Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil

A young woman from a long line of assassins, lives her life with the ardent mission to avoid the trappings of any enduring romantic love, while keeping one on the pursuit of an untimely death for herself. 

Not yet thirty, Bathory, or 'Bat' to those near to her, has assembled a peculiar Model, sex worker, linguist and scholar of Latin. But nothing in her lively job history employs the singular traits she inherited from her strange family, chief among them an uncanny ability to sidestep seemingly certain death(s). An appropriate atavistic instinct, for someone from a long line of assassins and spies. Her clan are assassins of a romantic bent, her parents issuing theories on love galore. However Bat is set on swerving any enduring romantic loves, and she's set on dying young. Now, if she could only avoid that one alluring figure from her father's past.

A thriller, a love story, and a dynamic examination of class, violence and connection. The images we make to share and those we strive to conceal, alienation and salvation, magic and technology, LaCava's bold new novel is propelled by the compelling violence one can seed in contradiction.

How the intersex liberation movement exposed medical harms and became an inspiration to rethink sex and gender. 

Hermaphrodite Logic is a bold examination of intersex liberation. Juliana Gleeson reveals how a movement challenged systemic medical abuses to reshape our understanding of sex. Blending philosophical insights and personal testimonies, Gleeson argues that intersex people have been harmed not just for therapeutic reasons but to ease professional and parental anxieties.

The Salvage Editorial Collective on the Covid-19 crisis.

Including: ‘Mothering Against the World' by Sophie Lewis on ‘Momrades’, ‘The Bushes’ a new fiction by China Miéville, ‘Hookers and Other Angels’ photography from Juno Mac, ‘Prepared for the Worst’ by Richard Seymour on Disaster Nationalism, ‘Welfare State Populism and the “Left-Behind Left”’ by Kevin Ochieng Okoth, ‘A Glimmer of a Shell of a Husk’ by Maya Osborne; ‘The Phallic Road to Socialism’ by Sebastian Budgen; A newly translated interview with Daniel Guérin, ‘Nationalism After Coronavirus’ by Sivamohan Valluvan, ‘Striking in Striking Times: Capitalism’s Coronavirus Crisis’ by Gregor Gall, ‘Getting Dressed for a Pandemic’ by Camila Valle, ‘Out of the Iron Lung: A Miasma Theory of Coronavirus’ by Matthew Broomfield.

Poetry by Nisha Ramayya, this issue’s featured poet, and an interview with her conducted by Salvage poetry editor, Caitlín Doherty. Plus the return of the Salvage Editorial Collective perspectives pamphlet, and a postcard.

Salvage is a bi-annual journal of revolutionary arts and letters. Salvage is written by and for the desolated Left, by and for those sick of capitalism and its planetary death-drive, implacably opposed to the fascist reflux and all ‘national’ solutions to our crisis, committed to radical change, guarded against the encroachments of ‘woke’ capitalism and its sadistic dramaphagy, and impatient with the Left’s bad faith and bullshit.

Published June 2020

A materialist analysis of the links between global capitalism, energy politics, and racial oppression in Palestine. 

Why has Palestine become a defining fault line of contemporary politics?

Challenging mainstream narratives that reduce Palestine to ancient hatreds, humanitarian tragedy, or legal abstractions, Resisting Erasure places Israeli settler-colonialism within the broader historical arc of imperialism, race, and fossil capitalism in the Middle East.

Resisting Erasure is a succinct and far-reaching critique of the socio-economic and political forces that sustain the Israeli settler-colonial project. An essential introduction for anyone looking to understand what Palestine reveals about the world – and what it demands of us today.

How most Western governments and elites have supported the destruction of Gaza and silenced voices calling for the rights of Palestinians. 

Providing a record of the first six months of the war waged by the Israeli army after the 7 October attacks and drawing on a rich range of international sources, Didier Fassin examines how most Western governments have acquiesced in and often contributed to the destruction, by the Israeli army, of Gaza, its homes, infrastructures, hospitals, institutions of education, and civilian population. To justify their support and prevent criticism, they have provided an official version of the events, adopting the Israeli narrative. It was largely taken up by mainstream media, which ignored the experiences and perspectives of Palestinians. Dissenting voices were silenced. A policing of language and thought was imposed. Censorship and self-censorship became normalized. 

