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Love and I: Poems
Set in transit even as they investigate the transitory, the cinematic poems in Love and I move like a handheld camera through the eternal, the minds of passengers, and the landscapes of Ireland and America. From this slight remove, Fanny Howe explores the edge of "pure seeing" and the worldly griefs she encounters there, cast in an otherworldly light. These poems layer pasture and tarmac, the skies above where airline passengers are compressed with their thoughts and the ground where miseries accumulate, alongside comedies, in the figures of children in a park.
Love can do little but walk with the person and suddenly vanish, and that recurrent abandonment makes it necessary for these poems to find a balance between seeing and believing. For Howe, that balance is found in the Word, spoken in language, in music, in and on the wind, as invisible and continuous lyric thinking heard by the thinker alone. These are poems animated by belief and unbelief. Love and I fulfills Howe's philosophy of Bewilderment.
"[Love and I] hurries to join a long and illustrious career, which, besides poetry, includes novels, stories, memoir, and short films. . . . Howe prefers the clarity of misunderstanding to the blur of certainty. Like stained glass, her poems await illumination, but it is important not to flood them with a klieg light. . . . It is marvelous to think of these works as having been made not in some bower but in the midst of life." — The New Yorker
Autobiographical Tightropes
"In order to write" said Simone de Beauvoir, "the first essential condition is that reality can no longer be taken for granted."
She and four other French women writers of the second half of the twentieth century-Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Monique Wittig, and Maryse Condé-illustrate that producing autobiography is like performing a tightrope act on the slippery line between fact and fiction.
Autobiographical Tightropes emphasizes the tension in the works of these major writers as they move in and out of "experience" and "literature," violating the neat boundaries between genres and confusing the distinctions between remembering and creating.
Focusing on selected works, Leah D. Hewitt for the first time anywhere explores the connections among the authors. In doing so she shows how contemporary women's autobiography in France links with feminist issues, literary tradition and trends, and postmodern theories of writing. In light of these theories Hewitt offers a new reading of de Beauvoir's memoirs and reveals how her attempt to represent the past faithfully is undone by irony, by literary and "feminine" detours. Other analysts of Nathalie Sarraute's writing have dwelt mainly on formal considerations of the New Novel, but Hewitt exposes a repressed, forbidden feminine aspect in her literary innovations. Unlike Sarraute, Duras cannot be connected with just one literary movement, political stance, style, or kind of feminism because her writing, largely autobiographical, is marked by chameleon like transformations.
The chapters on Wittig and Condé show how, within the bounds of feminism, lesbians and women of color challenge the individualistic premises of autobiography. Hewitt demonstrates that, despite vast differences among these five writers, all of them reveal in their autobiographical works the self's need of a fictive other. Leah D. Hewitt is an associate professor of French at Amherst College.
News Animations
A reference book containing all the transcripts of Simone Forti's News Animations.
The book is the complete collection of Simone Forti's News Animations, one of the works that best reveal her artistic practice. The news and, more broadly, the most pressing issues of the global socio-political situation, are used to explore the potential of language, its dimensions, and its combination with dance, movements, words, images, and music. Simone Forti has always "danced" the news, it's the way she tells them. But, above all, it's the way she internalizes them, feels them, and processes them. Through a stream of consciousness, the artist grants voice and body to thoughts about the world, its conflicts, war, injustices, and inequalities.
The volume collects Simone Forti's News Animations from 1980 to 2018—through the transcriptions of the performances, images, and drawings—seeking to capture their spirit, their poetic stance and, mostly, understand how they manage to describe the society and the world we live in.
Introduction by Luca Lo Pinto
Published August 2021
Poems I Will Never Release, 2007-2017
First retrospective monograph: an essential resource for any in-depth critical study of Chiara Fumai's work and thought, including a first systematic analysis of her oeuvre.
