Theory & Criticism

Featuring contributions from various artists and authors, including Louis Morelle, Persis Bekkering & Crisis Acting. 

Dialogues on CoreCore & the Contemporary Online Avant-Garde gathers the work of over forty artists, writers, and philosophers to address the trajectories of the underground avant-garde digital art-world. A variety of topics and visual styles are represented in this anthology, but particular attention is paid to CoreCore, the DIY experimental filmmaking meta-trend which emerged on TikTok in the dusk of 2020. In part an anthology of critical and experimental essays, in part a curatorial artbook, in part a volume of conference proceedings, this text invites the viewer to explore the grassroots conference of a particular cybercultural moment. 

This book follows on from the proceedings of All Things are Nothing to Us, a symposium on CoreCore and the Contemporary Online Avant-Garde, held on December 2nd. 2023, at the School of Visual Arts, NYC; organized by 0nty and OnMyComputer (Dylan Smith). 

FEATURES WORK FROM:
0nty - Dylan Smith (OnMyComputer) - John-Robin Bold - Bebe_Crotte - Societyiftextwall - Aemmonia - Emonie Fay Chetwin (Xleepyfay) - Alice Aster - Anastasija Pavić - Anastasiia Pishchanska (shelestvetrovki) - Ash Ingram - ChaoticRhizomatic - Crisis Acting - Dana Dawud - Daniel Neeman - Edson Javier Rogil - Hunter Thompson - Joe Iovino (Levels of Nuance) - John DeSousa - John Michael - Jomel - Liam Harding (X._.pulp) - Louis Higgins - Louis Morelle - Maria Puglisi - Mason Noel - Mischa Dols - i0 xen0 - Nicholas Sanchez (Wonderful Cringe) - Nick Vyssotsky - Nikolaos Sakkadakis - Orion Arnold - Persis Bekkering - Redacted Cut - Reed McDonaldson - Rokas Vaičiulis - Rozzlyn Agnes K - Soham Adhikari - Uba - Zoey Solomon - Machine Yearning - Jordi Viader Guerrero - Tommaso Campagna - Kali Masoch  

While presented as a contiguous work, the book is formed of different essays that have been dissected, recomposed with artificial connective tissue. The result lies somewhere between the rhizomatic continuity of a Body-without-Organs, and the disjointed assemblage of roadkill; either way, the question of where to even begin remains the same. 

These essays each grow out of a particular resentment that developed through years of experience as a working-student of biology, but the task of the book was to transform this into something productive, something that sticks granular propositions into Biology like acupuncture needles. Inherent sexism within Biological research is, after all, not entirely disconnected to Pharmaceutical giants flooding the streets with opiates—and it is simply a writer’s hope that some well positioned words can remind enough people of how its all connected. 

In what could be perceived as a philosophical turn, the importance of talking about science, as much as doing it, is re-entering the popular scientific consciousness, and it is high time, too. What was already getting bad under Biden, became catastrophic under Trump, and the infiltration into public research by private institutions and capitalist enterprises, which this book highlights, is proving dire. The capitalisation of all things bio, whether -yoghurt, -metric data or -logical institutions, is necrotic—MeltdownYourBooks didn’t flinch, they just grabbed the scalpel, dowsed the flesh in ethanol, and asked the question we all forget needs answering: where first, Doc? 

Meltdown Your Books (M.Y.B.), the pen name, was made as a portmanteau of the seminal essay Meltdown by Nick Land, and the landmark film Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets by Shuji Terayama. I chose the name, almost 3 years ago now, to reflect the political and digital black hole I saw hovering at the edge of contemporary media experience, and to present my work without the muddy veneer of personal identity. It has remained, since its inception, an anonymous project in only the loosest terms. The dedicated could always find my real identity, and some have, and so its anonymous character existed primarily as an element of presentation. Its anonymity existed to emphasize its deindividuated character. The things I discuss and emphasize under the M.Y.B. label are not items with definitive characteristics, they are collective experiences. M.Y.B. is something I cherish beyond self.

