Queer Ancient Ways advocates a profound unlearning of colonial/modern categories as a pathway to the discovery of new forms and theories of queerness in the most ancient of sources. In this radically unconventional work, Zairong Xiang investigates scholarly receptions of mythological figures in Babylonian and Nahua creation myths, exposing the ways they have consistently been gendered as feminine in a manner that is not supported, and in some cases actively discouraged, by the texts themselves. An exercise in decolonial learning-to-learn from non-Western and non-modern cosmologies, Xiang's work uncovers a rich queer imaginary that had been all-but-lost to modern thought, in the process critically revealing the operations of modern/colonial systems of gender/sexuality and knowledge-formation that have functioned, from the Conquista de America in the sixteenth century to the present, to keep these systems in obscurity.

At the heart of Xiang's argument is an account of the way the unfounded feminization of figures such as the Babylonian (co)creatrix Tiamat, and the Nahua creator-figures Tlaltecuhtli and Coatlicue, is complicit with their monstrification. This complicity tells us less about the mythologies themselves than about the dualistic system of gender and sexuality within which they have been studied, underpinned by a consistent tendency in modern/colonial thought to insist on unbridgeable categorical differences.

By contextualizing these deities in their respective mythological, linguistic, and cultural environments, through a unique combination of methodologies and critical traditions in English, Spanish, French, Chinese, and Nahuatl, Xiang departs from the over-reliance of much contemporary queer theory on European (post)modern thought. Much more than a queering of the non-Western and non-modern, Queer Ancient Ways thus constitutes a decolonial and transdisciplinary engagement with ancient cosmologies and ways of thought which are in the process themselves revealed as theoretical sources of and for the queer imagination.

There is nothing more alienating than having your pleasures disputed by someone with a theory, writes Lauren Berlant. Yet the ways in which we live sexuality and intimacy have been profoundly shaped by theories - especially psychoanalytic ones, which have helped to place sexuality and desire at the center of the modern story about what a person is and how her history should be read. At the same time, other modes of explanation have been offered by popular and mass culture. In these domains, sexual desire is not deemed the core story of life; it is mixed up with romance, a particular version of the story of love.

In this small theoretical novella-cum-dictionary entry, Lauren Berlant engages love and desire in separate entries. In the first entry, Desire mainly describes the feeling one person has for something else: it is organized by psychoanalytic accounts of attachment, and tells briefly the history of their importance in critical theory and practice. The second entry, on Love, begins with an excursion into fantasy, moving away from the parent-child structure so central to psychoanalysis and looking instead at the centrality of context, environment, and history. The entry on Love describes some workings of romance across personal life and commodity culture, the place where subjects start to think about fantasy on behalf of their actual lives.

Whether viewed psychoanalytically, institutionally, or ideologically, love is deemed always an outcome of fantasy. Without fantasy, there would be no love. Desire/Love takes us on a tour of all of the things that sentence might mean.

There is much to like about a book which gets real about the male anus as a site of penetrability which is not reducible to discourses of feminization, phallicization or psychosis. With real panache and poetic flair, it returns us to an earlier moment in queer theoretical discourse we would associate with Lee Edelman's Homographesis (easily the best book ever written in queer theory and every page of The Penetrated Male reminded me of it), Calvin Thomas' Male Matters, and Leo Bersani's Is the Rectum a Grave? Given the recent squeamishness ... in queer theoretical circles about shit, anality, and penetrability, there is real value (and it is not some sort of nostalgia for an earlier moment we might want to get back to) in this book which never shies away from any of these matters. As embodied and eroticized theory, it fills a much needed hole in contemporary discourse about the male body. It is a book I should like to have written. (Michael O'Rourke)

Through nuanced readings of a handful of modernist texts (Baudelaire, Huysmans, Wilde, Genet, Joyce, and Schreber's Memoirs), this book explores and interrogates the figure of the penetrated male body, developing the concept of the behind as a site of both fascination and fear. Deconstructing the penetrated male body and the genderisation of its representation, The Penetrated Male offers new understandings of passivity, suggesting that the modern masculine subject is predicated on a penetrability it must always disavow. Arguing that representation is the embodiment of erotic thought, it is an important contribution to queer theory and our understandings of gendered bodies.

At once memoir, theory, poetic prose, and fragment, NO ARCHIVE WILL RESTORE YOU is a feverish meditation on the body. Departing from Antonio Gramsci's summons to compile an inventory of the historical traces left in each of us, Singh engages with both the impossibility and urgent necessity of crafting an archive of the body. Through reveries on the enduring legacies of pain, desire, sexuality, race, and identity, she asks us to sense and feel what we have been trained to disavow, to re-member the body as more than itself.

