Category: books

by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten
Introduction by Jack Halberstam

In this series of essays Fred Moten and Stefano Harney draw on the theory and practice of the black radical tradition as it supports, inspires, and extends contemporary social and political thought and aesthetic critique. Today the general wealth of social life finds itself confronted by mutations in the mechanisms of control: the proliferation of capitalist logistics, governance by credit, and the management of pedagogy. Working from and within the social poesis of life in the undercommons Moten and Harney develop and expand an array of concepts: study, debt, surround, planning, and the shipped. On the fugitive path of an historical and global blackness, the essays in this volume unsettle and invite the reader to the self-organised ensembles of social life that are launched every day and every night amid the general antagonism of the undercommons.

Edited by Trystan Cotten

Transgender Migrations brings together a top-notch collection of emerging and established scholars to examine the way that the term “migration” can be used not only to look at the way trans bodies migrate from one gender to the (an?) other, but the way that trans people migrate in the larger geopolitical contexts of immigration reform, the war on terror, the war on drugs, and the increased policing of national borders. The book centers trans-ing experiences, identities, and politics, and treats these identities as inextricably intertwined with other social identities, institutions, and discourses of sexuality, nationality, race and ethnicity, globalization, colonialism, and terrorism. The chapter authors explore not only the movement of bodies in, through, and across spaces and borders, but also chart the metamorphoses of these bodies in relation to migration and mobility. Transgender Migrations takes the theory documented in The Transgender Studies Reader and blows it up to a global scale. It is the logical next step for scholarship in this dynamic, emerging field.

by Grada Kilomba

In her book, Grada Kilomba combines both academic writing and lyrical narrative creating a strong new literary style, which is as political and political (scholastic) as it is poetic and emotionally expressive. The book is based on a compilation of episodes of everyday racism written in the form of short psychoanalytical stories.

“‘Plantation Memories’ is a fervent, strong, and elaborated piece, which deconstructs the normality of racism, making visible what is often made invisible. From the question “Where do you come from?” to “How do you wash your hair?”, to the use of the N-word, the author exposes the violence of always being placed as the Other. The book is essential to anyone interested in Black studies, Post-colonial studies, Critical Whiteness, Gender studies and Psychoanalysis.” (Unrast Verlag)

Edited by Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, University of Manchester, UK, Manuela Boatca, Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Germany and Sérgio Costa, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

Decolonizing European Sociology builds on the work challenging the androcentric, colonial and ethnocentric perspectives eminent in mainstream European sociology by identifying and describing the processes at work in its current critical transformation. Divided into sections organized around themes like modernity, border epistemology, migration and ‘the South’, this book considers the self-definition and basic concepts of social sciences through an assessment of the new theoretical developments, such as postcolonial theory and subaltern studies, and whether they can be described as the decolonization of the discipline.

With contributions from a truly international team of leading social scientists, this volume constitutes a unique and tightly focused exploration of the challenges presented by the decolonization of the discipline of sociology.