Affects & Dreams: a manual for Becoming, the first book authored by niko mas, is a relatively quick dive into the waters of Becoming; a schizo-guide to our publishing practice (why, how, and for what cause do we publish/transmit). We tell the story of a radio show that bridged our project Crossdressing Diogenes with our latest project, Becoming. In telling the story of how we arrived here at all, we have a chance to index all of the fields and domains that Becoming has entered into so far, and begins to maniacally draw lines through many subjects.

Some of the topics covered here include:
Images of Thought, Listening modes, Negativity and The Ear, Minimalism, Honest Electronics, Logocentrism, Metaphysics of Presence, Natural
Physics, Lumbung Radio, Rave Culture, Tripping, Radio Control Rooms, Analogical Transmissions, Anamorphoses, Insomniac Dream-Machines.

A brilliant and creative account of Thinking that cuts through the noise eminating from Artificial Intelligence and Art. In one fatal blow, the author makes the case that while Artificial Intelligence cannot make art, the majority of art that is produced today and throughout history is no different to what an Artificial Intelligence can produce. AI is therefore both an end to Art and its chance to begin again. 

“The artist is cancelled: this is the time of art.” 

With a Foreword by Louis Morelle.

Susan Stryker is a foundational figure in trans studies. When Monsters Speak showcases the development of Stryker’s writing from the 1990s to the present. It combines canonical pieces, such as “My Words to Victor Frankenstein,” with her hard to find earlier work published in zines and newsletters. Brought together, they ground Stryker’s thought in 1990s San Francisco and its innovative queer, trans, and S/M cultures. The volume includes an introduction by editor McKenzie Wark, who highlights Stryker’s connections to developments in queer theory, media studies, and autotheory while foregrounding Stryker’s innovative writing style and scholarly methods. When Monsters Speak is an authoritative and essential collection by one of the most important and influential intellectuals of our time.

A history of Black imagery that recasts our understanding of visual culture and technology

In Black Meme, Legacy Russell, awardwinning author of the groundbreaking Glitch Feminism, explores the “meme” as mapped to Black visual culture from 1900 to the present, mining both archival and contemporary media.

Russell argues that without the contributions of Black people, digital culture would not exist in its current form. These meditations include the circulation of lynching postcards; why a mother allowed JET magazine to publish a picture of her dead son, Emmett Till; and how the televised broadcast of protesters in Selma changed the debate on civil rights. Questions of the media representation of Blackness come to the fore as Russell considers how citizen-recorded footage of the LAPD beating Rodney King became the first viral video. Why the Anita Hill hearings shed light on the media’s creation of the Black icon. The ownership of Black imagery and death is considered in the story of Tamara Lanier’s fight to reclaim the daguerreotypes of her enslaved ancestors from Harvard. Meanwhile the live broadcast on Facebook of the murder of Philando Castile by the police after he was stopped for a broken taillight forces us to bear witness to the persistent legacy of the Black meme.

Through imagery, memory, and technology, Black Meme shows us how images of Blackness have always been central to our understanding of the modern world.

Based on John Dewey's lectures on esthetics, delivered as the first William James Lecturer at Harvard in 1932, Art as Experience has grown to be considered internationally as the most distinguished work ever written by an American on the formal structure and characteristic effects of all the arts: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature.

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.

The first publication of a lost 1978 text by Peter Gidal—one of the most influential experimental filmmakers ever.

The book includes the first publication of Peter Gidal's text from 1978, with a new introduction. Gidal in this dense theoretical essay deals with the limits of language and representation in the practice of experimental filmmaking and writing. Gidal's lost text The Author as Producer of Nothing will give a new insight into the theoretical and political context to experimental film practices.
The afterword by Sezgin Boynik discusses in detail the political contradictions of Gidal's filmic non-objectivity.

