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Ghostlines – Re-Drawing the LAPSSET Corridor in Kenya. A Geo-Graphic Novel
Ghostlines is a graphic novel that describes the journey of the author and three Kenyan artists along the LAPSSET development corridor, a braid of roads, pipelines, and resort cities that promises to bring development to Kenya’s marginalized north. It mixes conceptual and empirical insights into the human geography of infrastructure with the narrative flexibility and depth afforded by the medium graphic novel – a geo-graphic novel.
They meet Peter, a retired pilot who had previously worked for a conservancy and can tell stories about the LAPSSET from high above and from the ground. He understands how everyone involved is seeking to benefit from the corridor in their own way, even if that means building uninhabited “ghost huts” that manifest the presence of pastoral communities and thus qualify them for compensation. Jane is an activist for a women’s and Indigenous rights organization. She’s been fighting invisible monsters her entire life: stalking hyenas (metaphorical and real), corrupt politicians, and the patriarchy itself. The spectre of the LAPSSET is only the last one of these hidden monsters. They meet Joseph, a herder, who hopes that the LAPSSET might connect him to far places but worries that it will instead cut him off of the grazing grounds that are essential for the survival of his family. What is the LAPSSET – a road or a fence? In Oldonyoro they meet Rashid, a poet, who writes about the long history of the corridor. In his mind, it reaches far back to colonial times. “My grandfather suffered greatly,” he writes, “Is it my turn to face the worst? I wonder, a tricky treasure”. In the last village on their journey, they meet a group of women who have come together to support each other. Their position on the LAPSSET is more optimistic. The real connections of solidarity they forged contrast with the imaginary ghostlines of the LAPSSET. The narrative structure of the geo-graphic novel draws connections between the narrators, that is, the team of researchers and artists and the interviewees. They seek to unravel the idea of the omniscient or unbiased narrator and to reveal how storytellers bring their own ghosts into stories. By connecting all of these narratives along their journey, they challenge the single, universalist story that planners tell about large-scale infrastructure projects. Instead, they invite the reader to embrace the often-contradictory multiplicity of infrastructural relations, to see the ostensibly solid lines on maps for what they are: a messy, ever-changing braiding of multitudes.
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Rooted in struggle: stories from translocal social movement learning in Ghana, South Africa, Guatemala and Canada
This book is the culmination of several years of partnership between social movements, social justice organizations and academics in Ghana, South Africa, Guatemala and Canada. Called the Translocal Learning Network, this partnership has generated a space for those facing the multiple and overlapping crises of our time to come together and share knowledge and mutually solidarize with each other’s struggles. This knowledge exchange and mutual solidarity has been non-hierarchical and collaborative in nature, and has taken the form of sharing and commenting on complex stories through a participatory research methodology known as narrative restorying. As such, this book will focus on the stories each partner has shared, along with engagement with these stories by other members of the network. This interplay of knowledge sharing will provide a window into the social movement learning of network members.
The central argument of the book was best captured by Thapelo Mohapi in our recent presentation at the Development Studies Association conference at SOAS in London, UK: “It is always assumed that when you are poor, when you are living in a shack, when you live in a rural area, when you are marginalized, that you cannot think for yourself, that you cannot be involved in development, because you are poor”; instead of this “People must make decisions and must be consulted, and they must have a voice to speak about their own development. It must be initiated and completed with the people.” This book is literally a space where those on the front line of struggles against land dispossession, livelihood dispossession, violent resource exploitation, forced marginal living, climate fueled emergencies, and the denigration of cultural and traditional indigenous knowledge share their experiences, learning, successes, and defeats, with those facing similar and related struggles. In addition to these front-line voices, scholars working alongside these struggles, share some of their learnings and ideas that have emerged from the partnership, and these reflections are also brought into dialogue with front-line activists. In other words, this book provides a window into a rich, ongoing dialogue of mutual learning and support that will speak to audiences in the activist and critical academic communities.
To that point, this translocal network uses the notion of translocality to push back on the capitalist, colonial, and neo-liberal agenda of a)maintaining divisions between people struggling against oppression in different parts of the world (through border controls, language divisions, and colonial racialized othering); and, b)maintaining a knowledge hierarchy that states, international institutions, intellectual institutions, and corporations are those best able to contend with the many crises we face, and even within activists, it is those movements and organizations with broad, multinational reach that can best speak for the affected. Translocality rather argues that it is those with local knowledge of crises and context that are best positioned to speak to what needs to change, and that local struggles meeting each other as equals, translocally, is the best way to learn from one another without imposing new forms of knowledge hierarchies. -
Beyond the Neocolonial: Africa and the Dialectics of Human Emancipation
Transcending our Colonial Place: Africa and the dialectics of emancipation
Michael Neocosmos
To begin to think the emancipation of humanity on the African continent, we must start by distancing the thought and practice of politics from state thinking. State thinking has been and continues to be the core subjective aspect of the continuing failure of an emancipatory politics of equality on our continent. State thinking in the present day is no longer simply colonial but neocolonial. This means that state colonial practices have been modified but not to the extent that colonialism has been abolished. It still exists but under modified forms. The only way to think about political emancipation of the whole of humanity is to understand and practice dialectical thought. The dialectic of politics necessarily assumes a process of becoming of a popular political subject and its continued existence vis-à-vis the state. The latter can only think analytically and not dialectically because it is concerned with maintaining a system of socio-political places to which people are allocated according to criteria that ensure the reproduction of relations of domination, themselves underpinned by capitalist relations of exploitation.