I am in love with this book. It is so smart, so lucid, so necessary, so honest, so compelling, so edifying, so terrifying, so poignant, so wise. No archive may restore us, but Julietta Singh is exactly the kind of company I want for the ride, to bear witness to the pains and pleasures of our being here, in these bodies, in these times. Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts

If Gramsci proposes the task of archiving - and analyzing - the detritus that history has deposited in us, Julietta Singh has a counter-proposition for what to do with that depository. What to call her method: Anarchivist? Gynarchivist? Though steeped in theory, it's adamantly corporeal, and deeply moving. Returning to various crime scenes, she examines the traces left upon her body by ravages historical, political, physical and sentimental. But she also courageously accounts for the shit she herself produces: 'I want to be responsible to and for my body, for everything it yields.' Attending carefully, even lovingly, to all that's come into and out of her body - food, pain, flesh, life, feces, feral moans, poetry - she invites you, reader, to take stock of the fecundity of your own dis-ordered archive. Barbara Browning, author of The Gift

Disability justice and ecojustice rarely are spoken in the same mouthful but are in constant conversation in our world. This mixed-genre manuscript of poetry and lyrical essay doesn't contain just one point of view but encompasses dialectical perspectives which often exist in contradiction to each other. A disabled person is in need of plastic cups and concerned about the overwhelming plastic in our ecosystems. Rituals for Climate Change: A Crip Struggle for Ecojustice expands on and complicates who is seen as an environmentalist and what being in relationship with the land can look like.

This book is an offering to explore the spiritual question of how to witness. It serves as a companion to those also grappling with the difficult and often unanswerable questions posed by climate change in the borderlands. By exploring the ways body, mind, and cultures both clash with and long for ecojustice, Rituals for Climate Change offers an often-overlooked perspective on climate-grief, interdependence, and resilience. Disabled people know how to adapt to a world that is ever changing without considering us.

Naomi Ortiz (they/she) is a poet, writer, and visual artist whose intersectional work focuses on self-care for activists, disability justice, climate action, and relationship with place. They are the author of Sustaining Spirit: Self-Care for Social Justice (Reclamation Press), a nonfiction book that delves into self-care tools and strategies for diverse communities. Their poetry/prose collection, Rituals for Climate Change: A Crip Struggle for Ecojustice (punctum books) explores how climate change impacts connection to place, expands on and complicates who is seen as an environmentalist, and reimagines relationship with the land. Ortiz is a Border Narrative Grant awardee for their multidisciplinary project Complicating Conversations. They are a 2022 Disability Futures Fellow and a Zoeglossia Poetry Fellow whose poems have been nominated for Best of the Internet and listed on Entropy's Best of 2020-2021: Favorite Poems Published Online. Ortiz emphasizes interdependence, inclusion, and spiritual growth in their talks, workshops, poetry, and writing. Ortiz first performed their poetry at the 2004 Inaugural Disability Pride Parade in Chicago and has continued at events across the country. As a Disabled Mestizx living in the Arizona U.S./Mexico borderlands, they are passionate about organizing with the Southern Arizona Community Care Collective/Colectivo de Beinestar Comunitario.

What do we do when we read? Reading can be an act of consumption or an act of creation. Our work reading overlaps with our pleasure reading, and yet these two modes of reading engage with different parts of the self. It is sometimes passive, sometimes active, and can even be an embodied form.

The contributors to this volume share their own histories of reading in order to reveal the shared pleasure that lies in this most solitary of acts - which is also, paradoxically, the act of most complete plenitude. Many of the contributors engage in academic writing, and several publish in other genres, including poetry and fiction; some contributors maintain an active online presence. All are engaged with reading's capacity to stimulate and excite as well as to frustrate and confuse. The synergies and tensions of online reading and print reading animate these thirteen contributions, generating a sense of shared community. Together, the authors open their libraries to us. This is how we read.