"The process of the film's making deals with devices that result in demystification or attempted demystification of the film process. But by 'deals with' I do not mean 'represents'. In other words, such films do not document various film procedures, which would place them in the same category as films which transparently document a narrative, a set of actions, etc. Documentation, through usage of the film medium as transparent, invisible, is exactly the same when the object being documented is some 'real event', some 'film procedure', some 'story', etc. An avant-garde film defined by its development towards increased materialism and materialist function does not represent, or document, anything. The film produces certain relations between segments, between what the camera is aimed at and the way that 'image' is presented. The dialectic of the film is established in that space of tension between materialist flatness, grain, light, movement, and the supposed reality that is represented. Consequently a continual attempt to destroy the illusion is necessary."—Peter Gidal

Peter Gidal (born 1946 in New York) is an influential British film theorist and avant-garde filmmaker, associated with the English "Structural/Materialist" movement (along with Malcolm Le Grice notably). He has published in numerous magazines (Studio International, Screen, October, Undercut) and is the author of several books, including Andy Warhol: Films and Paintings (1971), Materialist Film (1988) and Understanding Beckett: A Study of Monologue and Gesture in the Works of Samuel Beckett (1986).

Involuntarily sucked into the forcefield of Cute, Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic decided to let go, give in, let the demon ride them, and make an accelerationism out of it—only to realise that Cute opens a microcosmic gate onto the transcendental process of acceleration itself.

Joining the swarming e-girls, t-girls, NEETS, anons, and otaku who rescued accelerationism from the double pincers of media panic and academic buzzkill by introducing it to big eyes, fluffy ears, programming socks, and silly memes, they discover that the objects of cute culture are just spinoffs of an accelerative process booping us from the future, rendering us all submissive, breedable, helpless, and cute in our turn. Cute comes tomorrow, and only anastrophe can make sense of what it will have been doing to us.

Evading all discipline, sliding across all possible surfaces, Cute Accelerationism embraces every detail of the symptomatology, aetiology, epidemiology, history, biology, etymology, topology, and even embryology of Cute, joyfully burrowing down into its natural, cultural, sensory, sexual, subjective, erotic, and semiotic dimensions in order to sound out the latent spaces of this Thing that has soft-soaped its way into human culture.

Traversing tangents on natural and unnatural selection, runaway supernormalisation, the collective self-transformation of genderswarming cuties, the hyperstitional cultures of shojo and otaku, denpa and 2D love, and the cute subworlds of aegyo and meng, moé and flatmaxxing, catboys and dogon eggs, bobbles and gummies, vore machines and partial objects, BwOs and UwUs…glomping, snuggling, smooshing and squeeeeing their way toward the event horizon of Cute, donning cat ears and popping bubbles as they go, in this untimely philosophical intensification of an omnipresent phenomenon, having surrendered to the squishiest demonic possession, like, ever, two bffs set out in search of the transcendental shape of cuteness only to realise that, even though it is all around us, we do not yet know what Cute can do.

Seriously superficial and bafflingly coherent, half erudite philosophical treatise, half dariacore mashup, 100 percent cutagion, this compact lil’ textual machine is a meltdown and a glow up, as well as a twizzled homage to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. Welcome to the kawaiizome: nothing uncute makes it out of the near future, and the cute will very soon no longer be even remotely human.

In the first monograph on the feminist conceptual artist collective Claire Fontaine, political theorist and somatic practitioner Anita Chari explores the artist's theoretical and political innovations to illuminate a more haptic, embodied approach to the practice of critical theory.

A User's Manual to Claire Fontaine explores the work of the feminist conceptual artist collective Claire Fontaine through the lens of her theoretical and political innovations, both inside and outside the context of contemporary art. Theorizing the ways in which Claire Fontaine's experimental approach can illuminate a more haptic, embodied practice of critical theory, this book delineates a series of theoretical techniques and procedures at the core of the artist's work, among them defunctionalization, Institutional Critique, human strike, tactile mimesis, desubjectivation, détournement, magic materialism, and feminist materialism.

Political theorist and somatic practitioner Anita Chari illuminates a larger field of practice for those working within the world of critical theory with this "user's manual" that seeks to reinvest theory with use value, drawing on the resources of critical contemporary art to engage with critical theory in ways that can become embodied, sensate, and tactile, and thus inform contemporary political practices.