This book is dedicated to the complex artistic trajectory of Chiara Fumai, who played a significant role in the development of performance and feminist aesthetics in the twenty-first century and who died prematurely in 2017, at the age of only thirty-nine. Conceived as a critical monograph on Fumai's work as a visual artist, performer, DJ and music curator, Poems I Will Never Release is the first volume to trace the entirety of her artistic path: from her scathing video performances and large-scale installations, to her more intimist practices of automatic writing and collage and her incursions into music.
Almost 500 pages long, the volume is divided into three main chapters. The first of these brings together essays by prominent writers, curators and artists who examine Chiara Fumai's work from various perspectives, highlighting its intersections with anarchism, feminism, ideological forms and discourses of power and oppression, the animal rights movement, theater, surrealism and esotericism. The second chapter presents an imposing iconographic apparatus that documents Chiara Fumai's entire artistic production, from 2007 to 2017, while the third offers an exhaustively detailed chronology and bibliography.
The book collects essays by Irene Aristizábal, Andrea Bellini, Federico Campagna, Milovan Farronato, Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, Mara Montanaro, Chus Martínez, Paulina Olowska and Giovanna Zapperi, as well as conversations between Raimundas Malašauskas and Gabriel Lester, and Cristiana Perrella and Marcello Bellan. The chronology and bibliography are edited by Sara de Chiara.
Fórum do Futuro – Vita Nova
Jenna Sutela, Filipa Ramos and 2 more
A collective book that proposes to question human and non-human existence in the current social context, spanning different cosmogonic views.
The Vita Nova editorial project had its genesis in the Fórum do Futuro: a programme of debates, artist talks, and performances, held annually in the city of Porto, that brings together guests from different artistic and scientific practices to reflect on fundamental issues for contemporary societies. Given the impossibility of holding the 2020 edition, due to the challenges posed by the pandemic, the Fórum do Futuro is instead presenting a book that proposes to question human and non-human existence in the current social context, spanning different cosmogonic views. The book consists of four thematic sections that combine different artistic, scientific, philosophical and technological perspectives in written and visual essays, stories and interviews.
Texts by Sophia Al-Maria, K Allado-McDowell, Shumon Basar, Guilherme Blanc, Rosi Braidotti, Octavia Butler, Ted Chiang, GPT-3, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Kirsten Keller, Filipa Ramos, Tabita Rezaire, Jenna Sutela, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Suzanne Treister, Aby Warburg, Chandra Wickramasinghe, Feifei Zhou.
Sonsbeck20→24 – Force Times Distance – On Labour (reader)
Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Ibrahim Cissé
This reader is a culmination of direct and tangential deliberations on notions of labour, appreciated across geographies and mediums. Newly commissioned textual manifestations in a multilogue with historical positions.
The reader could be perceived as a negotiation of positions, as the strive towards utterances, towards becoming. Each text could be imagined as a stanza in a song. This is also a strive towards musicality. Or at least a wish for this reader to be a choir, in which we collectively sing, in which we all listen to each other to be able to sing, but most importantly, in which we afford ourselves the privilege of 'hearing the eloquence of silence', 'seeing the inner vision beneath the closed eyes' and 'listening to the chastity of inner music that defies betrayal by the wayward wind.'
Edited by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Ibrahim Cissé with Antonia Alampi, Amal Alhaag, Zippora Elders, Krista Jantowski, Aude Christel Mgba.
Contributions by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Panashe Chigumadzi, Maurizio Lazzarato, Danielle Child, Anne Moraa, Philomena Essed, Djuwa Mroivili, Anivia Beylard, Jana Keijdener, Iheb Guermazi, Alia Mossallam, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Chenjerai Kumanyika, Simone Atangana Bekono, Lionel Manga, Kodwo Eshun, Amal Alhaag, Precious Colette Kemigisha, Guy Ossito Midiohouan, Akila Richards, Mwazulu Diyabanza, Ibrahim Cissé, Léon-Gontran Damas
Graphic design: Leon Lukas Plum / Werkplaats Typografie.