Table of Contents //

Suzanne Conklin Akbari / Introduction: Practicing Reading, Reading PracticeIrina Dumitrescu / Reading LessonsAnna Wilson / I Like Knowing What is Going to HappenSuzanne Conklin Akbari / Read It Out LoudJessica Hammer / From When We ReadLochin Brouillard / De Vita Lochini, or Commentary on a Life of ReadingChris Piuma / How I ReadStephanie Bahr / How I Read, a History; or 'San Francisco Banking Contains No Trans Fats'Alexandra Atiya / Text to SpeechJonathan Hsy / Phantom SoundsKirsty Schut / On Not Being a Voracious ReaderKaitlin Heller / Sleeping Under the MountainJennifer Jordan / Reading to Forget, Reading to RememberBrantley Bryant / Best Practice Tips and Strategies for Academic Reading to Maximize Your Time and ProductivityKaitlin Heller / Afterword: The Parlor Scene

KAITLIN HELLER is a postdoctoral fellow at Syracuse University and a former assistant editor at Del Rey Books. Between teaching courses on folklore and medievalism, Heller designs games, watches Midsomer Murders, and does the bidding of one large cat.

SUZANNE CONKLIN AKBARI is Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, but would rather be working on her new project on medieval ideas of periodization, The Shape of Time, and/or lying on the beach in North Truro. Her books include Seeing Through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory (Toronto, 2004), Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100-1450 (Cornell, 2009), and four collections of essays, including How We Write: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blank Page (punctum, 2015). She is also a co-editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature (4th ed.), and a master of structured procrastination.

Queer communal kinship is a long overdue replacement for the naturalized model of the modern western family; a post-capitalist regime of social reproduction, aiming for redistributive justice through the politics of pleasure; a timely proposal for the demise of possessive and accumulative ideology, and the upsurge of a counter-imaginary; a manifesto for the collectivization of reproductive labor; an ethical conceptual framework for a joyful cultural shift: Queer Communal Kinship Now!

This manifesto pushes for a radical redefinition of love, intimacy, and care in support of a much needed redistributive justice movement. This project must be accompanied by an exit from heteronormativity as a regime of relational scarcity, as well as from the metaphysics of private property which is at the heart of our economies and by extension of our social ecologies -- at odds with much of life on this planet. Queer Communal Kinship Now! examines the role of western normative family ideals in the mechanisms of the preservation and intensification of this status quo, as well as potential approaches to guide us out of this unsavory situation.

Both handbook and personal narrative, Queer Communal Kinship Now! discusses the conceptual leaps required to emancipate ourselves from the conventional western family model, towards different regimes of bonding, care, and attention, to allow us to imagine a different type of social reality driven by queer and feminist ethical concerns. Directed to those interested in building queer families and wondering how not to repeat the mistakes of their parents, Queer Communal Kinship Now! offers radical ways of rethinking being together.

Robinou is an artist and theoretician whose work focuses on gender deconstruction and the questioning of heteronormativity. Their current research is articulated around notions of queer kinship and domesticity, with a focus on communal experimentation. Their literary practice consists of utopian theory, developing conceptual frameworks, regimes of attention, and narratives of emancipation from normative thinking. As a performer, they shape affective spaces of intimacy and care, events of collective world-making which re-actualize sensibility and imagination in our relational landscape.

Antiracism Inc. traces the ways people along the political spectrum appropriate, incorporate, and neutralize antiracist discourses to perpetuate injustice. It also examines the ways organizers continue to struggle for racial justice in the context of such appropriations. Antiracism Inc. reveals how antiracist claims can be used to propagate racism, and what we can do about it.

While related to colorblind, multicultural, and diversity discourses, the appropriation of antiracist rhetoric as a strategy for advancing neoliberal and neoconservative agendas is a unique phenomenon that requires careful interrogation and analysis. Those who co-opt antiracist language and practice do not necessarily deny racial difference, biases, or inequalities. Instead, by performing themselves conservatively as non-racists or liberally as 'authentic' antiracists, they purport to be aligned with racial justice even while advancing the logics and practices of systemic racism.

Antiracism Inc. considers new ways of struggling toward racial justice in a world that constantly steals and misuses radical ideas and practices. The critical essays, interviews, and poetry collected here focus on people and methods that do not seek inclusion in the hierarchical order of gendered racial capitalism. Rather, they focus on aggrieved peoples who have always had to negotiate state violence and cultural erasure, but who also work to build the worlds they envision. These collectivities seek to transform social structures and establish a new social warrant guided by what W.E.B. Du Bois called abolition democracy, a way of being and thinking that privileges people, mutual interdependence, and ecological harmony over individualist self-aggrandizement and profits. Further, these aggrieved collectivities reshape social relations away from the violence and alienation inherent to gendered racial capitalism, and towards the well-being of the commons. Antiracism Inc. articulates methodologies that strive toward freedom dreams without imposing monolithic or authoritative definitions of resistance. Because power seeks to neutralize revolutionary action through incorporation as much as through elimination, these freedom dreams, as well as the language used to articulate them, are constantly transformed through the critical and creative interventions stemming from the active engagement in liberation struggles.

