Kodwo Eshun, Anjalika Sagar (eds.): The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective, 1982-1998 (2007)

“The Ghosts of Songs is the first book-length exploration of the work of the Black Audio Film Collective. The collective, founded in 1982 and dissolved in 1998, comprised John Akomfrah, Lina Gopaul, Reece Auguiste, Avril Johnson, Trevor Mathison, Edward George and David Lawson, and for sixteen years their films addressed the social, political and racial crises of Thatcher’s Britain and beyond. However, it would be limiting their achievement to see them either as merely challenging the hegemonic forms of mass media, or conversely as polemicist film activists. In films such as Expeditions, Handsworth Songs, Seven Songs for Malcolm X and Twilight City, the collective explored and developed a black film aesthetic. The essays in this volume, contributed by Jean Fisher, Kodwo Eshun, Kobena Mercer and Okwui Enwezor, argue that they inaugurated themselves as an artist-group, laying claim to the right to reconfigure the space of cinema around the Afrodiasporic subject, reconceptualizing lighting, film stock, developing and printing, and inventing the forms that black cinema might take.”

Publisher Liverpool University Press, and FACT, Liverpool, 2007
Changing Media, Changing Europe series
ISBN 1846310148, 9781846310140
239 pages

Exh. review: Josephine Berry Slater (Mute, 2007).
Review: Alexandra M. Kokoli (The Art Book, 2008).

WorldCat

PDF (62 MB)

Kirsten Grimstad, Susan Rennie (eds.): The New Woman’s Survival Catalog (1973)

“Published in 1973, The New Woman’s Survival Catalog is a seminal survey of Second Wave feminist efforts, which, as the editors noted in their introduction, represented an “active attempt to reshape culture through changing values and consciousness.”

Assembled by Kirsten Grimstad and Susan Rennie in only five months, The New Woman’s Survival Catalog makes a nod to Stewart Brand’s influential Whole Earth Catalog to map a vast network of feminist alternative cultural activity in the 1970s. Grimstad and Rennie set out on a two month road trip in the summer of 1973, meeting and interviewing all the featured organizations and individuals, and gathering information and further references along the way to complete the publication.

From arts organizations to bookstores and independent presses, health, parenting, and rape crisis centers, and educational, legal and financial resources, this book provides crucial insight into feminist initiatives and activism nationwide during the Women’s Movement. Styled as a sales catalog, The New Woman’s Survival Catalog comprises listings and organizational descriptions, articles, and extensive illustrations, as well as a ‘Making the Book’ section, detailing the publication’s production.”

Publisher Coward, McCann & Geoghegan/Berkeley Publishing Corporation, New York, 1973
ISBN 9780698105676, 0698105672
223 pages
via Let’s Re-make, HT falprit

Video interview with editors (2010, edited transcript)
Commentary: Loraine Furter (J Bibliothèque Kandinsky, 2019).

Reprint (2019)
WorldCat

PDF (76 MB)
PDF (hi-res, 468 MB)

Chris Kraus: Aliens & Anorexia (2000)

“Chris Kraus’s second novel defines a female form of chance that is both emotional and radical. Unfolding like a set of Chinese boxes, with storytelling and philosophy informing each other, the novel weaves together the lives of earnest visionaries and failed artists. Its characters include Simone Weil, the first radical philosopher of sadness; the artist Paul Thek; Kraus herself; and “Africa,” Kraus’s virtual S&M partner, who is shooting a big-budget Hollywood film in Namibia while Kraus holes up in the Northwest woods to chronicle the failure of Gravity & Grace, her own low-budget independent film.

In Aliens & Anorexia, Kraus makes a case for empathy as the ultimate perceptive tool, and reclaims anorexia from the psychoanalytic girl-ghetto of poor “self-esteem.” Anorexia, Kraus writes, could be an attempt to leave the body altogether: a rejection of the cynicism that this culture hands us through its food.”

Publisher Semiotext(e), Brooklyn, NY, 2000
Native Agents series
ISBN 1584350016
236 pages

Interview with author (video, 4 min, 2008)
Introduction to new edition by Palle Yourgrau (Bookforum, 2013)

Review: Giovanna Barbara Alesandro (Ark Books, 2017)

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (63 MB, no OCR)