by Pluto Press

Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds
Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift
Pluto Press - 20.00€ -

'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

A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonizing the Museum
Françoise Vergès
Pluto Press - 25.00€ -

The Western museum is a battleground - a terrain of ideological, political and economic contestation. Almost everyone today wants to rethink the museum, but how many have the audacity to question the idea of the universal museum itself?

In A Programme of Absolute Disorder, Françoise Vergès puts the museum in its place. Exploring the Louvre's history, she uncovers the context in which the universal museum emerged: as a product of colonialism, and of Europe's self-appointed claim to be the guardian of global heritage.

Vergès outlines a radical horizon: to truly decolonize the museum is to implement a 'programme of absolute disorder', inventing other ways of apprehending the human and non-human world that nourish collective creativity and bring justice and dignity to the dispossessed.

Foreword by Paul Gilroy

Translated by Melissa Thackway

A Decolonial Feminism
Françoise Vergès
Pluto Press - 17.00€ -

'A vibrant and compelling framework for feminism in our times' - Judith Butler

For too long feminism has been co-opted by the forces they seek to dismantle. In this powerful manifesto, Francoise Verges argues that feminists should no longer be accomplices of capitalism, racism, colonialism and imperialism: it is time to fight the system that created the boss, built the prisons and polices women’s bodies.

A Decolonial Feminism grapples with the central issues in feminist debates today: from Eurocentrism and whiteness, to power, inclusion and exclusion. Delving into feminist and anti-racist histories, Verges also assesses contemporary activism, movements and struggles, including #MeToo and the Women's Strike.

Centring anticolonialism and anti-racism within an intersectional Marxist feminism, the book puts forward an urgent demand to free ourselves from the capitalist, imperialist forces that oppress us.

Radical Intimacy
Sophie K Rosa
Pluto Press - 19.00€ -  out of stock

An impassioned discussion about the alternative ways to form relationships and resist capitalism.

Capitalist ideology wants us to believe that there is an optimal way to live. 'Making connections' means networking for work. Our emotional needs are to be fulfilled by a single romantic partner, and self-care equates to taking personal responsibility for our suffering. We must be productive and heterosexual, we must have babies and buy a house. But the kicker is most people cannot and do not want to achieve all, or any of these life goals. Instead we are left feeling atomised, exhausted and disempowered.

Radical Intimacy shows that it doesn't need to be this way. A punchy and impassioned account of inspiring ideas about alternative ways to live, Sophie K Rosa demands we use our radical imagination to discover a new form of intimacy and to transform our personal lives and in turn society as a whole.

Including critiques of the 'wellness' industry that ignores rising poverty rates, the mental health crisis and racist and misogynist state violence; transcending love and sex under capitalism to move towards feminist, decolonial and queer thinking; asking whether we should abolish the family; interrogating the framing of ageing and death and much more, Radical Intimacy is the compassionate antidote to a callous society.

Ghassan Kanafani: Selected Political Writings
Ghassan Kanafani
Pluto Press - 24.00€ -

Ghassan Kanafani (1936 - 1972) is perhaps the greatest Palestinian novelist, whose books including Men in the Sun and Returning to Haifa documented the horrors of war and occupation. He was also a leading political thinker, strategist and revolutionary. Here, his writings on politics, history, national liberation and the media are collected in English for the first time.

Featuring new commentary from leading writers, this collection is a testament to Kanafani's continuing relevance. His work remains a vital touchstone for revolutionary Palestinian struggle and anti-colonial thought.

Edited by Louis Brehony and Tahrir Hamdi

Voices of the Nakba: A Living History of Palestine
Diana Allan (ed.)
Pluto Press - 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.

Settler Colonialism An Introduction
Sai Englert
Pluto Press - 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.

Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire
Max Haiven
Pluto Press - 20.00€ -  out of stock

It's in our food, our cosmetics, our fuel and our bodies. Palm oil, found in half of supermarket products, has shaped our world. Max Haiven uncovers how the gears of capitalism are literally and metaphorically lubricated by this ubiquitous elixir.

From its origins in West Africa to today's Southeast Asian palm oil superpowers, Haiven's sweeping, experimental narrative takes us on a global journey that includes looted treasures, the American system of mass incarceration, the history of modern art and the industrialisation of war. Beyond simply calling for more consumer boycotts, he argues for recognising in palm oil humanity's profound potential to shape our world beyond racial capitalism and neo-colonial dispossession.

One part history, one part dream, one part theory, one part montage, this kaleidoscopic and urgent book asks us to recognise the past in the present and to seize the power to make a better world.

On Cuddling: Loved to Death in the Racial Embrace
Phanuel Antwi
Pluto Press - 23.00€ -  out of stock

Ranging from the terrifying embrace of the slave ship's hold to the racist encoding of 'cuddly' toys, On Cuddling is a unique combination of essay and poetry that contends with the way racial violence is enacted through intimacy.

Informed by Black feminist and queer poetics, Phanuel Antwi focuses his lens on the suffering of Black people at the hands of state violence and racial capitalism. As radical movements grow to advance Black liberation, so too must our ways of understanding how racial capitalism embraces us all. Antwi turns to cuddling, an act we imagine as devoid of violence, and explores it as a tense transfer point of power.

Through archival documents and multiple genres of writing, it becomes clear that the racial violence of the state and economy has always been about the (mis)management of intimacies, and we should face it with resistance and solidarity.

Phanuel Antwi is Canada Research Chair in Black Arts and Epistemologies. He is an artist, teacher and organiser concerned with race, poetics, movements, intimacy and struggle. He works with text, dance, film and photography to intervene in artistic, academic and public spaces. He is a curator, activist and associate professor at the University of British Columbia.

The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-To-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future
Cassie Thornton
Pluto Press - 20.00€ -  out of stock

In an era when capitalism leaves so many to suffer and to die, with neoliberal 'self-care' offering little more than a bandaid, how can we take health and care back into our hands? In The Hologram, Cassie Thornton puts forward a bold vision for revolutionary care: a viral, peer-to-peer feminist health network. The premise is simple: three people - a 'triangle' - meet on a regular basis, digitally or in person, to focus on the physical, mental and social health of a fourth - the 'hologram'. The hologram, in turn, teaches their caregivers how to give and also receive care; each member of their triangle becomes a hologram for another, different triangle, and so the system expands. Drawing on radical models developed in the Greek solidarity clinics during a decade of crisis, and directly engaging with discussions around mutual aid and the coronavirus pandemic, The Hologram develops the skills and relationships we desperately need for the anti-capitalist struggles of the present, and the post-capitalist society of the future. One part art, one part activism, one part science fiction, this book offers the reader a guide to establishing a Hologram network as well as reflections on this cooperative work in progress.

Cassie Thornton is an artist and activist from the US, currently living in Canada. She refers to herself as a feminist economist, a title that frames her work as that of a social scientist actively preparing for the economics of a future society that produces health and life without the tools that reproduce oppression, like money, police or prisons. 

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