"Fluently traversing critical theory, political philosophy, and artistic discourse, this is a brilliant, engaging book on the art and writings of Claire Fontaine—'readymade artist' and conceptual provocateur—as well as a vital elucidation of paths toward a transformative mode of living in the present. Writing with and through rather than, as usual, 'on' her subject, Chari provides her readers with a 'how-to' manual to Claire Fontaine's practice, finding in it a model for embodied resistance."—Tom McDonough, author of The Beautiful Language of My Century

Anita Chari is a political theorist and writer based in Portland, Oregon and is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon. Her work explores the significance of aesthetics, artistic practices, and embodiment for critical theory and practice.

Claire Fontaine is a feminist, conceptual artist, founded in Paris in 2004.

In this groundbreaking work, Sara Ahmed demonstrates how queer studies can put phenomenology to productive use. Focusing on the “orientation” aspect of “sexual orientation” and the “orient” in “orientalism,” Ahmed examines what it means for bodies to be situated in space and time. Bodies take shape as they move through the world directing themselves toward or away from objects and others. Being “orientated” means feeling at home, knowing where one stands, or having certain objects within reach. Orientations affect what is proximate to the body or what can be reached. A queer phenomenology, Ahmed contends, reveals how social relations are arranged spatially, how queerness disrupts and reorders these relations by not following the accepted paths, and how a politics of disorientation puts other objects within reach, those that might, at first glance, seem awry. 

Ahmed proposes that a queer phenomenology might investigate not only how the concept of orientation is informed by phenomenology but also the orientation of phenomenology itself. Thus she reflects on the significance of the objects that appear—and those that do not—as signs of orientation in classic phenomenological texts such as Husserl’s Ideas. In developing a queer model of orientations, she combines readings of phenomenological texts—by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon—with insights drawn from queer studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Queer Phenomenology points queer theory in bold new directions.

Silvia Federici revi­site ce moment par­ti­cu­lier de l’his­toire qu’est la tran­si­tion entre le féo­da­lisme et le capi­ta­lisme, en y intro­dui­sant la pers­pec­tive par­ti­cu­lière de l’his­toire des femmes.

Elle nous invite à réflé­chir aux rap­ports d’exploi­ta­tion et de domi­na­tion, à la lumière des bou­le­ver­se­ments intro­duits à l’issue du Moyen Âge. Un monde nou­veau nais­sait, pri­va­ti­sant les biens autre­fois col­lec­tifs, trans­for­mant les rap­ports de tra­vail et les rela­tions de genre. Ce nou­veau monde, où des mil­lions d’escla­ves ont posé les fon­da­tions du capi­ta­lisme moderne, est aussi le résul­tat d’un asser­vis­se­ment sys­té­ma­ti­que des femmes. Par la chasse aux sor­ciè­res et l’escla­vage, la tran­si­tion vers le capi­ta­lisme fai­sait de la moder­nité une affaire de dis­ci­pline. Discipline des corps fémi­nins dévo­lus à la repro­duc­tion, consu­més sur les bûchers comme autant de signaux ter­ri­fiants, tor­tu­rés pour lais­ser voir leur méca­ni­que intime, anéan­tis socia­le­ment. Discipline des corps d’escla­ves, servis à la machine sociale dans un for­mi­da­ble mou­ve­ment d’acca­pa­re­ment des res­sour­ces du Nouveau Monde pour la for­tune de l’ancien.

Le capi­ta­lisme contem­po­rain pré­sente des simi­li­tu­des avec son passé le plus vio­lent. Ce qu’on a décrit comme bar­ba­rie et dont aurait su triom­pher le siècle de la raison est cons­ti­tu­tif de ce mode de pro­duc­tion : l’escla­vage et l’anéan­tis­se­ment des femmes n’étaient pas des pro­ces­sus for­tuits, mais des néces­si­tés de l’accu­mu­la­tion de richesse. L’auteur nous invite à par­ta­ger son son regard d’his­to­rienne et de fémi­niste sur la situa­tion actuelle et sur ses méca­nis­mes.