Published in August 2021
Bilingual edition (English / Dutch)
“If It's For The People, It Needs To Be Beautiful,” She Said
Accompanying a series of solo collaborations in 2020, this publication offers the first comprehensive and global perspective on Jeremiah Day's work as an artist, performer, researcher and teacher. As it details Day's specific works and evolution between visual and performing arts and between political reflection and engagement the result also serves as sourcebook for the legacy of the intersection between dance and the visual arts of the 1960s and 70's and the models of cultural practice emerging from the work of Hannah Arendt.
In his work, the Berlin-based American artist Jeremiah Day (born 1974 in Plymouth) re-examines recent political struggles and conflicts, revealing their subjective contexts and traces. To do this, he has developed a narrative and choreographic form in which personal and political realities intermingle, thus offering a thoroughly singular vision of these at times forgotten moments of history.
The distinctive feature of his method lies in a transversal approach. As a student of and regular collaborator with Simone Forti, one of the pioneers of Post-Modern Dance, he has turned performance into a now central and structure-providing practice. Since 2014, Jeremiah Day has in effect presented many performances, which contain movement, improvisation, photography and the spoken word, in order to broach universal historical and political subjects, but within an intimate and incarnated context.
Blank Forms #07 – The Cowboy's Dreams of Home
The seventh entry in an ongoing series of anthologies, this book features rare poems alongside new essays and interviews that engage the artists and themes explored elsewhere in Blank Forms' public programming.
Where most of prior entries, including Aspirations of Madness (2020), Intelligent Life (2019), and Music From The World Tomorrow (2018), have foregrounded little-seen or newly translated archival materials, this iteration privileges new texts produced specifically for the publication. These include an in-depth retrospective interview with the idiosyncratic Texan singer-songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen conducted by ICA Philadelphia chief curator Anthony Elms; a conversation between multidisciplinary writers—and longtime friends—Thulani Davis and Jessica Hagedorn on the occasion of Davis's latest poetry collection, Nothing but the Music, recently published by Blank Forms Editions; a recent discussion between composer Sarah Hennies and cellist Judith Hamann about their recent collaboration, which is included on Hamann's Music for Cello and Humming; and a conversation with composer-performers Tashi Wada and Charles Curtis, on the heels of a recent compilation of Curtis's work, Performances & Recordings 1998– 2018, produced by Wada. Each of these interviews shed light on the particularities of the artists' careers and methods in terms both formal and casual, practical and theoretical.
In addition to these dialogues, this book features new critical reflections on three artists whose work Blank Forms has presented: the legendary jazz percussionist and healer Milford Graves, by Ciarán Finlayson; English multimedia artist Graham Lambkin and his beguiling 2011 album Amateur Doubles, by Alan Licht; and the UK-based experimental music trio Still House Plants, by Joe Bucciero. These articles mine historical, social, and theoretical contexts, filling gaps in the existing literature on the given artist-subjects. New and archival poems and writing about poetry complement these interviews and essays, including rare texts by Davis, Hagedorn, and René Daumal—the latter translated by Louise Landes Levi—and a suite of Auto-Mythological writings commissioned from Chicago-based composer and musician Angel Bat Dawid.
Blank Forms #06 – Organic Music Societies
Magnus Nygren, Naima Karlsson and 1 more
Archival documents and new writings on the intermedia collaborations of avant-garde jazz trumpeter Don Cherry and textile artist Moki Cherry.
Don and Moki Cherry (born Karlsson) met in Sweden in the late sixties. They began to live and perform together, dubbing their mix of communal art, social and environmentalist activism, children's education, and pan-ethnic expression “Organic Music.” Organic Music Societies, Blank Forms' sixth anthology, is a special issue released in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name devoted to the couple's multimedia collaborations. The first English-language publication on either figure, the book highlights models for collectivism and pedagogy deployed in the Cherrys' interpersonal and artistic work through the presentation of archival documents alongside newly translated and commissioned writings by musicians, scholars, and artists alike.
