In this collection of essays in Semiotext(e)'s Intervention series, Jackie Wang examines the contemporary incarceration techniques that have emerged since the 1990s. The essays illustrate various aspects of the carceral continuum, including the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory policing, the political economy of fees and fines, cybernetic governance, and algorithmic policing. Included in this volume is Wang's influential critique of liberal anti-racist politics, “Against Innocence,” as well as essays on RoboCop, techno-policing, and the aesthetic problem of making invisible forms of power legible.
Wang shows that the new racial capitalism begins with parasitic governance and predatory lending that extends credit only to dispossess later. Predatory lending has a decidedly spatial character and exists in many forms, including subprime mortgage loans, student loans for sham for-profit colleges, car loans, rent-to-own scams, payday loans, and bail bond loans. Parasitic governance, Wang argues, operates through five primary techniques: financial states of exception, automation, extraction and looting, confinement, and gratuitous violence. While these techniques of governance often involve physical confinement and the state-sanctioned execution of black Americans, new carceral modes have blurred the distinction between the inside and outside of prison. As technologies of control are perfected, carcerality tends to bleed into society.
In this collection of essays, Lambda Literary Award-winning writer and longtime activist and performance artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores the politics and realities of disability justice, a movement that centers the lives and leadership of sick and disabled queer, trans, Black, and brown people, with knowledge and gifts for all.
Care Work is a mapping of access as radical love, a celebration of the work that sick and disabled queer/people of color are doing to find each other and to build power and community, and a tool kit for everyone who wants to build radically resilient, sustainable communities of liberation where no one is left behind. Powerful and passionate, Care Work is a crucial and necessary call to arms.
A 1948 sociological analysis of the issues of caste, class, and race relations in the United States and the world
As a formidable critic of some of society's most cherished institutions, such as compulsory education and organised religion, Ivan Illich has attracted world attention. His commitment to a radical humanism against conventional institutions and esatablished ideas of social virtue make for compelling, and convincing, reading. This book brings together for the first time many of his lectures and articles bearing out Illich's invigorating challanges to the status quo.
"Challenging Racism" was a course developed by All London Teachers Against Racism and Fascism(ALTARF). ALTARF was a group active in the 1980s that published materials and newsletters to combat racism in schools. Key strategies include openly discussing racial inequality, creating inclusive learning environments, and ensuring that responsibility for challenging racism does not fall solely on Black staff or students.
This book reflects the changes and developments in ALTARFs approach since the late 1970s and points out the way teachers, school students and schools as institutions can develop effective strategies that fundamentally challenge racism.
To the charity workers, Dadaab refugee camp is a humanitarian crisis; to the Kenyan government, it is a 'nursery for terrorists'; to the western media, it is a dangerous no-go area; but to its half a million residents, it is their last resort.
Situated hundreds of miles from any other settlement, deep within the inhospitable desert of northern Kenya where only thorn bushes grow, Dadaab is a city like no other. Its buildings are made from mud, sticks or plastic, its entire economy is grey, and its citizens survive on rations and luck. Over the course of four years, Ben Rawlence became a first-hand witness to a strange and desperate limbo-land, getting to know many of those who have come there seeking sanctuary. Among them are Guled, a former child soldier who lives for football; Nisho, who scrapes an existence by pushing a wheelbarrow and dreaming of riches; Tawane, the indomitable youth leader; and schoolgirl Kheyro, whose future hangs upon her education.
In City of Thorns, Rawlence interweaves the stories of nine individuals to show what life is like in the camp and to sketch the wider political forces that keep the refugees trapped there. Lucid, vivid and illuminating, here is an urgent human story with deep international repercussions, brought to life through the people who call Dadaab home.
Admired by Charles and Ray Eames, Buckminster Fuller and Saul Bass, Sister Corita Kent (1918–1986) was one of the most innovative and unusual pop artists of the 1960s, battling the political and religious establishments, revolutionizing graphic design and encouraging the creativity of thousands of people – all while living and practising as a Catholic nun in California. Mixing advertising slogans and poetry in her prints and commandeering nuns and students to help make ambitious installations, processions and banners, Sister Corita's work is now recognized as some of the most striking – and joyful – American art of the 60s. But, at the end of the decade and at the height of her fame and prodigious work rate, she left the convent where she had spent her adult life. Julie Ault's book is the first to examine Corita's life and career, containing more than 90 illustrations, many reproduced for the first time, capturing the artist's use of vibrant and day-glo colours.
In a gripping narrative informed by original reporting, Peter Oborne tells how Britain’s Conservative and Labour parties converged to back Israel’s criminal assault—in the process occupying disturbing common ground with the far right.
Rather than challenge this political cartel, British media colluded in its misrepresentations. The shocking result was that, as British authorities helped Israel set Gaza as well as international law aflame, almost everything the public was told about this momentous conflagration was untrue.
When citizens still turned out in their hundreds of thousands to demand a ceasefire, roiling the nation’s politics as they stayed faithful to the ancient British tradition of popular protest in defence of liberty, the political-media machine bared its fangs. The investigative reporting in this book exposes the methods by which peaceful demonstrations were smeared as “hate marches”.
Formerly chief political commentator at the Daily Telegraph and Spectator, Oborne knows the British establishment from within. In this book he names names and provides receipts. His demand is accountability—for atrocities, and their accomplices.
Conserve and Control is written from the margins. Characters who are non-binary, working class, disabled and trans take central place as we are transported to a queer and green paradise that, like all utopias, is not to be trusted.
As a working-class activist and (former) s3x worker, Otter Lieffe brings nuance to the ethics of work, kink, sex and activism. In this, her second novel, she explores what it might mean to really create political change and asks who gets left behind in the process. She invites us to step up and take our place in the struggle and bring our fabulous complexity with us to the front-lines.