Skip to main content
rile*books

Search books

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

Cover of Voices of the Nakba: A Living History of Palestine

Pluto Press

Voices of the Nakba: A Living History of Palestine

Diana Allan ed.

€27.00

First-generation Palestinian refugees recall life before and after the Nakba.

During the 1948 war more than 750,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were violently expelled from their homes by Zionist militias. The legacy of the Nakba - which translates to 'disaster' or 'catastrophe' - lays bare the violence of the ongoing Palestinian plight.

Voices of the Nakba collects the stories of first-generation Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, documenting a watershed moment in the history of the modern Middle East through the voices of the people who lived through it.

The interviews, with commentary from leading scholars of Palestine and the Middle East, offer a vivid journey into the history, politics and culture of Palestine, defining Palestinian popular memory on its own terms in all its plurality and complexity.

Afterword by Rosemary Sayigh. Winner of an English PEN Award 2021.

Language: English

recommendations

Cover of To See In the Dark: Palestine and Visual Activism Since October 7

Pluto Press

To See In the Dark: Palestine and Visual Activism Since October 7

Nicholas Mirzoeff

Essays €20.00

To see Palestine is to see the world. Since October 7th 2023, the forces of racial capitalism, settler colonialism and white supremacy have become all too visible in Israel's war on Gaza. Urban, networked Gazan youth have documented and shared their struggle with the world using social media strategies, derived from movements from Tahrir Square to Black Lives Matter.

In To See In The Dark, Nicholas Mirzoeff explores how these videos and photos transmitted and viewed outside Palestine, via platforms like Instagram and TikTok, enabled a dramatic switch in public opinion, leading to the global uprising against genocide.

In this groundbreaking analysis, he also connects the personal and the political via his own anti-Zionist Jewishness, weaving an autotheory of domestic, political and sexual violence. Through this exploration, he finds new collective anticolonial ways of seeing, combining online and embodied experiences.

Cover of Settler Colonialism An Introduction

Pluto Press

Settler Colonialism An Introduction

Sai Englert

Non-fiction €23.00

From the Palestinian struggle against Israeli Apartheid, to First Nations' mass campaigns against pipeline construction in North America, Indigenous peoples are at the forefront of some of the crucial struggles of our age. Rich with their unique histories, characteristics, and social relations, they are connected by the shared enemy they face: settler colonialism.

In this introduction, Sai Englert highlights the ways in which it has, and continues to shape our global economic and political order. From the rapacious accumulation of resources, land, and labour, through Indigenous dispossession and genocide, to the development of racism as a form of social control, settler colonialism is deeply connected to many of the social ills we continue to face today.

To understand settler colonialism as an ongoing process, is therefore also to start engaging with contemporary social movements and solidarity campaigns differently. It is to start seeing how distinct struggles for justice and liberation are intertwined.

Cover of Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds

Pluto Press

Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds

Nat Raha, Mijke van der Drift

'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

Cover of Parapraxis 06: Resistance

Parapraxis

Parapraxis 06: Resistance

Essays €25.00

In 1911, Sigmund Freud addressed his followers gathered at Nuremberg, where he restated the import of his practice: “the task of psychoanalysis lies not at all in the discovering of complexes, but in the dissolving of resistances.” A formal antipode to political resistance, psychoanalytic resistance dams up desire and obstructs traumatic knowledge. It is conservative, allergic to change, and aims for the kind of frictionless normativity against which the unconscious drives rail. Meanwhile, we associate political resistance with change itself, with a blockade that pushes for revolution—rather than a blockage that censors its very possibility. If we read Freud as urging his followers to help their patients move through their resistance, psychoanalysis is a project on the side of material and political reality by bringing patients out of isolation and into social struggles. However, psychoanalysis is often glossed in reverse: as a project of isolated relief for the stubborn individual.

Should psychoanalysis only succeed at rendering patients compliant in their cure? Is psychoanalysis a tool for nullifying political resistance? If so, Freud’s edict for the aim of psychoanalysis is now but an epitaph. It would be easy, then, to give up the ghost, to let psychoanalysis go. But why should psychoanalysis retreat from collective symptoms back into the consulting room for individual treatment—away from strikes, riots, and uprisings, and toward complacency and normativity, if not quite literally marriage and babies? Why should the clinic not dare to be in and of the world?

Feeling restless. Hunger tactics. Laughing in the face of fascism. Breaking through. Diagnosing revolution. Madness in the Maghreb. Essays by Fady Joudah, Jamieson Webster, Dylan Saba, Yasmin El-Rifae, Ussama Makdisi, Mary Turfah, Hannah Proctor, and more.

