Deepening political imaginations.
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The internet is the most effective weapon the government has ever built.
In this fascinating …
Not only is it fun to imagine university students protesting computers & trying to smash up the big military research ones on campus, but that's what they were actually doing in 1969!
The internet is the most effective weapon the government has ever built.
In this fascinating …
Content warning genocide
OK, so DARPA (the ARPANET people) are literally the same agency that spread Agent Orange all over Southeast Asia.
The hunt is over. After fifteen years of lies and sacrifice, Baru Cormorant has the …
Not Barhu explaining that a joint-stock company is pretty much a bank and that...lowkey makes sense?
Five essays that form a critique of publishing and call for its abolition in order …
Glad a short book like this exists & hope to find more. Not as analytically incisive as hoped. Not much historical perspective. The u.s.-centrism comes across as unintentional & therefore uncritical. One cool thing is an essay that actually talks practically about how the author runs her press, so it's not entirely polemic & theory. Author's style feels kinda radlib-y overall.
Even more sweeping and heart-wrenching than its 2015 prequel, The Monster Baru Cormorant is the …
Content warning genitalia
The author writes “cock” instead of dick. What the fuck
King of the Rising is the searing conclusion to an unflinching and powerful Caribbean-inspired fantasy series about colonialism, resilience, and …
On the islands of Hans Lollik, Sigourney Rose was the only survivor when her family …
This was a very, very violent book - there is a lot of physical, emotional, & sexual violence. I don't feel "gratuitous" is the right word for it, though, especially after reading the interview with the author that was helpfully included in the back of the ebook, because it confirmed they were thinking of the same themes I was while reading. I found it took me some time to get used to the descriptive style, but once I did I was more or less swept into the pace of events. I found the concluding twist to be well-prepared & felt like the scope was appropriately expanded to set up the next book. Let's see how it goes.
On the islands of Hans Lollik, Sigourney Rose was the only survivor when her family was massacred by the colonizers. …
The story of a left wing which constantly sanctioned global genocide and terror because it …
Labour leaders sure liked describing colonized people as “non-adult races”.
Karen Lord’s debut novel, the multiple-award-winning Redemption in Indigo, announced the appearance of a major …
Intriguing & occasionally confusing. Reads as somewhat episodic & came away with a belief that this would have worked better split into a 26-episode anime than a novel with no images. Much deeper than the publisher's blurb, which casts the central relationship as a tired trope even though it really didn't feel like one, at least not to me. Still haven't decided whether or not to read the sequel.
"Aster has little to offer folks in the way of rebuttal when they call her ogre and freak. She's used …
Severine Brock's first language was Ga, yet it was not surprising when, in 1842, she …
Content warning pedophilia, rape culture
Needs to be stated that the marriage featured in the book description is between a white man in his twenties and a teenage Black girl. He met her when she was 14.
Studies of revolution generally regard peasant popular support as a prerequisite for success. In this study of political mobilization and …
Studies of revolution generally regard peasant popular support as a prerequisite for success. In this …
Never going to think of the phrase "youth in revolt" the same way after reading this book.
Studies of revolution generally regard peasant popular support as a prerequisite for success. In this …
The tone of this book is relentlessly [social] scientific and analytical, presented in an "objective" and "unemotional" style. This, honestly, means that it's important to step back every now and then, because the focus of the work - peasant experiences of trauma amidst a revolution, frequently at the hands of the revolutionaries they're working to support - is intensely subjective and emotional. I don't think it's wrong that the author takes this approach, it's just important to keep in mind what exactly is being described. The material is, arguably, necessarily presented analytically, because what kriger is trying to do is correct a gap in a field of social science (the study of peasant revolutions / guerrilla wars generally and the one that took place in Zimbabwe particularly) that makes its flawed claims on "scientific" grounds. And the project, actually placing the voices of peasant "masses" at the center rather than …
The tone of this book is relentlessly [social] scientific and analytical, presented in an "objective" and "unemotional" style. This, honestly, means that it's important to step back every now and then, because the focus of the work - peasant experiences of trauma amidst a revolution, frequently at the hands of the revolutionaries they're working to support - is intensely subjective and emotional. I don't think it's wrong that the author takes this approach, it's just important to keep in mind what exactly is being described. The material is, arguably, necessarily presented analytically, because what kriger is trying to do is correct a gap in a field of social science (the study of peasant revolutions / guerrilla wars generally and the one that took place in Zimbabwe particularly) that makes its flawed claims on "scientific" grounds. And the project, actually placing the voices of peasant "masses" at the center rather than elites or archives, is a good one. I'm learning a lot from this book.
But the violence discussed is intense, complicated, and much of the time not even directly the violence of the apartheid state!! That's something that should be explicitly mentioned. kriger doesn't go as far as to erase or justify state violence (yet?) but it's not really the focus of this book.