Dear Science and Other Stories

Jill Johnston began the 1960s as an influential dance columnist for the Village Voice and by the start of the next decade she was known as a keen observer of postmodern art and lesbian feminist life who challenged how dance, art, and women can and should be seen. The Essential Jill Johnston Reader collects dozens of pieces of her writing from across her career. These writings—many of which appeared in the Village Voice and the New York Times—survey the breadth of her work, braiding together her thinking, writing, and activism.

From personal essays, travel writing, and artist profiles to dance and visual art reviews as well as her infamous series of columns for the Voice in which she came out as a lesbian, these pieces demonstrate the evolution of her philosophies and writing style. Illustrating how Johnston drew on lessons from dance to reconsider what it means to be a woman, this collection brings a fascinating and brilliant voice of American arts criticism, radical feminism, and gay liberation back to contemporary audiences.

Stories about witches are by their nature stories about the most basic and profound of human experiences—healing, sex, violence, tragedies, aging, death, and encountering the mystery and magic of the unknown. It is no surprise, then, that witches loom large in our cultural imaginations. In academia, studies of witches rarely emerge from scholars who are themselves witches and/or embedded in communities of witchcraft practitioners. The Witch Studies Reader brings together a diverse group of scholars, practitioners, and scholar-practitioners who examine witchcraft from a critical decolonial feminist perspective that decenters Europe and departs from exoticizing and pathologizing writing on witchcraft in the global South. The authors show how witches are keepers of suppressed knowledges, builders of new futures, exemplars of praxis, and theorists in their own right. Throughout, they account for the vastly different national, political-economic, and cultural contexts in which “the witch” is currently being claimed and repudiated. Offering a pathbreaking transnational feminist examination of witches and witchcraft that upends white supremacist, colonial, patriarchal knowledge regimes, this volume brings into being the interdisciplinary field of feminist witch studies. 

Contributors: Maria Amir, Ruth Asiimwe, Bernadette Barton, Ethel Brooks, Shelina Brown, Ruth Charnock, Soma Chaudhuri, Carolyn Chernoff, Saira Chhibber, Simon Clay, Krystal Cleary, Adrianna L. Ernstberger, Tina Escaja, Laurie Essig, Marcelitte Failla, D Ferrett, Marion Goldman, Jaime Hartless, Margaretha Haughwout, Patricia Humura, Apoorvaa Joshi, Govind Kelkar, Oliver Kellhammer, Ayça Kurtoğlu, Helen Macdonald, Isabel Machado, Brandy Renee McCann, Dev Nathan, Mary Jo Neitz, Amy Nichols-Belo, Allison (or AP) Pierce, Emma Quilty, Anna Rogel, Karen Schaller, Jacquelyn Marie Shannon, Shashank Shekhar Sinha, Gabriella V. Smith, Nathan Snaza, Shannon Hughes Spence, Eric Steinhart, Morena Tartari, Nicole Trigg, Katie Von Wald, Tushabe wa Tushabe, Jane Ward

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 this bold new work of cultural criticism, Ann Cvetkovich develops a queer approach to trauma. She argues for the importance of recognizing—and archiving—accounts of trauma that belong as much to the ordinary and everyday as to the domain of catastrophe. An Archive of Feelings contends that the field of trauma studies, limited by too strict a division between the public and the private, has overlooked the experiences of women and queers. Rejecting the pathologizing understandings of trauma that permeate medical and clinical discourses on the subject, Cvetkovich develops instead a sex-positive approach missing even from most feminist work on trauma. She challenges the field to engage more fully with sexual trauma and the wide range of feelings in its vicinity, including those associated with butch-femme sex and aids activism and caretaking.  

An Archive of Feelings brings together oral histories from lesbian activists involved in act up/New York; readings of literature by Dorothy Allison, Leslie Feinberg, Cherríe Moraga, and Shani Mootoo; videos by Jean Carlomusto and Pratibha Parmar; and performances by Lisa Kron, Carmelita Tropicana, and the bands Le Tigre and Tribe 8. Cvetkovich reveals how activism, performance, and literature give rise to public cultures that work through trauma and transform the conditions producing it. By looking closely at connections between sexuality, trauma, and the creation of lesbian public cultures, Cvetkovich makes those experiences that have been pushed to the peripheries of trauma culture the defining principles of a new construction of sexual trauma—one in which trauma catalyzes the creation of cultural archives and political communities.

Mutual aid is the radical act of caring for each other while working to change the world. 

Around the globe, people are faced with a spiralling succession of crises, from the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change-induced fires, floods, and storms to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, racist policing, brutal immigration enforcement, endemic gender violence, and severe wealth inequality. As governments fail to respond to—or actively engineer—each crisis, ordinary people are finding bold and innovative ways to share resources and support the vulnerable.  

Survival work, when done alongside social movement demands for transformative change, is called mutual aid.  

This book is about mutual aid: why it is so important, what it looks like, and how to do it. It provides a grassroots theory of mutual aid, describes how mutual aid is a crucial part of powerful movements for social justice, and offers concrete tools for organizing, such as how to work in groups, how to foster a collective decision-making process, how to prevent and address conflict, and how to deal with burnout.  