In addition to critical essays by Felice Blake (How Does Black Cultural Criticism 'Work' in the Age of Antiracist Incorporation?), Kevin Fellezs (Nahenahe [Soft, Sweet, Melodious], the Sound of Kanaka Maoli [Native Hawaiian] Refusal), Daniel Martinez HoSang (A Wider Type of Freedom), Paula Ioanide (Defensive Appropriations), George Lipsitz (The Logic of 'Illogical' Opposition: Tools and Tactics for Tough Times), Alison Reed (Gentrifying Disciplines: The Institutional Management of Trauma and Creative Dissent), Phia S. Salter + Glenn Adams (Provisional Strategies for Decolonizing Consciousness), and Barbara Tomlinson (Wicked Problems and Intersectionality Telephone), the volume also includes poetry by Dubian Ade, Jari Bradley, Dahlak Brathwaite, Corinne Contreras, Ebony P. Donnley, Colin Masashi Ehara, David Scott (YDS), Daniel Hershel Silber-Baker, and Sophia Terazawa, as well as interviews with Diana Zuñiga (CURB, Californians United for a Responsible Budget) and with Gaby Hernandez and Marissa Garcia (PODER, People Organizing for the Defense and Equal Rights of Santa Barbara Youth).

Essays, articles, artworks, and documents taken from and inspired by the symposium on Reza Negarestani's Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, which took place in March 2011 at The New School. Hailed by novelists, philosophers, artists, cinematographers, and designers, Cyclonopedia is a key work in the emerging domains of speculative realism and theory-fiction. The text has attracted a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary audience, provoking vital debate around the relationship between philosophy, geopolitics, geophysics, and art. At once a work of speculative theology, a political samizdat, and a philosophic grimoire, Cyclonopedia is a Deleuzo-Lovecraftian middle-eastern Odyssey populated by archeologists, jihadis, oil smugglers, Delta Force officers, heresiarchs, and the corpses of ancient gods. Playing out the book's own theory of creativity - a confusion in which no straight line can be traced or drawn between creator and created - original inauthenticity - this multidimensional collection both faithfully interprets the text and realizes it as a loving, perforated host of fresh heresies. The volume includes an incisive contribution from the author explicating a key figure of the novel: the cyclone.

CONTENTS: Robin Mackay, A Brief History of Geotrauma - McKenzie Wark, An Inhuman Fiction of Forces - Benjamin H. Bratton, Root the Earth: On Peak Oil Apophenia - Alisa Andrasek, Dustism - Zach Blas, Queerness, Openness - Melanie Doherty, Non-Oedipal Networks and the Inorganic Unconscious - Anthony Sciscione, Symptomatic Horror: Lovecraft's 'The Colour Out of Space' - Kate Marshall, Cyclonopedia as Novel (a meditation on complicity as inauthenticity) - Alexander R. Galloway, What is a Hermeneutic Light? - Eugene Thacker, Black Infinity; or, Oil Discovers Humans - Nicola Masciandaro, Gourmandized in the Abattoir of Openness - Dan Mellamphy & Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, Phileas Fogg, or the Cyclonic Passepartout: On the Alchemical Elements of War - Ben Woodard, The Untimely (and Unshapely) Decomposition of Onto-Epistemological Solidity: Negarestani's Cyclonopedia as Metaphysics - Ed Keller, . . .Or, Speaking with the Alien, a Refrain. . . - Lionel Maunz, Receipt of Malice - yk Tekten, Symposium Photographs - Reza Negarestani, Notes on the Figure of the Cyclone

The idea of the Anthropocene often generates an overwhelming sense of abjection or apathy. It occupies the imagination as a set of circumstances that counterpose individual human actors against ungraspable scales and impossible odds. There is much at stake in how we understand the implications of this planetary imagination, and how to plot paths from this present to other less troubling futures. With Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon, the editors aim at a resource helpful for this task: a catalog of ways to pluralize and radicalize our picture of the Anthropocene, to make it speak more effectively to a wider range of contemporary human societies and circumstances. Organized as a lexicon for troubled times, each entry in this book recognizes the gravity of the global forecasts that invest the present with its widespread air of crisis, urgency, and apocalyptic possibility. Each also finds value in smaller scales of analysis, capturing the magnitude of an epoch in the unique resonances afforded by a single word.

