transformative approach within both Italian and Western feminist art history led not only to the emergence of an interdisciplinary practice—encompassing film, performance, writing, rituals, poetry, music, collage, costumes, protests, and conferences—but also the creation of a new political language, grounded in cosmological creativity and justice through mythological rituals.

Edited by Sonia D'Alto.
Texts by Chiara Bottici, Federica Bueti, Cairo Clarke, Sonia D'Alto, Giulia Damiani, Giusi Palomba, Imma Tralli & Roberto Pontecorvo, Elvira Vannini, Giovanna Zapperi, Arnisa Zeqo.