Writing for those new to activism as well as those who have been in social movements for a long time, Dean Spade draws on years of organizing to offer a radical vision of community mobilization, social transformation, compassionate activism, and solidarity.

A book that examines the process of performing the self, distinctive for the formation of the self in Western neoliberal societies in the 21st century. It approaches the self from a transdisciplinary angle where political and cultural anthropology, performance studies and dramaturgy intersect.

Starting from their concern with the crisis of the social, which coincides with the rise of individualism, Vujanović and Cvejić critically untangle individualist modes of performing the self, such as possessive, aesthetic, and autopoietic individualisms. However, their critique does not make for an argument for collectivism as a socially more viable alternative to individualism. Instead, it confronts them with the more fundamental problem of ontogenesis: how is that which distinguishes me as an individual formed in the first place? This question marks a turning point in the study, where it steps back into the process of individuation, prior to, and in excess of, the individual. 

The process of individuation, however, encompasses biological, social, and technological conditions of becoming whose real potential is transindividual, or more specifically, social transformation. A ‘theater of individuation’ (Gilbert Simondon) captures the dramaturgical stroke by which the authors investigate social relations (like solidarity and de-alienation) in which the self actualizes its transindividual dimension. This epistemic intervention into ontogenesis allows them to expand the horizon of transindividuation in an array of tangible social, aesthetic and political acts and practices. As with every horizon, the transindividual may not be closely at hand; however, it is certainly within reach, and the book encourages the reader to approach it.

"Towards a Transindividual Self is an ambitious and capacious effort to theorize a new way to approach collectivity for political purposes through the lens of performance. Convinced that the current neoliberal conjuncture has only heightened a form of capitalist individualism that blocks notions of the social, the authors aim to show that a "transindividual formation of the self can bring about different courses of action and a more socially driven imagination." Transindividuation, they assure us, shows how "we form ourselves on the basis of interdependence, sharing, commonality, as well as indispensability of the individual as the agent of creativity/ knowledge, freedom, and change, who 'possibilizes' their own conditions of formation." 
— Professor Janelle Reinelt (University of Warwick), co-editor of Critical Theory and Performance (University of Michigan, 2006)

"Perhaps the most striking thing about this book is the manner in which it is able to engage with multiple discourses from political theory to aesthetics. In this way it both follows the ambitious scope of Simondon’s work on individuation, and expands into areas that Simondon did not cover, most notably politics and cultural politics, which is the book’s central concern. Rather than ask the question is the individual imagined or real, an effect of social relations or their distortion, the focus on the transindividual makes it possible to grasp individuation as a process: “Instead of pondering how the passage from one to many occurs, individuation permits us to immediately trace a bidimensional process in which both individual persons and the collectivities they form are altered. Another meaning of the crisis of the social has brought about a perfect slogan of such a process of transindividuation: ‘No one will be left alone in the crisis.” (…) Towards a Transindividual Self does a brilliant job of not only arguing for the importance and relevance for the transindividual as a concept for politics, performance, and the politics of performance, but of demonstrating a bold standard for political and aesthetic inquiry."
— Professor Jason Read (University of Maine), author of The Politics of Transindividuality (Brill, 2015)

Co-published by Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Sarma and Multimedijalni institut.

A collection of published and unpublished writings of the groundbreaking Chicana writer and self-described "chicana dyke-feminist, tejana patlache poet, writer and cultural theorist" Gloria Anzaldua.

Gloria Anzaldúa (1942-2004) was a visionary writer whose work was recognized with many honors, including the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award, a Lambda literary award, the National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Award, and the Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies. Her book Borderlands/La frontera was selected as one of the 100 Best Books of the Century by Hungry Mind Review and the Utne Reader. AnaLouise Keating, Professor of Women's Studies at Texas Woman's University, is the author of Women Reading, Women Writing: Self-Invention in Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde; editor of Anzaldúa's Interviews/Entrevistas and EntreMundos/AmongWorlds: New Perspectives on Gloria Anzaldúa; and co-editor, with Anzaldúa, of this bridge we call home: radical visions for transformation.

AnaLouise Keating, Professor of Women's Studies at Texas Woman's University, is the author of Women Reading, Women Writing: Self-Invention in Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde; editor of Anzaldúa's Interviews/Entrevistas and EntreMundos/AmongWorlds: New Perspectives on Gloria Anzaldúa; and co-editor, with Anzaldúa, of this bridge we call home: radical visions for transformation.

"Absolutely what we need in these days of spreading gloom. A very well argued case for joyful militancy, and against the dead hand of puritanical revolution. Read it, live it!” — John Holloway, author of Crack Capitalism

Why do radical movements and spaces sometimes feel laden with fear, anxiety, suspicion, self-righteousness, and competition? Montgomery and bergman call this phenomenon rigid radicalism: congealed and toxic ways of relating that have seeped into social movements, posing as the “correct” way of being radical. In conversation with organizers and intellectuals from a wide variety of political currents, the authors explore how rigid radicalism smuggles itself into radical spaces, and how it is being undone.

Interviewees include Silvia Federici, adrienne maree brown, Marina Sitrin, Gustavo Esteva, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Walidah Imarisha, Margaret Killjoy, Glen Coulthard, Richard Day, and more.