This book traces the contradiction between dialectical thought and analytical thought, beginning with the Ancient Egyptians and Asiatic Greeks up to the present day among African people. It reviews the way in which emancipatory politics was thought in practice by classical Marxist thinkers and also the centrality of popular African culture in the thinking of African revolutionaries. It argues that a political dialectic was present to varying degrees in the thought of these thinkers and that they all attempted to confront state analytical thinking and practice with varying degrees of success at different times. The subjective problem they faced was that the dialectic founded on the idea of the universality of movement to which they adhered was in constant conflict with the stasis of analytical thought itself enabled by a belief in the party as representing the people that was ultimately to be realized in the capture of state power.
It is further shown that popular African thought, as expressed in metaphorical proverbs, regularly contains references to a human universal, thus deploying much more than rhetoric in a potential for dialectical thought. Popularly expressed reason frequently operates metaphorically and not within the delimited analytical categories deployed by academics and the state. This political process of the struggle between the dialectic and the analytic in thought-practice is also traced in Haiti whose culture is heavily influenced by Africa. The emancipatory egalitarian politics pursued there after independence in 1804, and their destruction by a neocolonial state predicted the same process in post-colonial African countries. At the same time Africa has witnessed the invention of alternatives to the party form of organization, particularly during the struggle for freedom in South Africa in the 1980s. Finally, the book argues that the anatomy of the neocolonial state on our continent must be understood primarily from the point of those it rules in order to unravel its neocolonial character. The creation and eulogizing of heroic figures during popular struggles for freedom is no substitute for the universal truth that only the oppressed can liberate both themselves and humanity from what is rapidly becoming the living hell of neocolonial capitalism.Table of Contents
Introduction: what is to be thought?
Politics as a Collective Thought-Practice and Human Emancipation as its Essence
The Ancients and the Thought of Politics: arkhē and the ‘dialectic’ of physis and nomos
Sourcing an Emancipatory Politics for Today: reviewing the classics
Thinking Emancipatory Politics through African Popular Culture
Resolving Contradictions and the Dialectical Potential of Proverbial Metaphors
Haiti: from inventive popular sovereignty to neocolonial state
Beyond the Party Form? An alternative organisation and the figure of the heroic liberator
Perverted Freedom and the Anatomy of the African Neocolonial State
Conclusion: silencing as an analytical procedure in political theory and practice -
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Lines of Fire: Poetry of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Movement
USD $ 35.00This collection of poems features some of the voices that were persecuted for the power of their words. The poetry cries out against the injustices and brutality of the colonial powers of their time, raging against tyranny and the festering wounds of racism, especially in Palestine. Many of the writers of the Afro-Asian Writers Movement faced torture, imprisonment, exile, and even death, but their words continue to call for a just world. These poets span the length and breadth of Africa and Asia, and their poems speak to all of humanity. Embedded in their verses is a spirit of resilience that knows loss, love, anger, and anguish yet insists on enduring hope.