The Holocene may have been the age in which we learned our letters, but we are faced now with circumstances that demand more experimental plasticity. Alternative ways of perceiving a moment can bring a halt to habitual action, opening a space for slantwise movements through the shock of the unexpected. Each small essay in this lexicon is meant to do just this, drawing from anthropology, literary studies, artistic practice, and other humanistic endeavors to open up the range of possible action by contributing some other concrete way of seeing the present. Each entry proposes a different way of conceiving this Earth from some grounded place, always in a manner that aims to provoke a different imagination of the Anthropocene as a whole.

The Anthropocene is a world-engulfing concept, drawing every thing and being imaginable into its purview, both in terms of geographic scale and temporal duration. Pronouncing an epoch in our own name may seem the ultimate act of apex species self-aggrandizement, a picture of the world as dominated by ourselves. Can we learn new ways of being in the face of this challenge, approaching the transmogrification of the ecosphere in a spirit of experimentation rather than catastrophic risk and existential dismay? This lexicon is meant as a site to imagine and explore what human beings can do differently with this time, and with its sense of peril.

Cymene Howe is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and founding faculty of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences (CENHS) at Rice University. She is the author of Intimate Activism (Duke, 2013) and Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (Duke, 2019). Cymene was co-editor for the journal Cultural Anthropology and the Johns Hopkins Guide to Social Theory, and she co-hosts the weekly Cultures of Energy podcast.

Anand Pandian is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. He is author of Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation (Duke, 2015) and Crooked Stalks: Cultivating Virtue in South India (Duke, 2009), among other book, as well as the co-editor of Race, Nature and the Politics of Difference (Duke, 2003) and Crumpled Paper Boat (Duke, 2017).

The field of disability studies significantly contributes to contemporary discussions of the marginalization of and social justice for individuals with disabilities. However, what of disability in the past? The Medieval Disability Sourcebook: Western Europe explores what medieval texts have to say about disability, both in their own time and for the present.

This interdisciplinary volume on medieval Europe combines historical records, medical texts, and religious accounts of saints' lives and miracles, as well as poetry, prose, drama, and manuscript images to demonstrate the varied and complicated attitudes medieval societies had about disability. Far from recording any monolithic understanding of disability in the Middle Ages, these contributions present a striking range of voices-to, from, and about those with disabilities-and such diversity only confirms how disability permeated (and permeates) every aspect of life.

The Medieval Disability Sourcebook is designed for use inside the undergraduate or graduate classroom or by scholars interested in learning more about medieval Europe as it intersects with the field of disability studies. Most texts are presented in modern English, though some are preserved in Middle English and many are given in side-by-side translations for greater study. Each entry is prefaced with an academic introduction to disability within the text as well as a bibliography for further study. This sourcebook is the first in a proposed series focusing on disability in a wide range of premodern cultures, histories, and geographies.

Every body contains multitudes, but no body is immune to the ideology of oneness: one true self, one sexuality, one gender, one vision of the world, one true God. For many who identify (or who have been named by others) as transgender, queer, and nonbinary, the refusal to fit within the illusion of one set of sex and gender expectations has been met with violence and suppression. While the myth of oneness is a powerful story that shapes the contours of our societies and our selves, it is not the only myth. Performances, fictions, rituals, and theologies can transform current realities.

The(y)ology: Mythopoetics for Queer/Trans Liberation is a manifesto for artists, teachers, theologians, clergy, and activists looking for ways to resist rigid paradigms of gender, sexuality, self, and the sacred. In these pages, we are called to tell new stories about who we are and how we relate to each other within our ecosystems. The myths discussed wrestle with and transform the complex mytho-histories that have birthed and, often, harmed us. No story comes from nothing, and, more radically, perhaps no story is fully irredeemable.

In The(y)ology, feminist philosophies join with trans poetics, literary theory with liberation theologies, drag performance with kabbalah, ecologies with pornographies, and ancient theater with queer autobiographies. However ambitious its scope might be, The(y)ology is fundamentally about encouraging us all to think playfully and to play thoughtfully with the mythologies that define our lives.

