Ghosts and Their Hosts: The Colonization of the Invisible World in Early America

Sladja Blažan

Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2024

In this innovative book, Sladja Blažan explains the foundational role of ghost stories in fostering the cultural imaginary, offering a medium for framing political ideologies, philosophical thought, racial anxieties, and social concerns. Ghosts and Their Hosts analyzes American ghost stories, considering their role as a settler colonial tool that emerged to help justify land appropriation and human labor exploitation. Blažan breaks with the long tradition of reading ghosts as harbingers of justice, arguing that early American ghost stories worked instead to suppress the presence of non-Europeans through fantasies of European transcultural incorporation.

Shadow of the Tree

Eric Hounshell & Ruth Amstutz (Eds.)

Zürich: intercom Verlag, 2024

Diagrams have long been used to describe, claim, and produce the relatedness of human individuals and groups, animals, and plants. The tree form seems to have attained particular dominance, both within specific domains of practice and in historical scholarship. This pertains, moreover, to representations of non-organismic entities that draw from and flow back into the broad cultural history of the tree. And yet a wide variety of diagrams have been devised, sometimes in connection with the tree, other times as an explicit alternative, or as a novel or idiosyncratic invention. This volume wishes to bring the variety of diagrammatic forms out from under the “shadow of the tree.”

The Unrealizable: Towards a Politics of Ontology

Giorgio Agamben

London: Seagull Books, 2025

We are so used to distinguishing between the possible and the real, between essence and existence that we do not realize that these distinctions, which seem so obvious to us, are the result of a long and laborious process that has led to the splitting of being—the “matter” of thought—into two fragments that are both conflicting and intimately intertwined. This book argues that the ontological-political machine of the West is based on the splitting of this “matter,” without which neither science nor politics would be possible. 

Ancestral Future

Ailton Krenak

Cambridge: Polity, 2024

In response to the damage caused by centuries of colonial ravaging and the current ecological, political and social crises, the leading Indigenous thinker and activist Ailton Krenak warns against the power of corporate capitalism and its destructive impact. Capitalism encroaches on every corner of the planet and orients us toward a future of promised progress, achievement and growth, but this future doesn’t exist – we just imagine it. If there is a future to imagine, it is ancestral, since it is already present in the here and now and in that which exists around us, in the rivers and mountains and trees that are our kin.

On Cuddling: Loved to Death in the Racial Embrace

Phanuel Antwi

London: Pluto Press, 2024

Ranging from the terrifying embrace of the slave ship's hold to the racist encoding of 'cuddly' toys, On Cuddling is a unique combination of essay and poetry that contends with the way racial violence is enacted through intimacy. Informed by Black feminist and queer poetics, Phanuel Antwi focuses his lens on the suffering of Black people at the hands of state violence and racial capitalism. As radical movements grow to advance Black liberation, so too must our ways of understanding how racial capitalism embraces us all. Antwi turns to cuddling, an act we imagine as devoid of violence, and explores it as a tense transfer point of power.

Through archival documents and multiple genres of writing, it becomes clear that the racial violence of the state and economy has always been about the (mis)management of intimacies, and we should face it with resistance and solidarity.

Trees

Pierre-Édouard Couton (Ed.)

London: Thames & Hudson, 2019

From July 2019 to January 2020, the Fondation Cartier presented Trees, an ambitious exhibition devoted to trees; exceptional living beings with unexpected faculties and yet widely threatened today. The accompanying publication Trees allows readers to discover all of the works presented in the exhibition through almost 500 images, as well as a range of scientific and critical texts. Combining the work of painters, photographers, architects, sculptors, philosophers, botanists and climatology specialists, this publication highlights the beauty, ingenuity and biological wealth of trees.

Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image

Erika Balsom & Hila Peleg (Eds.)

Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2022

This book offers intersectional, intergenerational, and international perspectives on nonfiction film- and videomaking by and about women, examining practices that range from activist documentaries to avant-garde experiments. Concentrating primarily on the period between the 1970s and 1990s, the contributions revisit major figures, contexts, and debates across a polycentric, global geography. They explore how the moving image has been a crucial terrain of feminist struggle—a way of not only picturing the world but remaking it.

The Subversive Seventies

Michael Hardt

New York: Oxford University Press, 2023

In The Subversive Seventies, Michael Hardt sets out to show that popular understandings of the political movements of the seventies—often seen as fractious, violent, and largely unsuccessful—are not just inaccurate, but foreclose valuable lessons for the political struggles of today. While many accounts of the 1970s have been written about the regimes of domination that emerged throughout the decade, Hardt approaches the subversive from the perspectives of those who sought to undermine the base of established authority and transform the fundamental structures of society. A thought-provoking reconsideration of how the revolutionary movements of the 1970s set the mold for today's activism.

Your Body of Water

Siouxzi Connor

London: Repeater Books, 2025

Sex, death, nature and the ‘feminine’: an autofiction romance in four acts.

Your Body of Water is an interweaving of autofiction with hydro-feminist mythologies, exploring via the emotional landscapes of four rivers and four tragic feminine characters (Ophelia, Leda, the Lady of Shalott and Sappho) the author’s own real life journey, with a dose of tongue-in-cheek humour – through coming out in Australia, an abusive relationship in Berlin, and navigating queer love in the context of a world literally burning around us – and finding hope for the future in the stories of her ancestors before her.

Violence, Care, Cure: Self/Perceptions within the Medical Encounter

Marta-Laura Cenedese & Clio Nicastro (Eds.)

Oxford: Routledge, 2025

This book explores the notions of violence, care, and cure within the medical encounter and seeks to foreground the ways in which, whether individually or as a triad, they are prone to ambiguous interpretations. The chapters of this book attend to the complex interlacing of these three key terms and what to make of their entanglement by offering historical, practical, philosophical, personal, and aesthetic analyses of different medical scenes, objects, and concepts. By bringing together different methodological approaches, this volume provides its readers with conceptual resources for thinking about the intersections of violence, care, and cure.