The Witch Studies Reader

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.

In Juggling , Stewart Lawrence Sinclair explores the four-thousand-year history and practice of juggling as seen through his life as a juggler. Sinclair—who learned to juggle as a child and paid his way through college by busking—shares his experiences of taking up juggling after an episode of suicidal ideation, his time juggling on the streets, and ultimately finding comfort in juggling during the COVID-19 pandemic. In many ways, this is a book about loss and recovery. From his own juggling story to clowns braving military checkpoints in Bosnia and Rwanda to perform in refugee camps to contemporary avant-garde performances, Sinclair shows how the universal language of juggling provides joy as well as a respite from difficulties during hard times.

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.

The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternatives—to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives.

Jack Halberstam proposes “low theory” as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is derived from eccentric archives. It runs the risk of not being taken seriously. It entails a willingness to fail and to lose one’s way, to pursue difficult questions about complicity, and to find counterintuitive forms of resistance.

Tacking back and forth between high theory and low theory, high culture and low culture, Halberstam looks for the unexpected and subversive in popular culture, avant-garde performance, and queer art. Halberstam pays particular attention to animated children’s films, revealing narratives filled with unexpected encounters between the childish, the transformative, and the queer. Failure sometimes offers more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of being in the world, even as it forces us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido.

While the stock image of the anarchist as a masked bomber or brick thrower prevails in the public eye, a more representative figure should be a printer at a printing press. In Letterpress Revolution, Kathy E. Ferguson explores the importance of printers, whose materials galvanized anarchist movements across the United States and Great Britain from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s. Ferguson shows how printers—whether working at presses in homes, offices, or community centers—arranged text, ink, images, graphic markers, and blank space within the architecture of the page. Printers' extensive correspondence with fellow anarchists and the radical ideas they published created dynamic and entangled networks that brought the decentralized anarchist movements together. Printers and presses did more than report on the movement; they were constitutive of it, and their vitality in anarchist communities helps explain anarchism’s remarkable persistence in the face of continuous harassment, arrest, assault, deportation, and exile. By inquiring into the political, material, and aesthetic practices of anarchist print culture, Ferguson points to possible methods for cultivating contemporary political resistance.

A fullness of the erotic that pervades the entirety of the book to its edges, where a continual corruption of our often unexpressed desires overflows into forms both lyrical and traditional. "Butterflies Come Out At Night" continuously asks where the "you" stands, and if desire can empower one to reach a fullness of self. No othering, but flowing seamless from source to rapid source. The book explores this encompassing and embracing body of care and power through poetry, collage, enchantments, and spells and keeps an aura that constantly shifts where the erotic nature of both writer and reader bloom through out the reading.

An occult history that grounds the sacred yearning for magic in real life. 

In these essays by scholar and self-initiated witch Brooke Palmieri, occult history, the eternal now, and our magickal queer futures align, connecting us to an enchantment both contemporary and classic. Drawing upon the knowledge and influence of practitioners from Rachel Pollack to Tituba, Palmieri grounds the sacred yearning for magic in real life, whether exploring the gossip of feuding Salem witches, paying the rent by playing "wizard" for news cameras, or detailing the psychic ups and downs of working in an occult bookshop. Written in a voice electrified with love for the craft and its lineage of eccentrics, Bargain Witch shows us witch life in all its quotidian humor and splendor, taking its place amongst the magickal classics that inspired it, a literary ouroboros.

Brooke Palmieri is a writer and artist based in Joshua Tree. His writing considers the past as a supernatural encounter, spanning hundreds of years of queer and trans history, and the magic, mystery, and erotics of working in archives. Bargain Witch: Essays on Self-Initiation is his first book.

This book charts the journey of Black feminist, artist, researcher and curator Nydia A Swaby as she pieces together a biography of Pan-Africanist and feminist Amy Ashwood Garvey from her scattered archive. In turn, it offers a reflection on the future of Black feminist archival practice.

Often referred to as the first wife of Marcus Garvey, Amy Ashwood Garvey’s contributions to movements for social justice, and in particular Black women’s rights, have largely been forgotten, not least since archives about her life and work are spread across the various places she lived.

After helping Marcus Garvey set up the UNIA, one of the most influential Pan-African movements in the world, Amy moved to New York, where she thrived in the Harlem Renaissance. In the 1930s she emigrated to Britain, where she set up a boarding house and social centre called the Afro People’s Centre, and a club called the Florence Mills Social Parlour. Swaby recovers Amy’s life and work as an important political activist, cultural producer and Pan-Africanist in her own right, retracing her steps across the Caribbean, US, Britain and West Africa.

In addition to conducting traditional archival research, Swaby creates a series of ‘curatorial fabulations’, imagining into the gaps in the archive with her autoethnographic practice. Drawing on the work of contemporary Black feminist researchers, archivists, curators and artists, and her own creative practice, Swaby animates the process of creating and curating Ashwood Garvey’s archive. In doing so, she reflects on the practice of Black feminist archiving past, present and future.

This is the third book in LW’s Radical Black Women Series. It will be essential reading for scholars and students of Black feminism, Pan-Africanism, Black British history, Black arts and archival practice. Endorsements forthcoming from leading scholars in the field including Carole Boyce Davies, Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski, Kelly Foster, Kesewa John and Lola Olufemi.