Essai, traduction de l’anglais (États-Unis) par le collectif Senonevero, revue et complétée par Julien Guazzini

Silvia Federici (née en 1942 à Parme en Italie) est une uni­ver­si­taire amé­ri­caine, ensei­gnante et mili­tante fémi­niste révo­lu­tion­naire. Elle est pro­fes­seure émérite et cher­cheuse à l’Université Hofstra à New York.
 

Silvia Federici pré­sente une his­toire cri­ti­que de la poli­ti­que des com­muns dans une pers­pec­tive fémi­niste. De son vécu au Nigeria et de ses ren­contres avec des mili­tan­tes d’Amérique latine et du monde entier, Federici révèle les luttes quo­ti­dien­nes des femmes contre la spo­lia­tion de leur terre, de leur loge­ment et nour­ri­ture. De ses recher­ches his­to­ri­ques, elle com­pare les enclo­su­res, qui ont permis la nais­sance du capi­ta­lisme par la des­truc­tion des com­muns et la pro­lé­ta­ri­sa­tion des popu­la­tions rura­les, aux « nou­vel­les enclo­su­res » au cœur de la phase actuelle d’accu­mu­la­tion capi­ta­liste mon­diale. Cet ouvrage sou­tient que les luttes autour de la repro­duc­tion sociale sont cru­cia­les à la fois pour notre survie économique que pour la cons­truc­tion d’un monde libéré des hié­rar­chies et des divi­sions que le capi­tal a implan­tées dans le corps du pro­lé­ta­riat inter­na­tio­nal.

Federici consi­dère que les com­muns ne doi­vent pas être com­pris comme des îlots de par­tage dans un océan de rela­tions d’exploi­ta­tion, mais plutôt comme des espa­ces auto­no­mes à partir des­quels défier l’orga­ni­sa­tion capi­ta­liste de la vie et du tra­vail.

Essai traduit de l’anglais par Noémie Grunenwald.

Silvia Federici (née en 1942 à Parme en Italie) est une uni­ver­si­taire amé­ri­caine, ensei­gnante et mili­tante fémi­niste révo­lu­tion­naire. Elle est pro­fes­seure émérite et cher­cheuse à l’Université Hofstra à New York.

In the tradition of Suhrkamp Verlag and Penguin Classics, Domain offers a series of elegantly designed pocketbooks, conceived as a starter kit for radical liberatory thought. The pocketbooks are individually crafted with custom book jackets tailored to each individual buyer; every purchase receipt supplying the raw material for each design. The online fulfillment system leverages the graphic language of the US Postal Service for each cover and packaging design.

The Communist Manifesto (German: Das Kommunistische Manifest), originally the Manifesto of the Communist Party (Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei), is a political pamphlet written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, commissioned by the Communist League and originally published in London in 1848. The text is the first and most systematic attempt by Marx and Engels to codify for wide consumption the historical materialist idea that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles", in which social classes are defined by the relationship of people to the means of production. Published amid the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe, the Manifesto remains one of the world's most influential political documents. (From Wikipedia)

More on https://d-o-m-a-i-n.org/Pocketboks

The contributors to Otherwise Worlds investigate the complex relationships between settler colonialism and anti-Blackness to explore the political possibilities that emerge from such inquiries. Pointing out that presumptions of solidarity, antagonism, or incommensurability between Black and Native communities are insufficient to understand the relationships between the groups, the volume's scholars, artists, and activists look to articulate new modes of living and organizing in the service of creating new futures. Among other topics, they examine the ontological status of Blackness and Indigeneity, possible forms of relationality between Black and Native communities, perspectives on Black and Indigenous sociality, and freeing the flesh from the constraints of violence and settler colonialism.

Throughout the volume's essays, art, and interviews, the contributors carefully attend to alternative kinds of relationships between Black and Native communities that can lead toward liberation. In so doing, they critically point to the importance of Black and Indigenous conversations for formulating otherwise worlds.