Max Yeshaye Brumberg-Kraus is a poet, playwright, drag artist, and independent scholar living in Saint Paul, Minnesota. They are the co-founder of the House of Larva Drag Co-operative, performing as drag ogress Çicada L'Amour, producing one acts, full-length shows, and cabarets since 2014. In and out of drag, Max has performed at the Guthrie Theatre, Pangea World Theatre, 20% Theatre, In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre, Rimon (The Minnesota Jewish Arts Council), the Rochester Arts Center, and have also directed a full length show (Circe: Twilight of a Goddess) with Siren Island in Point San Pablo, California. After majoring in classics and theatre at Beloit College, they received their MA in Theology and the Arts from United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities. Max is former fellow and facilitator with Arts Religion Culture (ARC), and a member of the Green Sabbath Project. They are currently pursuing their MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College, with a focus on queerness and the medieval imagination.

An experimental hybrid work, Cycle of Dreams pairs translation and original poetry. The translations, or adaptations, are of William Langland's strange and wild fourteenth-century dream vision, Piers Plowman, a politically radical English and Latin poem written in the wake of plague and divided into a prologue and twenty passūs or steps. Eric Weiskott transposes the action from London and Worcestershire to New England and Long Island. The translations refashion and modernize Piers Plowman by disarticulating its continuous shape and rearticulating it as a collection of lyrics. The translation appears on the left and original poetry on the right in each page opening, so that the fourteenth and twenty-first centuries speak to one another as in a dream.

Like Piers Plowman itself in manuscript culture, Cycle of Dreams attracts paratexts. Images illustrate the absent presence of Langland's authorship. A series of glosses or marginal notes grounds the poems in critical theory, etymologies, lyric reminiscences, and statistics reflecting the desperation of our economic moment. An oneirography or dreamed bibliography names some of the scholarship that supports study of Piers Plowman today and some other sources for Langlandian fever dreams.

Langland can address us today, not in the voice of a bygone author whose context must be arduously rearticulated in the laboratories of scholarly endeavor, but one whose utopian vision is in its broad outlines no less urgent in 2024 than it was in 1381, when English rebels used Langland's title figure as a rallying cry for insurrection. Cycle of Dreams unearths buried dreams / of a future adequate to the present tense.

Eric Weiskott is a poet and teacher who lives in Brookline, Massachusetts. Author most recently of the poetry chapbook Chanties (Bottlecap Press, 2023) and the scholarly monograph Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650 (Penn, 2021), Eric is also co-editor of the Yearbook of Langland Studies.

The convenient myth of Wilhelm Reich is that he lost his mind in the early 1950s, if not before, and that the last seven years of his life and work - the orgone and radiation experiments, the cloudbuster, and flying saucer intrigues - present an embarrassment. Even the counterculture that embraced Reich, not least William S. Burroughs, Norman Mailer, and filmmaker Dusan Makavejev, tended to distort his theory. The psychosis attached to Reich by his detractors was the culmination of decades of scapegoating by psychoanalysts, Nazis, communists, and conservatives. But Reich's environmental and Cold War preoccupations and his slow-burning fascination with UFO phenomena were not signs of a madness incipient since his break with Sigmund Freud. They anticipated and reflected much in the American psyche.

Defining the presence of a cinematic self in the misunderstood analyst once considered an heir to Freud, Wilhelm Reich versus the Flying Saucers rejects orthodox portrayals of Reich's final years as merely pathological. Combining original analysis and evidence from the Wilhelm Reich Archive, James Reich uncovers the fatal moments in the psychologist's uncanny identification with the spaceman, and the myth of a scientist lost to his own grandiosity and paranoia. Taking seriously the influence of The Day the Earth Stood Still, Bad Day at Black Rock, and other pop cultural narratives on Reich, this psychoanalytic detective story concerns existential traps, conscious and unconscious collaborations and betrayals by disciples, and unidentified flying object-relations. Reich's is an atomic-age passion narrative. Vitally, Reich's story could be ours. The author is not related to his subject.

James Reich is a novelist, essayist, and journalist. He is the author of The Moth for the Star (7.13 Books, 2023), The Song My Enemies Sing (Anti-Oedipus, 2018), Soft Invasions (Anti-Oedipus, 2017), Mistah Kurtz! A Prelude to Heart of Darkness (Anti-Oedipus, 2016), I, Judas (Soft Skull, 2011), and Bombshell (Soft Skull, 2013). His account of innovations in British science fiction is published by Bloomsbury in its Decades series, The 1960s. His nonfiction has also appeared in Salon, SPIN Magazine, The Huffington Post, International Times, and other literary and cultural publications. Reich was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire in the West of England, and has been a resident of Santa Fe, New Mexico since 2009. He was greatly influenced by early exposure to the poetry of Dylan Thomas, and by a small book on dadaism, and later by Andy Warhol, the Beats, science fiction, psychoanalysis, punk rock, and the films of Ken Russell and Nic Roeg. Norman Mailer, Sylvia Plath, J.G. Ballard, Anne Sexton, Paul Bowles, D.H. Lawrence, and Lars von Trier are also vital constellations in his work. He has a Master's degree in Ecopsychology from Naropa University.

