Andreas Malm, The Zetkin Collective: White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism (2021)

“What does the rise of the far right mean for the battle against climate change?

In the first study of the far right’s role in the climate crisis, White Skin, Black Fuel presents an eye-opening sweep of a novel political constellation, revealing its deep historical roots. Fossil-fuelled technologies were born steeped in racism. No one loved them more passionately than the classical fascists. Now right-wing forces have risen to the surface, some professing to have the solution—closing borders to save the nation as the climate breaks down.

Epic and riveting, White Skin, Black Fuel traces a future of political fronts that can only heat up.”

Publisher Verso Books, London, May 2021
ISBN 9781839761744, 1839761741
xviii+558 pages

Interviews with authors: Walid Mebarek w/ Lise Benoist (El Watan, 2020, FR), Wen Stephenson w/ Andreas Malm (The Nation, 2021).
Reviews: Sophie Chapelle (Basta, 2020, FR), Paul Guillibert (Contretemps, 2020, FR), Alex King (Spectre Journal, 2021).

Publisher (EN)
Publisher (FR)
WorldCat (EN)

EPUB (updated on 2022-11-21)
PDF (added on 2021-8-13 via t-1000)

See also Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021).

October, 174: A Questionnaire on Decolonization (2020)

“The term decolonize has gained a new life in recent art activism, as a radical challenge to the Eurocentrism of museums (in light of Native, Indigenous, and other epistemological perspectives) as well as in the museum’s structural relation to violence (either in its ties to oligarchic trustees or to corporations engaged in the business of war or environmental depredation). In calling forth the mid-twentieth-century period of decolonization as its historical point of reference, the word’s emphatic return is rhetorically powerful, and it corresponds to a parallel interest among scholars in a plural field of postcolonial or global modernisms. The exhortation to decolonize, however, is not uncontroversial-some believe it still carries a Eurocentric bias. Indeed, it has been proposed that, for the West, de-imperialization is perhaps even more urgent than decolonization.

What does the term decolonize mean to you in your work in activism, criticism, art, and/or scholarship? Why has it come to play such an urgent role in the neoliberal West? How can we link it historically with the political history of decolonization, and how does it work to translate postcolonial theory into a critique of the neocolonial contemporary art world?”

Respondents include Nana Adusei-Poku, Brook Andrew, Sampada Aranke, Ian Bethell-Bennett, Kader Attia, Andrea Carlson, Elise Y. Chagas, ISUMA, Iftikhar Dadi, Janet Dees, Nitasha Dhillon, Hannah Feldman, Josh T. Franco, David Garneau, Renee Green, Iman Issa, Arnold J. Kemp, Thomas Lax, Nancy Luxon, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Saloni Mathur, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Alan Michelson, Partha Mitter, Isabela Muci Barradas, Steven Nelson, Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, Alessandro Petti, Paulina Pineda, Christopher Pinney, Elizabeth Povinelli, Ryan Rice, Andrew Ross, Paul Chaat Smith, Nancy Spector, Francoise Verges, Rocio Zambrana, and Joseph R. Zordan.

Edited by Huey Copeland, Hal Foster, David Joselit, and Pamela M. Lee
Publisher MIT Press, Fall 2020
Open access
ISSN 0162-2870
123 pages

Publisher

PDF

Catherine Flood, Gavin Grindon (eds.): Disobedient Objects (2014)

“This book explores the material culture of radical change and protest – from objects familiar to many, such as banners or posters, to the more militant, cunning or technologically cutting-edge, including lock-ons, book-blocs and activist robots. Focusing on social movements since 1980, the book features an introductory essay by the curators examining the history of objects in protest and activism, followed by six essays that look at particular objects, and the contexts in which they are used. It demonstrates how political activism drives a wealth of design ingenuity and collective creativity that defy standard definitions of art and design. Accompanies the V&A exhibition Disobedient Objects, July 2014 to February 2015.”

With essays by Mark Traugott, Anna Feigenbaum, Francesco Raparelli, David Graeber, Nicholas Thoburn, and Ana Longoni.

Publisher V&A Publishing, London, 2014
ISBN 9781851777976, 1851777970
144 pages

Exh. review: Richard Taws (West 86th, 2014).
Book review: Thomas Snow (Object, 2015).

Exhibition
Exhibition blog
WorldCat

PDF (63 MB)