Urban Lament

Epidemics and pandemics undermine societies and highlight the vulnerability of relations people have created to the land, other species, and each other. This book presents fragments of disease management in the Mediterranean from the 15th-century onwards and in the Aegean Archipelago in the last two centuries. From religious to medical approaches to the Bubonic Plague, through the creation of lazarettos, to the famine in occupied Syros, to ghost ships drifting on the Mediterranean: citizens are forced to avoid citizens. Public health in crisis: confinement versus mobility, awakening memories of totalitarian regimes.

CONTENTS

Impending Arrivals by Dimitra Kondylatou
Cruises to Nowhere
Covid-19 stricken Ships
Ghost Ships drifting on the Mediterranean

Suspended Arrivals by Dimitra Kondylatou
Le Corbusier Confined
Venice, Lazaretto and Black Death

Confined Spaces by Dimitra Kondylatou
Religious versus Medical Approaches to the Plague
Public Health and Public Order
Architectures of Control
The Lazaretto at Syros

Confinement and Totalitarianism, Famine in Occupied Syros
by Nicolas Lakiotakis

Panic Room. Waiting Room. Island.
by Hulya Ertas

Ethical, pondering, and wondrous, adrienne maree brown’s Loving Corrections is a collection of love-based adjustments and reframes to grow our movements for liberation while navigating a society deeply fractured by greed, racism, and war. In this landmark book, brown invigorates her influential writing on belonging and accountability into the framework of “loving corrections”; a generative space where rehearsals for the revolution become the everyday norm in relating to one another. 

Filled with practical wisdom on how to be a trustworthy communicator while providing bold visions for a shared future, Loving Corrections can speak to everyone caught in the crossroads of our political challenges and potential. No matter how new to the struggle, or how numerous our failures, brown’s indispensable writing is an invitation to us all. Includes an afterword by Janine de Novais.

The poet, the unknown being… a loony, a dreamer, a hermit. The poet writes poetry… but really, what is poetry? Arts, politics, mere amusement?

This little book is an insight into the mindset of someone who just can’t help but to be a poet. It is a manifesto for the freedom of thought and expression, an essential source of motivation and inspiration for readers and writers alike.

Anisur Rahman (b.1978) made his poetic debut in 2003. As a journalist, translator and playwright he has further contemplated the poetic mind. Born in Bangladesh, he writes in both Bengali and English, but nowadays lives exiled in Sweden.

Poetry as both a form and genre has many possibilities to exist within; however, poetry too often is burdened by the imperative to have an argument and a set of imagery and meanings that are preconceived and placed within the poem. In this way, poetry gets conflated with writing a thesis or project, and the poet simply the presenter of perfectly argued language. When poets attempt to bridge the gap between genres and write within the contemporary essay form, they are tasked to construct perfect arguments there as well and avoid the associative and aesthetic logic that makes poems important. The term essay itself was coined by Michel de Montaigne in the 1500s — it comes from the French word essai, which means to test or experiment with what one knows as a learning tool, and is in partial opposition to the terms we use to discuss the essay now

ESSAYS calls on thinkers and writers to move beyond this linear thinking into the realm of what an essay by someone like Montaigne might do. His essays do as they say they will—they test out ideas, they are unafraid to get messy in their execution, they are brave enough to go forward into the uncharted waters. In them, it’s completely beside the point to get back to where they started, let alone where they’d say they would go. They are simply beside the point. It’s true.

ESSAYS, edited by Dorothea Lasky, is a book of essays on the essay, which enact and query these directives. The volume collects essays by poets Ariel Goldberg, Ken Chen, Wayne Koestenbaum, Tracie Morris, Anaïs Duplan, Raquel Salas Rivera, Brandon Shimoda, Cecilia Vicuña, Fred Moten, and Mónica de la Torre.

« La société n’existe pas » : la formule de l’ancienne Première ministre britannique Margaret Thatcher est restée célèbre. On connaît moins ses ramifications en images, de la guerre civile anglaise du XVIIe siècle jusqu’à l’art contemporain en passant par la culture populaire en Grande-Bretagne. De photographies en affiches, de manuscrits en frontispices, ce livre traverse l’histoire pour cerner les échos visuels du thatchérisme. Son point de départ est une pièce de l’artiste Jeremy Deller : la reconstitution d’une bataille ouvrière entre mineurs grévistes et policiers survenue en 1984. Maxime Boidy en extrait une série de scènes qui sont autant d’infléchissements de l’idée de « corps politique ». Ce faisant, il dessine la discrète et brûlante actualité de ces formes symboliques, à l’heure de la guerre civile qu’a imposé le thatchérisme globalisé.

Maxime Boidy est enseignant-chercheur en études visuelles. Il s’intéresse principalement à l’histoire des savoirs de l’image et à l’iconographie politique sous toutes ses formes.

Building on previous projects centered on the pedagogy of poets, and friendship through correspondence, LOST & FOUND SERIES VII breaks new ground to present unpublished and presently unavailable materials by novelist, filmmaker, and activist Toni Cade Bambara; iconic poet-activist-teachers Audre Lorde and June Jordan; scholar, activist, and poet Dr. Jack D. Forbes, and letters between North American poet and translator Paul Blackburn and Argentinian in exile novelist, poet, and translator Julio Cortázar.

While Cortázar and Blackburn forged their own institution of sorts, through a friendship that would help ignite the Latin American boom, Forbes, Bambara, Jordan, and Lorde worked in and out of institutions to help transform the landscape of our educational and historical horizons and expectations. For some years Bambara, Jordan, and Lorde all taught together in the City University of New York, the largest urban system in the United States, collaborating with activist students and other faculty to create new curriculum in Black Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Women's Studies. At the same time, Blackburn also taught part-time at City University, while bringing the vision of another world into American English, through his translations of Cortázar, a champion of the Cuban revolution and a writer of unparalleled influence in Latin America. On the other side of the country, Dr. Jack Forbes's vision of hemispheric Indigenous life was brought to bear on his involvement in the creation of D-Q University, the first Indigenous university in California, as well as the creation of Native American Studies at UC Davis, a program that would be emulated at other universities in North America. At the same time, his extraordinary and almost unknown poetry, featured here along with notable materials on his educational activism, presents a vision of Los Angeles cutting across race, class, and ethnicity that the work of all the writers in this Series help us realize.

SERIES VII Includes:

Audre Lorde
"I teach myself in outline," Notes, Journals, Syllabi, & an Excerpt from Deotha 

Toni Cade Bambara
"Realizing the Dream of a Black University," & Other Writings (Parts I & II)

June Jordan
"Life Studies," 1966-1976 

Jack Forbes
"Yanga Ya," Selected Poems & The Goals of Education 

Paul Blackburn & Julio Cortázar
"Querido Pablito"/"Julissimo Querido," Selected Correspondence, 1958-1971 (Parts I & II)