Beginning with an overview by Blank Forms Artistic Director Lawrence Kumpf and Don Cherry biographer Magnus Nygren, this volume further explores Don's work of the period through a piece on his Relativity Suite by Ben Young and an essay on the diasporic quality of his music by Fumi Okiji. Ruba Katrib emphasizes the domestic element of Moki's practice in a biographical survey accompanied by full-color reproductions of Moki's vivid tapestries, paintings, and sculptures, which were used as performance environments by Don's ensembles during the Sweden years and beyond. Two selections of Moki's unpublished writings—consisting of autobiography, observations, illustrations, and diary entries, as well as poetry and aphorisms—are framed by tributes from her daughter Neneh Cherry and granddaughter Naima Karlsson. Swedish Cherry collaborator Christer Bothén contributes period travelogues from Morocco, Mali, and New York, providing insight into the cross-cultural communication that would soon come to be called “world music.”
The collection also features several previously unpublished interviews with Don, conducted by Christopher R. Brewster and Keith Knox. A regular visitor to the Cherry schoolhouse in rural Sweden, Knox documented the family's magnetic milieu in his until-now unpublished Tågarp Publication. Reproduced here in its entirety, the journal includes an interview with Terry Riley, an essay on Pandit Pran Nath, and reports on counter-cultural education programs in Stockholm, including the Bombay Free School and the esoteric Forest University.
Taken together, the texts, artwork, and abundant photographs collected in Organic Music Societies shine a long overdue spotlight on Don and Moki's prescient and collaborative experiments in the art of living.
Blank Forms #05 – Aspirations of Madness
Aspirations of Madness, Blank Forms' fifth collection of archival, unpublished, or newly translated texts, considers the work of Masayuki Takayanagi, the poet Louise Landes Levi, musician and writer Joseph Jarman, polymath Catherine Christer Hennix and her one-time student the poet Charles Stein, Russian musicologist Henry Orlov, and Maryanne Amacher—brilliant and overlooked artists whose work Blank Forms will continue to champion in a variety of contexts. Aspirations of Madness features additional contributions by Alan Cummings, Bill Dietz, Peter Kastakis, Art Lange, Leo Svirsky, Satoru Obara, and Tomoyuki Chida.
Draconis Lacrimae: Escape From The Guts of The Dragon
Federico Vladimir Strate Pezdirc, Pablo Esbert Lilienfeld
In this Player’s Handbook you’ll find the rules of a Fantasy Role Playing Game: Draconis Lacrimae. It can be played by a group of 3 to 6 players.
First, you will create the Characters, then you will create the World and, lastly, you will Role-Play to escape from the inside of The Dragon. The characters come from different background universes and they all meet in The Dragon’s guts after being swallowed/injected/tele-transported/etc. by their own dragons. In Draconis Lacrimæ there are no dungeons and dragons, the dungeon is the Dragon. The adventurers must join forces in order to “escape” from it, whatever escape might mean.
This game is an invitation for the readers to play themselves otherwise and encounter otherness as an accomplice. In addressing certain construction paradigms of the self, the book invites the reader/player to welcome the alterity we have in us, in order to revisit fundamental archetypes of fiction. It aims at creating interstices that can open up to another view of the self and its social configurations.
Autobiography is used as a ground from which to start playing, as the material that one has at hand to transform, craft, dissolve, rebuild, paint, glitch, etc. Auto-fiction serves here as a tool to resist predefined categorizations of identity, as a technique of transformation and orientation in a world saturated with categories.
Hopefully, along the way, our fictional and real selves will start bleeding onto each other, the infinite threads of our possible selves hanging around us connected to our play partners, known and unknown.
“The Dragon is the figure that extends the couple, that expands the kin, that narrates the community. The Dragon is the shared collective fiction that appears within the mosh.”
