“What is required of
us, now? In this long time of our undoing?”Organized as a series of theoretical-poetic interventions,
Ordinary Notes is one of those rare
books that combines theory, memoir, and art.
There was something intensely
meditative about Sharpe’s engagement with Black life in the context of racial
capitalism, a beauty excavated beneath the spectacular and quotidian horror.
It
is one of those rare books where political and social theory enters the realm
of literature.
A finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction
Critically acclaimed author of In the Wake, "Christina Sharpe is a brilliant thinker who attends unflinchingly to the brutality of our current arrangements . . . and yet always finds a way to beauty and possibility" (Saidiya Hartman).
A singular achievement, Ordinary Notes explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 notes that gather meaning as we read them, Christina Sharpe skillfully weaves artifacts from the past―public ones alongside others that are poignantly personal―with present realities and possible…
“Eventually, if we are lucky, we
will release this work from the past, through the present and into the future,
as a record of how we thought and interacted at one point in time.”I
love dialogical work formed through a conversation by two or more authors.
Comprised of letters between Maynard and Simpson during the COVID lockdown, Rehearsals For Living thinks the
violence of settler/racial capitalism and the struggles of Black and Indigenous
subjects in the immediacy of the pandemic.
One reason I enjoyed it was that it
echoed a dialogical project I was part of at the time and echoed a lot of the themes, but the framing
was different, particularly the intimate friendship that is evoked by the text.
A revolutionary collaboration about the world we're living in now, between two of our most important contemporary thinkers, writers and activists.
When much of the world entered pandemic lockdown in spring 2020, Robyn Maynard, influential author of Policing Black Lives, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, award-winning author of several books, including the recent novel Noopiming, began writing each other letters-a gesture sparked by friendship and solidarity, and by a desire for kinship and connection in a world shattering under the intersecting crises of pandemic, police killings, and climate catastrophe. Their letters soon grew into a powerful exchange on the subject of…
I
love poetry but have been extremely allergic to a lot of popular contemporary poetry
due to the influence of Rupi Kaur and other Instagram poets. Fournier’s
recently published collection, however, reminded me of the poetry I loved and reminded me of how I felt when I picked up Dionne
Brand’s Ossuaries over ten years ago
and was mesmerized by its meter.
The thematic arrangement of the poems, the
parallel translation into Inuk, and the way the book has been textured and
shaded make Elements an aesthetic
object.
In this complex, at times dark, poetry collection from Inuk author Jamesie Fournier, readers are taken through the recesses of a character struggling with inner demons whispering into his mind. As he attempts to overcome his inner turmoil within a Colonial and contemporary system that oppresses him, the speaker guides readers through verse both ethereal and imagistic. Echoing artists as varied as Margaret Laurence and The Velvet Underground, this sweeping collection of bilingual verse deals with erasure, resilience, and-above all-resistance through the voice of one complex protagonist.
Since the economic crisis of 2008, the concept of social class emerged again as central in critical theory.
Temporarily eclipsed in the metropoles by the focus on other sites of oppression, the possible return of class and class struggle to the centre of academic and activist discourse brings with it the same economism that other radical conceptions of politics seemed to displace. Politics in Command seeks to understand what economism is, how it is deployed through socialist analyses, and the ways in which various categories (economy, politics, class, practice, revolution, etc.) are mobilized and classified according to its imaginary.
