Feminism or Death

A beguiling debut novel about friendship and failure, written with unusual craft and spryness by an acclaimed poet

Nicola is a few years out of a fine arts degree, listless and unenthusiastically employed in London. She begins to spend her hours at a university archive dedicated to women's art, because she 'wants to read about women who can't make things'.

There she discovers one side of a correspondence beginning in 1976 and spanning a dozen years, written from one woman  –  a ceramics graduate, uncannily like Nicola – to her friend, who is living a contrasting and conventionally moored life. As she reads on, an acute sense of affinement turns to obsession, and she abandons one job after another to make time for the archive.

The litany of coincidences in the letters start to chime uncomfortably, and Nicola's feeling of ownership begets a growing what if she doesn't like what the letters lead to?

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

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

First French translation of Shulamith Firestone's first novel.

Originally published by Semiotext(e) in 1998, Airless Spaces is Shulamith Firestone's first novel. She writes this short stories gradually moving away from a career as a feminist activist; while finding herself increasingly close to a state of breathlessness. The stories center around people in the grip of a seemingly endemic poverty in New York, worn out by the back and forth of psychiatric hospitals and a sclerotic daily life. On the back cover of the original edition, we read the words of the poet Eileen Myles: “In the century I'm most familiar with, the 20th, the explosion was never-ending, the pieces tinier and tinier. Shulamith Firestone, in her radical insider's tale, informs us repeatedly like lightly pelting rain that all of us are vanishing in a century of institutions that take and take until everyone has gone away and there's no one left to shut the door.”

The French edition that we offer here, in a translation by Émilie Notéris, is accompanied by a text by Chris Kraus, author and first editor of the book.

Shulamith Firestone (1945 - 2012) is a feminist writer, activist and artist. After studying painting at the Art Institute of Chicago, she moved to New York where she co-founded the feminist groups New York Radical Women (1967), Redstockings (1969) and New York Radical Feminists (1969). In 1970, when she was only 25 years old, she publieshed the book The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for a Feminist Revolution. Firestone theorizes cybernetic communism as a system that enables the liberation of women, while at the same time putting an end to biological and social inequalities linked to reproduction and the education of children, in particular through technological emancipation.

published in May 2020

French edition
12,5 x 19,5 cm (softcover)
154 pages

A Book for Disappearance explores themes of extinction and ecology through the lens of contemporary technology and using AI and image-generation platforms as collective tools. It grapples with the contradictions of living in this world full of worlds and full of crises, while revindicating processes of nomadic becoming, transcending fixed identities, and collective emergence. While disappearance may seem abstract or esoteric, it has tangible implications for both individual and collective action. In this book, the concept of disappearance emerges as an alternative, including a variety of short poetic and experimental texts on the multiple possibilities that surface from our engagement with AI alter-egos and a collective artistic exercise with image generation technologies.

Texts by Laura Tripaldi, Institute of Queer Ecologies, and Stacy Alaimo provide further food for thought, and invite readers into recondite explorations—of parasitic spaces and ghost bodies through materialist feminisms; of oak archives and the previous lives that forests can narrate to us; of acid oceans and the psychedelic trips they might afford.

In Fly-Fishing, Christopher Schaberg ponders his lifetime pursuit of the widely mythologized art of fly-fishing. From the Michigan lakeshore where he learned to fish to casting flies in a New Orleans bayou, Schaberg sketches landscapes and fish habitats and shows how fly-fishing allows him to think about coexisting with other species. It offers Schaberg a much-needed source of humility, social isolation, connection with nature, and a reminder of environmental degradation. Rather than centering fishing on trophies, conquest, and travel, he advocates for a “small-fishing” that values catching the diminutive fish near one’s home. Introspective and personal, Fly-Fishing demonstrates how Schaberg’s obsession indelibly shapes how he understands and lives in the wider world.

The Compost Reader series sees the world as an interconnected being, where all its parts relate to one another. Composting as a way of cultivating consciousness through questions instead of answers, and from uncertainty and doubt. Hydro-memories, a talking lion, sounds that live in a snail shell, a dry swamp, a herbal medicine witch girl, ephemeral queer performances, chemical-sensing tentacles, stone eaters, scriptures-fossil, heavy cheese-like lids, dolphins in traffic, blue humanities, and digital forensic public spaces are some of the matters fermenting in this Compost Reader.

Authors:
Filipa Ramos
Panamby
María Morata and Lorenzo Galgó
Marie Skousen
Natasha Thembiso Ruwona
Zachary Schoenhut
Pauline Ruffiot
alfonso borragán
Valeria Mata and Maxime Dossin
Esther Gatón
Cristóbal Olaya Meza
Paloma Contreras Lomas

Series Co-editors: Yuri Tuma, Gabriel Alonso