The publication consists of two parts:
"Draconis Lacrimae. The Player’s Handbook” (A5, 160 pages), divided in three chapters: Character Building, World Building and Role-Playing.
“Draconis Lacrimae. After action report” (A5, 8 pages). A booklet that accompanies the book. An after action report contains the stories created during a game. This booklet is a draft of the fiction and characters created while playing Draconis Lacrimae.
Patriarchy of the Wage: Notes on Marx, Gender, and Feminism
In Patriarchy of the Wage, Silvia Federici, bestselling author and the most important Marxist feminist of our era, asks why Marx's crucial analysis of the exploitation of human labor was blind to women's work and struggle on the terrain of social reproduction. Why was Marx unable to anticipate the profound transformations in the proletarian family that took place at the turn of the nineteenth century creating a new patriarchal regime? Patriarchy of the Wage does more than just redefine classical Marxism. It is an urgent call for a new kind of radical politics.
the ALL-OVER
Shifting between figuration and abstraction, comedy and doubt, order and mess, Amy Sillman's painting has greatly influenced generations of American artists.
New York-based Amy Sillman (born 1955) is one of the most beloved and quietly influential contemporary American artists. The ALL-OVER provides a comprehensive overview of her most recent bodies of work, including painting and serially exhibited large-scale abstractions, as well as diagrams, drawings, animations and sculpture.
The title of the book, and the exhibition it accompanies at Frankfurt's Portikus, refers to a concept often used to describe abstract painting (the classic instance of which is the work of Jackson Pollock). Much of Sillman's oeuvre can be categorized as such, although her abstractions often suggest recognizable forms and figures. In the 24-canvas series Panorama, motifs seem to run continuously around the walls of the exhibition space, but in fact are repeated prints of the artist's drawings with painterly interventions. The materiality is lost through the superimposition of print and oil paint; what remains is pure color and gesture. Also present here are stills from an animation developed by Sillman to be exhibited alongside Panorama and an insert made especially for the book by the artist. Alongside essays by Manuela Ammer, Yve-Alain Bois and Sillman herself. The book includes a conversation with the artist by Fabian Schöneich.
Can the Monster Speak?: Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts
Paul Preciado's controversial 2019 lecture at the École de la Cause Freudienne annual conference, published in a definitive translation for the first time.
In November 2019, Paul Preciado was invited to speak in front of 3,500 psychoanalysts at the École de la Cause Freudienne's annual conference in Paris. Standing in front of the profession for whom he is a mentally ill person suffering from gender dysphoria, Preciado draws inspiration in his lecture from Kafka's Report to an Academy, in which a monkey tells an assembly of scientists that human subjectivity is a cage comparable to one made of metal bars.
Speaking from his own mutant cage, Preciado does not so much criticize the homophobia and transphobia of the founders of psychoanalysis as demonstrate the discipline's complicity with the ideology of sexual difference dating back to the colonial era, an ideology which is today rendered obsolete by technological advances allowing us to alter our bodies and procreate differently. Preciado calls for a radical transformation of psychological and psychoanalytic discourse and practices, arguing for a new epistemology capable of allowing for a multiplicity of living bodies without reducing the body to its sole heterosexual reproductive capability, and without legitimizing hetero-patriarchal and colonial violence.
Causing a veritable outcry among the assembly, Preciado was heckled and booed and unable to finish. The lecture, filmed on smartphones, was published online, where fragments were transcribed, translated, and published with no regard for exactitude. With this volume, Can the Monster Speak? is published in a definitive translation for the first time.
At the Full and Change of the Moon
Written with lyrical fire in a chorus of vividly rendered voices, Dionne Brand's second novel is an epic of the African diaspora across the globe.
It begins in 1824 on Trinidad, where Marie-Ursule, queen of a secret slave society called the Sans Peur Regiment, plots a mass suicide. The end of the Sans Peur is also the beginning of a new world, for Marie-Ursule cannot kill her young daughter, Bola, who escapes to live free and bear a dynasty of descendants who spill out across the Caribbean, North America, and Europe.
