Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil

One of America's most historic political trials is undoubtedly that of Angela Davis. Opening with a letter from James Baldwin to Davis, and including contributions from numerous radicals such as Black Panthers George Jackson, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale and Erica Huggins, this book is not only an account of Davis's incarceration and the struggles surrounding it, but also perhaps the most comprehensive and thorough analysis of the prison system of the United State.  

Since the book was written, the carceral system in the US has seen unprecedented growth, with more of America's black population behind bars than ever before. The scathing analysis of the role of prison and the policing of black populations offered by Davis and her comrades in this astonishing volume remains as pertinent today as the day it was first published.  

Featuring contributions from George Jackson, Bettina Aptheker, Bobby Seale, James Baldwin, Ruchell Magee, Julian Bond, Huey P. Newton, Erika Huggins, Fleeta Drumgo, John Clutchette, and others.

It was 1969, and temperatures were rising across the factories of the north as workers demanded better pay and conditions. Soon, discontent would erupt in what became known as Italy’s Hot Autumn. A young worker from the impoverished south arrives at Fiat’s Mirafiori factory in Turin, where his darker complexion begins to fade from the fourteen-hour workdays in sweltering industrial heat. His bosses try to withhold his wages. Our cynical, dry-witted narrator will not bend to their will. “I want everything, everything that’s owed to me,” he tells them. “Nothing more and nothing less, because you don’t mess with me.”

Around him, students are holding secret meetings and union workers begin halting work on the assembly lines, crippling the Mirafiori factory with months of continuous strikes. Before long, barricades line the roads, tear gas wafts into private homes, and the slogan “We Want Everything” is ringing through the streets.

Wrought in spare and measured prose, Balestrini’s novel depicts an explosive uprising. Introduced by Rachel Kushner, the author of the best-selling The Flamethrowers, We Want Everything is the incendiary fictional account of events that led to a decade of revolt.

Translated by Matt Holden
Introduction by Rachel Kushner

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

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 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.

Ursula K. Le Guin witnessed and contributed to many of the twentieth century’s rebellions and upheavals, including women’s liberation, the Civil Rights movement and US anti-war and environmental activism.

Spanning fifty years of her life and work, Space Crone brings together Le Guin’s writings on feminism and gender for the first time, offering new insights into her imaginative, multispecies feminist consciousness: from its roots in deep ecology and philosophies of non-violence to her self-education about racism and her writing on motherhood and ageing.

The most accessible introduction to the life and work of James Lovelock, and a guide to address today's "polycrisis."

There is no creation of the future if we do not sustain, at root, an intuition for invention. No one understood this better than James Lovelock, the most significant scientific thinker since Charles Darwin.

Over the course of his career, Lovelock set the terms by which we've come to understand life—biologically, societally, poetically—in the twenty-first century. He helped NASA complete missions to Mars and the moon; he invented devices that revealed the presence of harmful chemicals in the Earth's atmosphere, inspiring Rachel Carson to write Silent Spring; and he formulated the Gaia hypothesis, the deceptively simple idea that our planet could be viewed as a single self-regulating organism—everything entangled, everything acting upon everything else.

In September 2015, Hans Ulrich Obrist traveled to Dorset to visit Lovelock at his seaside cottage, where they spent nine hours discussing garden cities, frozen hamsters, rising temperatures, tiny widgets, the Space Age, the birth of modern science, the agonies of institutions, and the future of humanity. Ever Gaia presents this conversation as a celebration of Lovelock, who died in 2022 at 103, alongside contributions from two future pioneers of Gaia: Daisy Hildyard and Precious Okoyomon. As another of Lovelock's heirs, Tim Lenton, writes in his afterword, this encounter was pivotal in Lovelock's late intellectual life and, at the start of 2023, provides a guide—by way of Lovelock's Gaian approach—to address today's "polycrisis."

Ever Gaia opens the second season of isolarii as a tribute not just to Lovelock but to the late Bruno Latour, who introduced the series when we launched it two years ago. The second volume of a trilogy that started with the release of The Archipelago Conversations in 2021, Ever Gaia is the most accessible introduction to the life and work of Lovelock, whose way of seeing—"perhaps his greatest legacy," Obrist writes—will continue to shape our world and our place within it for decades to come.

As everyday white supremacy becomes increasingly vocalized with no clear answers at hand, how best might we approach one another? Claudia Rankine, without telling us what to do, urges us to begin the discussions that might open pathways through this divisive and stuck moment in American history.

Just Us is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, even and especially in breaching the silence, guilt, and violence that follow direct addresses of whiteness. Rankine’s questions disrupt the false comfort of our culture’s liminal and private spaces—the airport, the theater, the dinner party, the voting booth—where neutrality and politeness live on the surface of differing commitments, beliefs, and prejudices as our public and private lives intersect.