Contributors. Maile Arvin, Marcus Briggs-Cloud, J. Kameron Carter, Ashon Crawley, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Chris Finley, Hotvlkuce Harjo, Sandra Harvey, Chad B. Infante, Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro, Lindsay Nixon, Kimberly Robertson, Jared Sexton, Andrea Smith, Cedric Sunray, Se’mana Thompson, Frank B. Wilderson

In Brutalism, eminent social and critical theorist Achille Mbembe invokes the architectural aesthetic of brutalism to describe our moment, caught up in the pathos of demolition and production on a planetary scale.

Just as brutalist architecture creates an affect of overwhelming weight and destruction, Mbembe contends that contemporary capitalism crushes and dominates all spheres of existence. In our digital, technologically focused era, capitalism has produced a becoming-artificial of humanity and the becoming-human of machines. This blurring of the natural and artificial presents a planetary existential threat in which contemporary society’s goal is to precipitate the mutation of the human species into a condition that is at once plastic and synthetic.

Mbembe argues that Afro-diasporic thought presents the only solution for breaking the totalizing logic of contemporary capitalism: repairing that which is broken, developing a new planetary consciousness, and reforming a community of humans in solidarity with all living things.

La philosophe Sara Ahmed se présente parfois comme « une rabat-joie féministe, une alienne affective, une femme queer racisée en colère ». Depuis plus de dix ans, elle tient un blog, feministkilljoys.com, où elle publie des morceaux de ses livres et de ses conférences. Dedans, on trouve des bouts de rages - contre le harcèlement sexuel à la fac où elle enseigne, contre le racisme institutionnel, contre le capitalisme carcéral... — mais aussi des célébrations des solidarités et des activismes transféministes. De là sont extraits les trois textes rassemblés dans ce court recueil, « Vandalisme queer », « Usage queer» et « La plainte, méthode queer»; des textes qui ont tous pour point commun de réfléchir aux potentiels d'interruption du mot queer. Queer, oblique, pas droit.e.s, déviant.e.s : des termes pour se mettre en travers des chemins trop bien tracés. Des textes comme autant d'appels à multiplier les existences vandales.

Un tuyau percé peut mener à un autre; il peut le faire et il le fait. Il suffit parfois de desserrer un écrou, un petit peu, juste un tout petit peu, pour que l'explosion ait lieu. Et nous avons besoin de plus d'explosions. Les usages queers, les usages obliques, décrivent ce potentiel d'explosion. Ils décrivent la manière dont les petites déviations, les petits desserrements, la création d'une issue de secours, l'ouverture d'une échappée, peuvent aider à multiplier toutes sortes de fuites et de sorties.

A multidisciplinary investigation of the interrelations of space and time, memory, architecture and urban planning through and beyond Henri Lefebvre's concept of Rhythmanalysis.

“The whole universe revolves around rhythm, and when we get out of rhythm, that's when we get into trouble.”—Babatunde Olatunji

A gathering of the echoes, memories and findings after three years of research, performances, exhibitions and conversations within “That, Around Which The Universe Revolves. On Rhythmanalysis of Memory, Times, Bodies in Space”. With chapters in Lagos, Düsseldorf, Harare, Hamburg and Berlin, the S A V V Y Contemporary project and publication bring together visual artists, urbanists, writers, photographers, performers, poets, and theorists to investigate the interrelations of space and time, memory, architecture and urban planning through and beyond Henri Lefebvre's concept of Rhythmanalysis.

Published following the exhibition project “That, Around Which The Universe Revolves. On Rhythmanalysis of Memory, Times, Bodies in Space”, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, from December 1st, 2017, to January 28, 2018.

Edited by Elena Agudio, Anna Jäger, Saskia Köbschall, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung.

Contributions by Akinbode Akinbiyi, Jacques Coursil, Thulile Gamezde, Gintersdorfer/Klaßen, Noa Ha, Hebbel am Ufer Berlin (Annemie Vanackere & Ricardo Carmona), Kampnagel Hamburg (Caroline Spellenberg), Jan Lemitz, Dorothee Munyaneza, Lucia Nhamo, Christian Nyampeta, Qudus Onikeku, Tracey Rose, Louis Henri Seukwa, AbdouMaliq Simone, Awilda Sterling, Greg Tate, Kathrin Tiedemann, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Tinofireyi Zhou, Percy Zvomuya.