Anything that can be automated, will be. The magic that digital technology has brought us - self-driving cars, Bitcoin, high frequency trading, the internet of things, social networking, mass surveillance, the 2009 housing bubble - has not been considered from an ideological perspective. The Critique of Digital Capitalism identifies how digital technology has captured contemporary society in a reification of capitalist priorities, and also describes digital capitalism as an ideologically invisible framework that is realized in technology. Written as a series of articles between 2003 and 2015, the book provides a broad critical scope for understanding the inherent demands of capitalist protocols for expansion without constraint (regardless of social, legal or ethical limits) that are increasingly being realized as autonomous systems that are no longer dependent on human labor or oversight and implemented without social discussion of their impacts. The digital illusion of infinite resources, infinite production, and no costs appears as an end to scarcity, whereby digital production supposedly eliminates costs and makes everything equally available to everyone. This fantasy of production without consumption hides the physical costs and real-world impacts of these technologies.

The critique introduced in this book develops from basic questions about how digital technologies directly change the structure of society: why is Digital Rights Management not only the dominant solution for distributing digital information, but also the only option being considered? During the burst of the Housing Bubble burst 2009, why were the immaterial commodities being traded of primary concern, but the actual physical assets and the impacts on the people living in them generally ignored? How do surveillance (pervasive monitoring) and agnotology (culturally induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data) coincide as mutually reinforcing technologies of control and restraint? If technology makes the assumptions of its society manifest as instrumentality - then what ideology is being realized in the form of the digital computer? This final question animates the critical framework this analysis proposes.

Digital capitalism is a dramatically new configuration of the historical dynamics of production, labor and consumption that results in a new variant of historical capitalism. This contemporary, globalized network of production and distribution depends on digital capitalism's refusal of established social restraints: existing laws are an impediment to the transcendent aspects of digital technology. Its utopian claims mask its authoritarian result: the superficial objectivity of computer systems are supposed to replace established protections with machinic function - the uniform imposition of whatever ideology informs the design. However, machines are never impartial: they reify the ideologies they are built to enact. The critical analysis of capitalist ideologies as they become digital is essential to challenging this process. Contesting their domination depends on theoretical analysis. This critique challenges received ideas about the relationship between labor, commodity production and value, in the process demonstrating how the historical Marxist analysis depends on assumptions that are no longer valid. This book therefore provides a unique, critical toolset for the analysis of digital capitalist hegemonics.

Over the past several years, scholars, activists, and analysts have begun to examine the growing divide between the wealthy and the rest of us, suggesting that the divide can be traced to the neoliberal turn. I'm not a business man; I'm a business, man. Perhaps no better statement gets at the heart of this turn. Increasingly we're being forced to think of ourselves in entrepreneurial terms, forced to take more and more responsibility for developing our human capital. Furthermore a range of institutions from churches to schools to entire cities have been remade, restructured to in order to perform like businesses. Finally, even political concepts like freedom, and democracy have been significantly altered.

As a result we face higher levels of inequality than any other time over the last century. In Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics, Lester K. Spence writes the first book length effort to chart the effects of this transformation on African American communities, in an attempt to revitalize the black political imagination. Rather than asking black men and women to hustle harder Spence criticizes the act of hustling itself as a tactic used to demobilize and disempower the communities most in need of empowerment.

This book touches at hot stuff. Not only have we 'never been modern' (Latour) or postmodern, but even not so contemporary. C.B. Johnson offers a glimpse into what is, at best, a strange and Utopian, millenaristic condition (Agamben), at worst, an arrogant attempt on the part of power to put an end to the flow of time. (Franco La Cecla, author of Against Architecture)

Entering the 21st century, the postmodern succession has given way to a doom-laden, apolitical orthodoxy. This book offers suggestive readings of the contemporary in light of high modernity, postwar modernity, and postmodernity, as framed by the influential institutions of modern art and the spectacles of millennial architecture. Modernity without a Project critiques and connects historical avant-garde currents as they are institutionally expressed or captured, and scrutinizes the remake of New York's Museum of Modern Art, Minoru Yamasaki's vanished Utopias, the anarchitecture of Lebbeus Woods, recent work of Rem Koolhaas, delirious developments in Dubai, and the unexpected contribution to architectural debate by the late Hugo Chavez.

