New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the (After)Life of Erica Garner

By the middle of the twenty-first century, war, famine, economic collapse, and climate catastrophe had toppled the world's governments. In the 2050s, the insurrections reached the nerve center of global capitalism—New York City. This book, a collection of interviews with the people who made the revolution, was published to mark the twentieth anniversary of the New York Commune, a radically new social order forged in the ashes of capitalist collapse.

Here is the insurrection in the words of the people who made it, a cast as diverse as the city itself. Nurses, sex workers, antifascist militants, and survivors of all stripes recall the collapse of life as they knew it and the emergence of a collective alternative. Their stories, delivered in deeply human fashion, together outline how ordinary people's efforts to survive in the face of crisis contain the seeds of a new world.

An essential document of the Black Panther Party written by three leading thinkers and party activists who were jailed following the FBI’S 1969 mandate to destroy the organization “by any means possible.”

Still Black, Still Strong is partly based upon the 1989 videotape Framing The Panthers by producers Chris Bratton and Annie Goldson. It recounts the stories of Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Mumia Abu-Jamal and Assata Shakur, all of whom were arrested and jailed during the COINTELPRO probe of the Black Panther Party.

Dhoruba Bin Wahad, who organized chapters of the Black Panther Party in New York and along the Estern Seaboard and worked with tenants in Harlem and on drug rehabilitation in the Bronx, was accused of murdering two officers while still in his teens and imprisoned for 19 years. He always maintained his innocence and won his freedom by forcing the FBI to release thousands of classified documents proving that he had been framed. The justice department eventually rescinded Bin Wahad’s conviction and he was released in 1990, seven months after the documentary premiered.

Mumia Abu-Jamal, a journalist who headed the Black Panther free breakfast program for inner-city school children in Philadelphia, was also accused of the murder of an officer and sent on death-row, where he still is today.

Assata Shakur was a college educated social worker in her twenties when she was accused of shooting a cop, then arrested and tortured and denied medical treatment. Her interview was conducted in Cuba where she has been exiled since her escape from a New Jersey women’s prison in 1975.

Bin Wahad, Shakur and Abu-Jamal offer a little-known history and an incisive analysis of the Black Panthers’ original goals, which the U.S. Government has tried to distort and suppress. As one confidential, 1969, memo to J. Edgar Hoover put it, “The Negro youth and moderates must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teaching, they will be dead revolutionaries.”

Edited by Jim Fletcher, Tanaquil Jones and Sylvère Lotringer

Violence is arrayed against us because we’re Black, or female, or queer, or undocumented. There is no rescue team coming for us. With that knowledge, we need a different operational base to recreate the world. It is not going to be a celebrity savior. Never was, never will be. If you’re in a religious tradition that is millennia-old, consider how the last savior went out. It was always going to be bloody. It was always going to be traumatic. But there’s a beauty to facing the reality of our lives. Not our lives as they’re broken apart, written about, and then sold back to us in academic or celebrity discourse. But our lives as we understand them. The most important thing is showing up. Showing up and learning how to live by and with others, learning how to reinvent ourselves in this increasing wasteland. That’s the good life.

Foreword by Da’Shaun L. Harrison.
Afterword by Mumia Abu-Jamal.

"Joy James’s Revolutionary Love is umph-degree love; or love beyond measure. It is anything love. It is love without reckoning. It is love that dares all things, beyond which others may find the spirit-force to survive; to live to fight another day. Such love is also fighting itself, for the sake of ensuring that others may live." — Mumia Abu-Jamal

An impassioned discussion about the alternative ways to form relationships and resist capitalism.

Capitalist ideology wants us to believe that there is an optimal way to live. 'Making connections' means networking for work. Our emotional needs are to be fulfilled by a single romantic partner, and self-care equates to taking personal responsibility for our suffering. We must be productive and heterosexual, we must have babies and buy a house. But the kicker is most people cannot and do not want to achieve all, or any of these life goals. Instead we are left feeling atomised, exhausted and disempowered.

Radical Intimacy shows that it doesn't need to be this way. A punchy and impassioned account of inspiring ideas about alternative ways to live, Sophie K Rosa demands we use our radical imagination to discover a new form of intimacy and to transform our personal lives and in turn society as a whole.

Including critiques of the 'wellness' industry that ignores rising poverty rates, the mental health crisis and racist and misogynist state violence; transcending love and sex under capitalism to move towards feminist, decolonial and queer thinking; asking whether we should abolish the family; interrogating the framing of ageing and death and much more, Radical Intimacy is the compassionate antidote to a callous society.

In Brutalism, eminent social and critical theorist Achille Mbembe invokes the architectural aesthetic of brutalism to describe our moment, caught up in the pathos of demolition and production on a planetary scale.

Just as brutalist architecture creates an affect of overwhelming weight and destruction, Mbembe contends that contemporary capitalism crushes and dominates all spheres of existence. In our digital, technologically focused era, capitalism has produced a becoming-artificial of humanity and the becoming-human of machines. This blurring of the natural and artificial presents a planetary existential threat in which contemporary society’s goal is to precipitate the mutation of the human species into a condition that is at once plastic and synthetic.

Mbembe argues that Afro-diasporic thought presents the only solution for breaking the totalizing logic of contemporary capitalism: repairing that which is broken, developing a new planetary consciousness, and reforming a community of humans in solidarity with all living things.

From the Palestinian struggle against Israeli Apartheid, to First Nations' mass campaigns against pipeline construction in North America, Indigenous peoples are at the forefront of some of the crucial struggles of our age. Rich with their unique histories, characteristics, and social relations, they are connected by the shared enemy they face: settler colonialism.

In this introduction, Sai Englert highlights the ways in which it has, and continues to shape our global economic and political order. From the rapacious accumulation of resources, land, and labour, through Indigenous dispossession and genocide, to the development of racism as a form of social control, settler colonialism is deeply connected to many of the social ills we continue to face today.

To understand settler colonialism as an ongoing process, is therefore also to start engaging with contemporary social movements and solidarity campaigns differently. It is to start seeing how distinct struggles for justice and liberation are intertwined.