Haunted by a legacy of passion and oppression, the children of Bola pass through two world wars and into the confusion, estrangement, and violence of the late twentieth century.
"[Brand has] a lush and exuberant style that may put some readers in mind of Toni Morrison or Edwidge Danticat." — William Ferguson, The New York Times Book Review
A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing
An essay on art, bodies and fascism.
In an era where identity politics is being weaponised against the very people it has sought to make visible, how can we reclaim complexity?
In 1937 the Nazis staged an exhibition of seized modernist artworks. Named Entartete ‘Kunst’ – Degenerate ‘Art’ – it sought to define degeneracy, display it and destroy it.This act of violent appropriation is one episode in a long and ongoing history of the erasure of queer and non-normative cultures.
A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing works against this erasure; it is a manifesto – a catalogue for an exhibition that could never take place. Drawing on work from dissident sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld to South African artist Zanele Muholi, as well as a century of queer cinema from Sergei Eisenstein to Pedro Almodóvar, So Mayer creates an archive of resistance.
‘This book is a small revolution that becomes a party that you won’t be leaving soon. I believe we’re living in a time of fresh erasures, systemic violences working that global pandemic to take some other bodies out. Looking so freshly at the history of queerness, sexual deviance and the long long coordinated erasures of colonialism, bigotry and transphobia the essential non binary nature of art opens up right here like the wildly singing flower it is and So Mayer’s compelling version makes sense, makes me listen.’
— Eileen Myles
‘A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing is a reflective, creative walk through some of the worst – and best – people of the last hundred years, looking at the power of images and their relationship(s) with text. In a time of rising fascism, So Mayer highlights ways that artists have found strategies of resistance, and offers hope in historical analysis.’
— Juliet Jacques
Near to the Wild Heart
Near to the Wild Heart, published in Rio de Janeiro in 1943, introduced Brazil to what one writer called "Hurricane Clarice" a twenty-three-year-old girl who wrote her first book in a tiny rented room and then baptized it with a title taken from Joyce: "He was alone, unheeded, near to the wild heart of life."
Narrative epiphanies and interior monologue frame the life of Joana, from her middle-class childhood through her unhappy marriage and its dissolution to transcendence, when she proclaims: "I shall arise as strong and comely as a young colt."
Knee Balance
KNEE BALANCE (2021) is a performance that uses choreography, writing, photography, and design to traverse particular anatomical, personal, and sociopolitical arcs. Time oscillates and fractures movement. Space unfolds. Situated before a hearth in the throes of balance, the performer becomes a crucible for memory, durability, and the reciprocal relationship between the present and the unforeseen.
Comes nested inside ad hoc polyvinyl sleeve with text by Matty Davis printed on front
This work marks the first in a series of performances by Matty Davis arranged for print by Matt Wolff. Distinct in content and form, each work weaves psychosomatic realities with the spatial and temporal possibilities of print.
Vital contributions have been made to this series of performances by artists including Will Arbery, Whitney Browne, Mark Davis, Eryka Dellenbach, Nile Harris, Jonah Rosenberg, Holly Sass, Matt Shalzi, and Bobbi Jene Smith.
The Trojan Women
A fantastic comic-book collaboration between the artist Rosanna Bruno and the poet Anne Carson, based on Euripides’s famous tragedy.
The Trojan Women, follows the fates of Hekabe, Andromache, and Kassandra after Troy has been sacked and all its men killed. This collaboration between the visual artist Rosanna Bruno and the poet and classicist Anne Carson attempts to give a genuine representation of how human beings are affected by warfare. Therefore, all the characters take the form of animals (except Kassandra, whose mind is in another world).
Alas
First published in 1759, Laurence Sterne’s ‘The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy’ is widely considered a revolutionary novel, and its style is marked by digression, double entendre, and graphic devices.