To call for a ceasefire or to demand the respect of humanitarian law was enough to prompt the ever-ready accusation of antisemitism. Exploring the multiple dimensions of the extreme inequality of lives between the two sides of the conflict and analyzing the complex geopolitical, economic and ideological stakes that underlie it, Fassin intends to constitute an archive of this moral abdication. In his view, the abandonment of the values and principles proclaimed by Western elites to be foundational will leave a deep scar in the history of the world.

The sequel to Pendleton's acclaimed Black Dada Reader, compiling an anti-canon of radical experimentation and thought.

In 2011, artist Adam Pendleton (born 1984) assembled Black Dada Reader, a compendium of texts, documents and positions that elucidated a practice and ethos of Black Dada. Resembling a school course reader, the book was a spiral-bound series of photocopies and collages, originally intended only for personal reference, and eventually distributed informally to friends and colleagues. The contents - an unlikely mix of Hugo Ball, W.E.B. Du Bois, Adrian Piper, Gertrude Stein, Sun Ra, Stokely Carmichael, Gilles Deleuze -formed a kind of experimental canon, realized through what Pendleton calls radical juxtaposition. In 2017, Koenig Books published the Reader in a hardcover edition, with newly commissioned essays and additional writings by the artist. A decade later, Pendleton has composed another reader, building upon the constellation of writers, artists, filmmakers, philosophers and critics that emerged in the first volume.

Source texts by Sara Ahmed, Mikhail Bakhtin, Toni Cade Bambara, Amiri Baraka, Augusto de Campos, Hardoldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari, Angela Davis, Gilles Deleuze, Julius Eastman, Adrienne Edwards, Clarice Lispector, Achille Mbembe, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Charles Mingus, Piet Mondrian, Leslie Scalapino, Leonard Schwartz and Michael Hardt, Juliana Spahr, Cecil Taylor and Malcolm X.

Errant Journal No. 6 takes up the topic of debt in order to challenge the idea that it is something rational, natural or inevitable.

The contributions in the issue address the ways in which debt and its language hold power over us and organize obedience; from its role in geopolitics to its associations with shame and guilt through moral and religious connotations. Together they reveal how the personal is always connected to the structural. Crucially, the issue also features contributions that address ways of thinking about debt outside Western/neoliberal hegemony and introduce instances of resistance to the violence and inequality inherent to debt. We’ve made additional space in this issue to address the intensified struggle for Palestinian liberation and its relations to debt/guilt and finance.

Contributors: Ian Beattie, W.E.B. Du Bois, Sultan Doughan, Toon Fibbe, Ibrahim Kombarji, Levi Masuli, Jamie McGhee, Kristina Millona, Bahar Noorizadeh, Falke Pisano, Taring Padi, Dalia Wahdan

The theme of this issue of Pages was triggered by the idea of opium smoke as a ‘writing machine.’ Since the early opium trade, there has been writing not only on opium, but also through opium, especially in countries linked to past and present drug networks. In this issue we are tapping into the deeply rooted relationship between writing and drugs, especially beyond the Western literary tradition, and wondering about the current conceptual and material derivatives of intoxication with which we can machinate new extremities in our chemical, historical and technological relations to the world.

With contributions by:

- Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh / Smoke, Drug, Poison: A Philosophy of the Faramoosh-Khaneh (Opium Den)
- Pages / Dissolving, Mixing, Melting, Stirring (the Smoke)
- Hung-Bin Hsu / The Taste of Opium: Science, Monopoly and the Japanese Colonization in Taiwan, 1895—1945
- Saleh Najafi / Hedayat: The Opium of Translation and Creating the Impossible Memory
- Patricia Reed / The Toxicity of Continuity
- Fuko Mineta / A Monster Appears in Qingtian
- Morad Farhadpour / Inside and Outside Addiction
- Mohammad-Ali Rahebi / Of Junk and Time: Trauma, Habit, Capitalism