Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun

Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun
Author: Jackie Wang
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2023-11-21
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1635901928

The early writings of renowned poet and critical theorist Jackie Wang, drawn from her early zines, indie-lit crit, and prolific early 2000s blog. Compiled as a field guide, travelogue, essay collection, and weather report, Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun traces Jackie Wang’s trajectory from hard femme to Harvard, from dumpster dives and highway bike rides to dropping out of an MFA program, becoming a National Book Award finalist, and writing her trenchant book Carceral Capitalism. Alien Daughters charts the dream-seeking misadventures of an “odd girl” from Florida who emerged from punk houses and early Tumblr to become the powerful writer she is today. Anarchic and beautifully personal, Alien Daughters is a strange intellectual autobiography that demonstrates Wang’s singular self-education: an early life lived where every day and every written word began like the Tarot’s Fool, with a leap of faith.

Carceral Capitalism

Carceral Capitalism
Author: Jackie Wang
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2018-02-23
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1635900026

Essays on the contemporary continuum of incarceration: the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory policing, the political economy of fees and fines, and algorithmic policing. What we see happening in Ferguson and other cities around the country is not the creation of livable spaces, but the creation of living hells. When people are trapped in a cycle of debt it also can affect their subjectivity and how they temporally inhabit the world by making it difficult for them to imagine and plan for the future. What psychic toll does this have on residents? How does it feel to be routinely dehumanized and exploited by the police? —from Carceral Capitalism In this collection of essays in Semiotext(e)'s Intervention series, Jackie Wang examines the contemporary incarceration techniques that have emerged since the 1990s. The essays illustrate various aspects of the carceral continuum, including the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory policing, the political economy of fees and fines, cybernetic governance, and algorithmic policing. Included in this volume is Wang's influential critique of liberal anti-racist politics, “Against Innocence,” as well as essays on RoboCop, techno-policing, and the aesthetic problem of making invisible forms of power legible. Wang shows that the new racial capitalism begins with parasitic governance and predatory lending that extends credit only to dispossess later. Predatory lending has a decidedly spatial character and exists in many forms, including subprime mortgage loans, student loans for sham for-profit colleges, car loans, rent-to-own scams, payday loans, and bail bond loans. Parasitic governance, Wang argues, operates through five primary techniques: financial states of exception, automation, extraction and looting, confinement, and gratuitous violence. While these techniques of governance often involve physical confinement and the state-sanctioned execution of black Americans, new carceral modes have blurred the distinction between the inside and outside of prison. As technologies of control are perfected, carcerality tends to bleed into society.

Breaking Out

Breaking Out
Author: Padma Desai
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2013-09-13
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0262019973

The brave and moving memoir of a woman's journey of transformation: from a sheltered Indian upbringing to success and academic eminence in America. Padma Desai grew up in the 1930s in the provincial world of Surat, India, where she had a sheltered and strict upbringing in a traditional Gujarati Anavil Brahmin family. Her academic brilliance won her a scholarship to Bombay University, where the first heady taste of freedom in the big city led to tragic consequences—seduction by a fellow student whom she was then compelled to marry. In a failed attempt to end this disastrous first marriage, she converted to Christianity. A scholarship to America in 1955 launched her on her long journey to liberation from the burdens and constraints of her life in India. With a growing self-awareness and transformation at many levels, she made a new life for herself, met and married the celebrated economist Jagdish Bhagwati, became a mother, and rose to academic eminence at Harvard and Columbia. How did she navigate the tumultuous road to assimilation in American society and culture? And what did she retain of her Indian upbringing in the process? This brave and moving memoir—written with a novelist's skill at evoking personalities, places, and atmosphere, and a scholar's insights into culture and society, community, and family—tells a compelling and thought-provoking human story that will resonate with readers everywhere.

The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void

The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void
Author: Jackie Wang
Publisher:
Total Pages: 120
Release: 2021-01-26
Genre:
ISBN: 9781643620367

Jackie Wang's magnetic and spellbinding debut collection of poetry that attempts to speak in the language of dreams.In The Sunflower, Wang follows the sunflower's many dream guises-its evolving symbolism in literature, society, and the author's own dream life using a mathopoetic technique to generate poems using the Fibonacci sequence (a pattern found in the seed spirals of sunflower). The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void embodies what Wang calls oneiric poetry: a poetry that attempts to speak in the language of dreams. Although dreams, in psychoanalytic discourse, have been conceptualized as a window into the unconscious, Wang's poetry emphasizes the social dimension of dreams, particularly the use of dreams to index historical trauma and social processes.

Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters

Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters
Author: Aimee Ogden
Publisher: Tordotcom
Total Pages: 128
Release: 2021-02-23
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1250782139

In Aimee Ogden's Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters, one woman will travel to the stars and beyond to save her beloved in this lyrical space opera that reimagines The Little Mermaid. Gene-edited human clans have scattered throughout the galaxy, adapting themselves to environments as severe as the desert and the sea. Atuale, the daughter of a Sea-Clan lord, sparked a war by choosing her land-dwelling love and rejecting her place among her people. Now her husband and his clan are dying of a virulent plague, and Atuale’s sole hope for finding a cure is to travel off-planet. The one person she can turn to for help is the black-market mercenary known as the World Witch—and Atuale’s former lover. Time, politics, bureaucracy, and her own conflicted desires stand between Atuale and the hope for her adopted clan. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Truth is a Strange Fruit

Truth is a Strange Fruit
Author: David Beresford
Publisher: Jacana Media
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2010
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1770099026

Twice voted Britain's top foreign correspondent, David Beresford has produced a 'word picture' of South Africa's Apartheid War. Borrowing from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and plundering his own journalism, he gives his 'truth' of the apartheid years. He has woven through the book the love letters of John Harris - the 'station bomber', awaiting execution on Pretoria's death row. In combination, these paint an often harrowing and heart-breaking, but brilliant picture of South Africa. -- Cover, p. [4].

Cosmopatriots

Cosmopatriots
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2015-06-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 9401205558

This volume analyzes mediated articulations of “cosmopatriotism” in East and South-East Asian popular cultures and arts. Cosmopatriots navigate between a loyalty to the home country and a sense of longing for and belonging to the world. Rather than searching for the truly globalized cosmopolitans, the authors of this collection look for the postcolonial, rooted cosmopolitans who insist on thinking and feeling simultaneously beyond and within the nation. The cultural sites they discuss include Hong Kong, Indonesia, China, Singapore, the United States, South Korea and Australia. They show how media from both sides of the arbitrary divide between high art and popular culture – including film, literature, the fine arts, radio, music, television and mobile phones – function as vehicles for the creation and expression of, or reflection upon, intersections between patriotism and cosmopolitanism.

Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter, and Beyond

Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter, and Beyond
Author: Ashley Jean Yeager
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2021-08-17
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0262366878

How Vera Rubin convinced the scientific community that dark matter might exist, persevering despite early dismissals of her work. We now know that the universe is mostly dark, made up of particles and forces that are undetectable even by our most powerful telescopes. The discovery of the possible existence of dark matter and dark energy signaled a Copernican-like revolution in astronomy: not only are we not the center of the universe, neither is the stuff of which we’re made. Astronomer Vera Rubin (1928–2016) played a pivotal role in this discovery. By showing that some astronomical objects seem to defy gravity’s grip, Rubin helped convince the scientific community of the possibility of dark matter. In Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter, and Beyond, Ashley Jean Yeager tells the story of Rubin’s life and work, recounting her persistence despite early dismissals of her work and widespread sexism in science. Yeager describes Rubin’s childhood fascination with stars, her education at Vassar and Cornell, and her marriage to a fellow scientist. At first, Rubin wasn’t taken seriously; she was a rarity, a woman in science, and her findings seemed almost incredible. Some observatories in midcentury America restricted women from using their large telescopes; Rubin was unable to collect her own data until a decade after she had earned her PhD. Still, she continued her groundbreaking work, driving a scientific revolution. She received the National Medal of Science in 1993, but never the Nobel Prize—perhaps overlooked because of her gender. She’s since been memorialized with a ridge on Mars, an asteroid, a galaxy, and most recently, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory—the first national observatory named after a woman.

Adulthood Rites

Adulthood Rites
Author: Octavia E. Butler
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2023-03-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1538765470

From the award-winning author of Parable of the Sower:After the near-extinction of the human race, one young man with extraordinary gifts will reveal whether the human race can learn from its past and rebuild their future . . . or is doomed to self-destruction. In the future, nuclear war has destroyed nearly all humankind. An alien race intervenes, saving the small group of survivors from certain death. But their salvation comes at a cost. The Oankali are able to read and mutate genetic code, and they use these skills for their own survival, interbreeding with new species to constantly adapt and evolve. They value the intelligence they see in humankind but also know that the species—rigidly bound to destructive social hierarchies—is destined for failure. They are determined that the only way forward is for the two races to produce a new hybrid species—and they will not tolerate rebellion. Akin looks like an ordinary human child. But as the first true human-alien hybrid, he is born understanding language, then starts to form sentences at two months old. He can see at a molecular level and kill with a touch. More powerful than any human or Oankali, he will be the architect of both races' future. But before he can carry this new species into the stars, Akin must reconcile with his own heritage in a world already torn in two.

Letters and Other Texts

Letters and Other Texts
Author: Gilles Deleuze
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2020-06-23
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1635901278

A posthumous collection of writings by Deleuze, including letters, youthful essays, and an interview, many previously unpublished. Letters and Other Texts is the third and final volume of the posthumous texts of Gilles Deleuze, collected for publication in French on the twentieth anniversary of his death. It contains several letters addressed to his contemporaries (Michel Foucault, Pierre Klossowski, François Châtelet, and Clément Rosset, among others). Of particular importance are the letters addressed to Félix Guattari, which offer an irreplaceable account of their work as a duo from Anti-Oedipus to What is Philosophy? Later letters provide a new perspective on Deleuze's work as he responds to students' questions. his volume also offers a set of unpublished or hard-to-find texts, including some essays from Deleuze's youth, a few unusual drawings, and a long interview from 1973 on Anti-Oedipus with Guattari.