This book makes an important contribution in defining and evaluating the alternative concept of 'contemporaneity' . . . . Scholars and students of modernism, of museum history and of modern architecture in general will find Modernity without a Project highly relevant and stimulating. (Bart Verschaffel, Professor of Architecture at Ghent University)

This provocative and interesting book argues that the celebratory discourse of 'the contemporary' is not as innocent as it seems, but is geared towards cancelling out or negating the capital-unfriendly scepticism of modernism and postmodernism. This study contributes significantly to the field of what might be termed critical cultural studies, particularly with regard to the understanding of art and architecture as they are mobilised in the first part of the 21st century. (Professor Ian Buchanan, Director of the Institute for Social Transformation Research, University of Wollongong)

Benjamin Christensen's 1922 Swedish/Danish film H xan (known under its English title as Witchcraft Through the Ages) has entranced, entertained, shocked, and puzzled audiences for nearly a century. The film mixes documentary with fantasy, history with theatrics, religion and science, the medieval past and modern culture. This uncanny content is compounded by the film's formal strangeness, a mixture of quasi-documentary with fictional episodes, illustrated lectures alongside docudrama recreations and dreamscapes. Is this a documentary, a horror flick, or both? In this chapbook, authors Doty and Ingham argue that the puzzle of Christensen's H xan might be unraveled by attending to the film's provocative and paradoxical medievalism, its fantasmatic rendering of the witch as a medieval monster. Such monstrous medievalism, moreover, sheds considerable light on the politics of gender and culture once the witch is rendered a female figure in a time-out-of-joint.

Beta Exercise: The Theory and Practice of Osamu Kanemura is the first bilingual (Japanese-English) book to provide an overview of the theoretical work of Japanese photographer and video artist Osamu Kanemura, a unique talent and voice in the world of avant-garde contemporary photography.

The opening essay Life Is a Gift meditates on the transformation of human life into an exchangeable commodity and the abstraction that entails. Essay 01 develops Kanemura's idea of photographic technique in an era when such techniques have become accessible to all, radically undermining the importance of human subjectivity in the process of capturing the photographic image: We can say that modern technology constitutes photographic technique. Instead, Kanemura argues, extra-technical elements such as concept and vision will have to compensate for the expression of individuality that technique is no longer able to convey.

Taking cues from Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Karlheinz Stockhausen, the essay Dead-Stick Landing develops Kanemura's theory of the moving image as mechanical system, solely governed by an on-off switch, while Essay 02 develops these ideas into a consideration of cinematic time and the experience of boredom in cinema as the result of a truthful loyalty expressed to machines, and not to stories.

The essays are accompanied by an extensive two-part interview with Italian photographer Marco Mazzi, touching upon topics ranging from the technical aspects of Kanemura's equipment, the concept of non-editing, and the destruction of the frame to the similarity between Mao's dialectics and the camera, the presence of the human figure as trace, and the politics of photographing Tokyo.

Osamu Kanemura was born in 1964 in Tokyo, Japan. In the 1980s, after performing as a punk-rock musician, he entered the film school Image Forum in Tokyo where he made several 16 mm experimental films. In 1990 he entered the Tokyo College of Photography, and before graduating in 1993, he was invited to the Photography Biennale in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Since then, he has held numerous solo exhibitions and has participated in various group shows in Japan and abroad. His photographs are found in public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and the Yokohama Museum of Art. Besides his well-recognized black-and-white photographs of cityscapes, Kanemura also continues to work on videos and moving images.

What do medieval Icelanders mean when they say troll? What did they see when they saw a troll? What did the troll signify to them? And why did they see them?

The principal subject of this book is the Norse idea of the troll, which the author uses to engage with the larger topic of paranormal experiences in the medieval North. The texts under study are from 13th-, 14th-, and 15th-century Iceland. The focus of the book is on the ways in which paranormal experiences are related and defined in these texts and how those definitions have framed and continue to frame scholarly interpretations of the paranormal.

The book is partitioned into numerous brief chapters, each with its own theme. In each case the author is not least concerned with how the paranormal functions within medieval society and in the minds of the individuals who encounter and experience it and go on to narrate these experiences through intermediaries. The author connects the paranormal encounter closely with fears and these fears are intertwined with various aspects of the human experience including gender, family ties, and death.

The Troll Inside You hovers over the boundaries of scholarship and literature. Its aim is to prick and provoke but above all to challenge its audience to reconsider some of their preconceived ideas about the medieval past.