Avery F. Gordon: The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins (2018)

“The Hawthorn Archive, named after the richly fabled tree, has long welcomed the participants in the various Euro-American social struggles against slavery, racial capitalism, imperialism, and authoritarian forms of order. The Archive is not a library or a research collection in the conventional sense but rather a disorganized and fugitive space for the development of a political consciousness of being indifferent to the deadly forms of power that characterize our society. Housed by the Archive are autonomous radicals, runaways, abolitionists, commoners, and dreamers who no longer live as obedient or merely resistant subjects.

In this innovative, genre- and format-bending publication, Avery F. Gordon, the “keeper” of the Archive, presents a selection of its documents—original and compelling essays, letters, cultural analyses, images, photographs, conversations, friendship exchanges, and collaborations with various artists. Gordon creatively uses the imaginary of the Archive to explore the utopian elements found in a variety of resistive and defiant activity in the past and in the present, zeroing in on Marxist critical theory and the black radical tradition. Fusing critical theory with creative writing in a historical context, The Hawthorn Archive represents voices from the utopian margins, where fact, fiction, theory, and image converge.

Reminiscent of the later fictions of Italo Calvino or Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, The Hawthorn Archive is a groundbreaking work that defies strict disciplinary, methodological, and aesthetic boundaries. And like Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, which established Gordon as one of the most influential interdisciplinary scholars of the humanities and social sciences in recent years, it provides a kaleidoscopic analysis of power and effect. The Hawthorn Archive’s experimental format and inventive synthesis of critical theory and creative writing make way for a powerful reconception of what counts as social change and political action, offering creative inspiration and critical tools to artists, activists, scholars across various disciplines, and general readers alike.”

Publisher Fordham University Press, 2018
ISBN 0823276325, 9780823276325
xii+472 pages

Interview with author: Krystian Woznicki (transversal, 2019).

Review: Eddie Bruce-Jones (Race & Class, 2019).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (46 MB)

Decolonizing North (2018)

“The north is not only a geographical expression, it indicates often a power relation based on presumption of superiority. Despite violent border regimes and colonial processes on indigenous populations, northern European countries have scarcely dealt with their self-image of colonial powers. Is decolonization today a possible political project of liberation against this historical prejudice? What is at stake and how should we position ourselves within an imperative process of decolonization in relation to land and knowledge? In particular, how to de-align from the reproduction of oppressive structures and look instead to new alliances between native and migrants’ populations, and towards solidarity practices within art, discourse and immediate locality.

Addressing a range of topics in relation to contemporary colonial forms, inner-nordic colonialization of Sámi and Inuit, reflections on decolonizing terminologies, white supremacy the publication focuses on questions of decoloniality and its meaning for the particularities of North Europe today.”

Contributors: Lesley Ann Brown, Gunilla Larsson, Gurminder K. Bhambra, Ylva Habel, Timea Junghaus, Decolonizing Architecture Advanced Course, Corina Oprea.

Edited by Elof Hellström, Samuel Girma, Corina Oprea, and Alessandro Petti
Publisher Konsthall C, Stockholm, 2017
95 pages

Editors

PDF, PDF (6 MB)

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung: In a While or Two We Will Find the Tone: Essays and Proposals, Curatorial Concepts, and Critiques (2020)

“This collection of writings from Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung presents, for the first time in one volume, essays and proposals edited anew. Ndikung’s expanded curatorial practice delineates the space of exhibition making as a space of critical thinking and of experimentation. By proximity, these texts echo each other, resonate with each other, interfere with each other, and present perspectives on the political, poetic, and philosophical potentials of exhibition making, beyond the tight corset of the discipline itself.”

Compiled by Sunette Viljoen and Federica Bueti
Edited by Chiara Figone and Ines Juster
Publisher Archive Books, Berlin, 2020
Perspectives series
Open access
ISBN 3948212139, 9783948212131
250 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (50 MB)