Frantz Fanon: Gender, Torture and the Biopolitics of Colonialism

Azzedine Haddour

London: Pluto Press, 2025

Drawing on archival material, leading Fanon scholar Azzedine Haddour explores the historical developments that determined the colonial consensus and the social transformation prompted by the Algerian liberation struggle. Haddour engages with the biopolitics of French colonialism to support Fanon’s claim that the medical establishment acted in complicity with colonialism. He recounts various assimilationist laws that resulted in the gendering of colonial space and shows how the wars alter the perception of the colonised population through modern Western technologies like the radio.

See Frantz Fanon’s Social Therapy, Symposium, ICI Berlin

Adjusted Margin: Xerography, Art, and Activism in the Late Twentieth Century

Kate Eichhorn

Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2016

This is the story of how the xerographic copier, or “Xerox machine,” became a creative medium for artists and activists during the last few decades of the twentieth century. Xerography democratized print culture by making it convenient and affordable for renegade publishers, zinesters, artists, punks, anarchists, queers, feminists, activists, and others to publish their work and to get their messages out on the street. The xerographic copier adjusted the lived and imagined margins of society, Eichhorn argues, by supporting artistic and political expression and mobilizing subcultural movements.

See A Hundred Years of the Future of the Book, Symposium, ICI Berlin

The Artisans

Madeleine Thien

Zurich: Diaphanes, 2025

Canadian writer Madeleine Thien reflects on a ­fragment of a mural depicting three Uyghur Princes from one of the Bezeklik Caves along the Northern Silk Road, in what is now the Xinjiang Uyghur ­Autonomous Region of China. This most renowned donor portrait of Uyghur-Buddhist art was brought to the Berlin museums following the Second German Turfan Expedition (1904–1905). Thien responds to its vibrant colors and expressive lines with a fictional text, transporting us into the daily lives of the painters who adorned the caves with strikingly lifelike murals in the tenth century. She asks: Is there an autonomous republic of art that transcends time and place?

Locked In and Out

Priya Basil

Zurich: Diaphanes, 2025

Having recently accepted German citizenship, writer and activist Priya Basil explores the Humboldt Forum from a deeply personal perspective. She delves into the question of what such a building, such a project, means for an understanding of the past and our sense of belonging in the present. This much disputed, contested, celebrated monument now exists―but what exactly does it monumentalize?

“In German the word Schloss means a palace, and also a ‘lock.’ The central question: Can a lock also be a key?”

Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital

Marina Vishmidt

Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019

In Speculation as a Mode of Production, Marina Vishmidt offers a new perspective on one of the main categories of capitalist life in the historical present. Writing not under the shadow but in the spirit of Adorno's negative dialectic, her work pursues speculation through its contested terrains of philosophy, finance, and art, to arrive at the most detailed analysis that we now possess of the role of speculation in the shaping of subjectivity by value relations. Speculation as a Mode of Production is an essential, widescreen theorisation of capital's drive to self-expansion, and an urgent corrective to the narrow and one-sided periodisations to which it is most commonly subjected.

Scale Matters: The Quality of Quantity in Human Culture and Sociality

Thomas Widlok & Dores M. Cruz (Eds.)

Bielefeld: transcript, 2022

When conducting research and writing, scholars upscale and downscale. So do the subjects of their work - we scale, they scale. Although scaling is an integrant part of research, we rarely reflect on scaling as a practice and what happens when we engage with it in scholarly work. The contributors aim to change this: they explore the pitfalls and potentials of scaling in an interdisciplinary dialogue. The volume brings together scholars from diverse fields, working on different geographical areas and time periods, to engage with scale-conscious questions regarding human sociality, culture, and evolution. Also Open Access.

Living in the City: Of Cities, People and Stories

Lukas Feireiss, Tatjana Schneider & TheGreenEyl

Leipzig: Spector Books, 2020

Cities are full of stories—running in parallel, contradictory, overlapping and inseparably linked. Such stories are told in Living the City by referencing various projects from architecture, art, and urban planning. The book aims to show processes and possibilities for action in cities based on more than fifty projects from all over Europe. The publication first looks at urbanites before expanding into emotionally and poetically charged stories that consider very basic activities such as loving, living, moving, working, learning, playing, dreaming, and participating in the city.

The Juridification of Democracy: How Politics Travels from the Streets to the Courts, and Back Again

Natascia Tosel

London: Pluto Books, 2025

This book examines what it identifies as an increasing juridification of politics. This term refers to the use of law by both state and non-state social actors to advance their political demands and strategies.  Combining theoretical inquiry with case studies of human rights adjudication, Natascia Tosel reveals how courts have become arenas of political struggle where the supralegal values of democracy are named, claimed, and contested, and how this process reverberates far beyond the courtroom, supplementing rather than supplanting democratic decision-making.