In Memory of Joshua Clover (1962-2025).

Cover of Jill Johnston in Motion

Duke University Press

Jill Johnston in Motion

Clare Croft

Performance €28.00

Performer, activist, and writer Jill Johnston was a major queer presence in the history of dance and 1970s feminism. She was the first critic to identify postmodernism’s arrival in American dance and was a fierce advocate for the importance of lesbians within feminism. In Jill Johnston in Motion, Clare Croft tracks Johnston’s entwined innovations and contributions to dance and art criticism and activism. She examines Johnston’s journalism and criticism—in particular her Village Voice columns published between 1960 and 1980—and her books of memoir and biography. At the same time, Croft attends to Johnston’s appearances as both dancer and audience member and her physical and often spectacular participation at feminist protests. By bringing together Johnston’s criticism and activism, her writing and her physicality, Croft emphasizes the effect that the arts, particularly dance, had on Johnston’s feminist thinking in the 1970s and traces lesbian feminism’s roots in avant-garde art practice.

Cover of Letterpress Revolution

Duke University Press

Letterpress Revolution

Kathy E. Ferguson

Non-fiction €29.00

While the stock image of the anarchist as a masked bomber or brick thrower prevails in the public eye, a more representative figure should be a printer at a printing press. In Letterpress Revolution, Kathy E. Ferguson explores the importance of printers, whose materials galvanized anarchist movements across the United States and Great Britain from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s. Ferguson shows how printers—whether working at presses in homes, offices, or community centers—arranged text, ink, images, graphic markers, and blank space within the architecture of the page. Printers' extensive correspondence with fellow anarchists and the radical ideas they published created dynamic and entangled networks that brought the decentralized anarchist movements together. Printers and presses did more than report on the movement; they were constitutive of it, and their vitality in anarchist communities helps explain anarchism’s remarkable persistence in the face of continuous harassment, arrest, assault, deportation, and exile. By inquiring into the political, material, and aesthetic practices of anarchist print culture, Ferguson points to possible methods for cultivating contemporary political resistance.

Cover of Held by Hands: K-pop and the Social Potencial of Fandom

Publication Studio

Held by Hands: K-pop and the Social Potencial of Fandom

Sol Archer

Essays €16.00

This book brings together personal and theoretical reflections written by members of the Brazilian K-pop community on the constructive potential of fandom in contemporary society. The texts spans experiences of occupying public space through collective dance practice, identity formation and community support, cultural appropriation in K-pop, the e ects of soft power, and considerations of the phenomenon of fandom

In the fandom universe passive consumption of culture is replaced by active participation in its co-creation. Fan-fiction is one among many examples of this. Autonomous territories, with con gurations and laws unto themselves, are built by fans experiencing culture in collectivised ways. The sense of belonging and formation of identities enabled by exchanges and diverse practices make the K-pop fandom a space with the potential for radical social transformation and collective agency, resisting contradictions inherent to contemporary social norms. This book is a collective body dancing utopia.

With contributions by Aline Barbosa, EVE, Julia Guerreiro, Kananda Simonetti, Kelly Nobre, Lohaynne Beringui, Lucas Victor Aureliano, Marcelle Belfort, Millah C. S. Gomes, Natália Amorim, Paula Castro, Paulina Yeal Cho e/and Sabrina Diniz.

Cover of We, the Heartbroken

Hajar Press

We, the Heartbroken

Gargi Bhattacharyya

Essays €18.00

What do we do when the world breaks our hearts? Racial capitalism in the age of pandemic continues to crush ever more lives and spirits. Yet, we are told repeatedly to master, to overcome, to be resilient. Beneath this fragile pretence of coping, many of us have grown used to living with profound and fathomless sorrow.

In graceful prose, Gargi Bhattacharyya navigates collective grief and how it mingles with personal tragedy. Alongside love and joy, perhaps grief is what makes us human―and while its pain scrapes our wounds, its presence can help us renounce that which exists and build anew. 

Heartbreak is the class consciousness of our times. So, it is up to us, the heartbroken, to learn again to heal—and remake the world.

"We, the Heartbroken reckons with loss and grief’s fullness and its surprising abilities to make us alive to one another … entranced by one another again. We are called upon to do this work, to allow for heartbreak to engender capaciousness and collectivity."
Full Stop

Gargi Bhattacharyya lives and works in London. Their work includes writing on racism, racial capitalism, austerity and war.