In ‘Alas, artist Sophie Nys obsesses about one of these devices, the so-called black page, famously paired with the line, “Alas, poor Yorick!” She compiles a remarkable collection of black pages, all gathered from more than 100 different editions of Sterne’s book.
Included is a text by Peter de Voogd, the collector and owner of the library from which all the images in this publication originate, on the technical challenges that printing a black page presented for these early editions.
Vernon Subutex 3
As storm clouds gather, portending a final reckoning, ersatz rave-cult leader Vernon Subutex decides to return to Paris. Even if it means leaving behind his disciples. He has to. He’s got a dentist’s appointment.
Back in the city, he learns that an old friend from his days homeless on the Paris streets has died and left him half of a lottery win. But when Vernon returns to his commune with news of this windfall, it’s not long before his disciples turn on each other. Such good fortune does not accord with the principles Vernon has handed down.
Meanwhile, the monstrous film producer Laurent Dopalet is determined to make Aïcha and Céleste pay for their attack on him, whatever it takes and whoever gets hurt. And, before long, the whole of Paris will be reeling in the wake of the terrorist atrocities of 2015 and 2016, and all the characters in this kaleidoscopic portrait of a city and era will be forced to confront one another one last time. In the wake of all this chaos and hate, the question will rise again: After all he’s been through, who is Vernon Subutex? And the answer: He is the future.
Virginie Despentes’s epochal trilogy ends with Vernon Subutex 3—in fire, blood, and even forgiveness. But not everyone will survive to see the dawning of the golden age of Subutex.
James Baldwin: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations
Never before available, the unexpurgated last interview with James Baldwin.
“I was not born to be what someone said I was. I was not born to be defined by someone else, but by myself, and myself only.” When, in the fall of 1987, the poet Quincy Troupe traveled to the south of France to interview James Baldwin, Baldwin’s brother David told him to ask Baldwin about everything—Baldwin was critically ill and David knew that this might be the writer’s last chance to speak at length about his life and work.
The result is one of the most eloquent and revelatory interviews of Baldwin’s career, a conversation that ranges widely over such topics as his childhood in Harlem, his close friendship with Miles Davis, his relationship with writers like Toni Morrison and Richard Wright, his years in France, and his ever-incisive thoughts on the history of race relations and the African-American experience.
Also collected here are significant interviews from other moments in Baldwin’s life, including an in-depth interview conducted by Studs Terkel shortly after the publication of Nobody Knows My Name. These interviews showcase, above all, Baldwin’s fearlessness and integrity as a writer, thinker, and individual, as well as the profound struggles he faced along the way.
We are not where we need to be, but we ain't where we were.
Tiphanie Blanc, Lili Reynaud-Dewar and 1 more
We are not where we need to be but, we ain't where we were is the first volume of a new series of publications by the collective Wages For Wages Against that reports on active research engaged within the artistic professions and institutions since 2017. Its aim is to question the underlying neoliberal logics in the contemporary art world, by orienting our object of study towards the struggles that impact it. With this publication, our hope is to put into practice various values specific to the campaign: the existence of a systematic and fair remuneration, a desire for transparency, the sharing of knowledge, and the visibilization of demands proper to the field of the visual arts and concomitant struggles. It is the result of militant experiences, at the convergence of our individual experiences and collective questionings.
With texts by Tiphanie Blanc, Antonella Corsani, Fanny Lallart, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Ramaya Tegegne and an interview with Outrage Collectif.
Honey Mine: Collected Stories
Honey Mine unfolds as both excavation and romp, an adventure story that ushers readers into a lesbian writer's coming of age through disorienting, unsparing, and exhilarating encounters with sex, gender, and distinctly American realities of race and class. From childhood in Chicago's South Side to youth in the lesbian underground, Roy's politics find joyful and transgressive expression in the liberatory potential of subculture. Find here, in these new, uncollected and out-of-print fictions by a master of New Narrative, a record of survival and thriving under conditions of danger.