Living With Ghosts explores the ways the unresolved traumas of Africa’s colonial past, and its unfulfilled project of decolonisation, continue to haunt the present global order. The reader further expands on these complex ideas through philosophical, historical, and literary approaches. Reprinted texts by thinkers such as Achille Mbembe, C.L.R. James, and Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni explore the historical experiences of the African postcolony and the problematics of decolonisation. Meditations on artists including John Akomfrah and Abraham Oghobase provide engaging entry points to their multi-layered artistic practices. Also featured are images of artworks in the exhibition and an in-depth conversation between Bouchra Khalili and KJ Abudu.

Texts by Achille Mbembe, Jacques Derrida, C.L.R. James, Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, KJ Abudu, Emmanuel Iduma, Walter D. Mignolo, Avery F. Gordon, Adjoa Armah, Joshua Segun-Lean. Conversation with Bouchra Khalili and KJ Abudu.

Pour les révolutionnaires des deux derniers siècles, l’accumulation du capital devait unifier la classe ouvrière sous la bannière du sujet révolutionnaire. Le mouvement ainsi né était appelé à renverser la société de classes et les clivages divisant les prolétaires. Mais le mouvement de la valeur a finalement triomphé, pour donner naissance à la société de la séparation. L’atomisation a pris le pas sur les puissances du rassemblement. La civilisation du capital traverse aujourd’hui une crise sans fin, mais les forces capables de la défaire brillent par leur absence.

Ces textes tirés de la revue Endnotes, réunis pour la première fois en français, dessinent la carte d’un présent ponctué de paysages désindustrialisés, de centres logistiques et de bidonvilles où s’entassent les populations rejetées aux marges de l’accumulation – autant de coordonnées nécessaires pour continuer à penser le dépassement du capitalisme : une fois encore, reprendre le chantier de l’hypothèse communiste.

Endnotes est une revue théorique communiste produite par un groupe de discussion du même nom basé en Grande-Bretagne et aux États-Unis.

Traduction: Pablo Arnaud
Préface: Aaron Benanav Et John Clegg

An accessible, bold new vision for the future of intersectional trans feminism, called "one of the best books in trans studies in recent years" by Susan Stryker.

Why are trans women the most targeted of LGBT people? Why are they in the crosshairs of a resurgent anti-trans politics around the world? And what is to be done about it by activists, organizers, and allies?

A Short History of Transmisogyny is the first book-length study to answer these urgent but long overdue questions. Combining new historical analysis with political and activist accessibility, the book shows why it matters to understand trans misogyny as a specific form of violence with a documentable history. Ironically, it is through attending to the specificity of trans misogyny that trans women are no longer treated as inevitably tragic figures. They emerge instead as embattled but tenacious, locked in a struggle over the meaning and material stakes of gender, labor, race, and freedom.

The book travels across bustling port cities like New York, New Orleans, London and Paris, the colonial and military districts of the British Raj, the Philippines, and Hawai'i, and the lively travesti communities of Latin America.

The book shows how trans femininity has become legible as a fault line of broader global histories, including colonial government, the sex work industry, the policing of urban public space, and the line between the formal and informal economy. This transnational and intersectional approach reinforces that trans women are not isolated social subjects who appear alone; they are in fact central to the modern social world.

A renowned feminist thinker argues we need to get in the way of happiness, our own and other people’s, to build a more just world

Do you refuse to laugh at offensive jokes? Have you ever been accused of ruining dinner by pointing out your companion’s sexist comment? Are you often told to stop being so “woke”? If so, you might be a feminist killjoy—and this handbook is for you. In this book, feminist theorist Sara Ahmed shows how killing joy can be a radical world-making project.

Presenting sharp analysis of literature, film, and influential feminist works, and drawing on her own experiences as a queer feminist scholar-activist of color, Ahmed reveals the invaluable lessons of the feminist killjoy, from the importance of asking questions to the power of the eye roll. The Feminist Killjoy Handbook offers an outstretched hand to feminist killjoys everywhere and an essential intellectual guide to the transformative power of getting in the way.

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.