Edited by Tariq Mehmood, this collection includes poems by:
Salah Abdel Sabour (1931-1981, Ali Ahmad Said Esber, also known as Adunis (1930- ), Mulk Raj Anand (1905-2004), Anar Rasul oghlu Rzayef (1938- ), Nobuo Ayukawa (1920-1986), Fadhil al-Azzawi (1940- ), Abd Al-Wahhab al-Bayati (1926-1999), Mahim Bora (1917- ), Bernard Binlin Dadié (1916- ), Mahmoud Darwish (1942-2008), Osamu Dazai (1909-1948), Mário Pinto de Andrade (1928-1990), D.B. Dhanapala (1905-1971), Mohammed Dib (1920-2003), Gevorg Emin (1918-1998), Sengiin Erdene (1929-2000), Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911-1984), Rasul Gamzatov (1923-2003), Daniil Granin (1919- ), Colette Anna Gregoire, better known as Anna Greki (1931-1966), Malek Haddad (1927-1978), Pham Ba Ngoan, better known by his pen name Thanh Hai (1930-1980), Buland al-Haidari (1926-1996), Suheil Idris (1925-2008), Yusuf Idris (1927-1991), Fazil Iskander (1929- ), Zulfiya Isroilova (1915-1996), Ali Sardar Jafri (1913-2000), Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972), Edward al-Kharrat (1926- 2015), Hajime Kijima (1928-2004), Mazisi Kunene (1930-2006), Alex La Guma (1925-1985), U Gtun Kyi, better known by his pen name Minn Latt Yekhaun (1925-1985), Abdul Hayee better known by his pen name Sahir Lundhianvi (1921-1980), Zaki Naguib Mahmoud (1905-1993), Nazik Al-Malaika (1923-2007), Mouloud Mammeri (1917-1989), Yuri Nagibin (1920-1994), Sergey Narovchatov (1919-1981), Dashdorjiin Natsagdorj (1906-1937), Hiroshi Noma (1915-1991), Gabriel jibaba Okara (1921- ), Amrita Pritam (1919-2005), Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo (1901-1937), Richard Rive (1931-1989), Rady Saddouk (1938-2010), Badr Shakir al-Sayyab (1926-1964), Ousmane Sembene (1923- 2007), Leopold Sedar Senghor (1906-2001), Yusuf al-Sibai (1917-1978), Fadwa Tuqan (1917-2003), Sonomyn Udval (1921-1991), Ramses Younan (1913-1966), and Tawfiq Ziad (1929-1994).
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Flames of the Cherry Tree
USD $ 12.00 USD $ 20.00Price range: USD $ 12.00 through USD $ 20.00Select options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page
Flames of the Cherry Tree
USD $ 12.00 USD $ 20.00Price range: USD $ 12.00 through USD $ 20.00In the majestic valley of pre-Partition Kashmir, Aafreen Khan dreams of becoming a doctor like her beloved grandfather. Fierce, curious, and headstrong, she defies the boundaries of convention as a Muslim and a woman in a country rigged against her, determined to carve her own path. But as the partition of India looms closer and Kashmir finds itself in the crossfire, Aafreen is swept into the whirlwind of a story much larger than her own. When love, loss, and political upheaval reshape her entire world, Aafreen is forced to confront everything she thought she knew.Spanning decades and generations, Flames of the Cherry Tree is a sweeping, intimate portrait of a young woman’s coming-of-age against the backdrop of colonialism, rebellion, and the violent birth of today’s occupied Kashmir. At once tender and unflinching, it traces the story of one Kashmiri family through oppression and resistance, illuminating the forgotten histories that have shaped Kashmir and the hope that survives in its people.
This book is for readers of historical fiction that crave a deeper understanding of places too-often lost under the narrative of their tyrants. Flames of the Cherry Tree is a vivid, devastating, and ultimately life-affirming tale of the ties that bind us across time.
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Nous sommes toujours là: Une anthologie de résilience, de douleur et d’un espoir intact des étudiants des universités de Gaza
Depuis le début du génocide contre les Palestiniens à Gaza, mené par la violence coloniale israélienne, les établissements d’enseignement supérieur ont été systématiquement détruits. Les campus sont en ruines, les universitaires et les étudiants ont été tués ou déplacés de force, et ce qui était autrefois une population étudiante florissante et intellectuellement dynamique vit maintenant sous la menace quotidienne de bombardement, de famine forcée et de mort. Pendant près de deux ans, les étudiants ont été coupés non seulement de leurs universités, mais aussi de leurs rêves, de leur avenir et même de leur sentiment de sécurité le plus élémentaire.
Pourtant, malgré ce traumatisme inimaginable, beaucoup écrivent encore.
Nous sommes toujours là est une anthologie de ces voix – brutes, non filtrées et courageuses. Il présente des histoires courtes et longues, des poèmes, des essais et des témoignages écrits par des étudiants des universités de Gaza. Ce ne sont pas des réflexions rétrospectives ou des analyses à distance ; ce sont des mots en temps réel, émergeant des profondeurs du génocide, du déplacement et du deuil. Ces écrits peuvent être leurs derniers espoirs d’atteindre le monde, un dernier acte de résistance par l’expression.
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Ancestral Daughter
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Ancestral Daughter
USD $ 20.00 USD $ 40.00Price range: USD $ 20.00 through USD $ 40.00Ancestral Daughter is a poignant collection of free-verse poetry by Palestinian writer Zeina Jhaish, exploring themes of diaspora, identity, resistance, and love. Through vivid imagery and raw emotion, Jhaish navigates her dual existence as a Palestinian woman from Gaza living in the diaspora, weaving personal and collective histories into her verses. The book is divided into two parts: “Ancestral,” which delves into exile, land, and the trauma of occupation, and “Daughter,” which reflects on womanhood, heartbreak, and rebirth. Poems like “Haifa on 85th Avenue” and “Godforsaken Homes” juxtapose longing for homeland with the alienation of displacement, while “Being a Palestinian Woman: A Guide” celebrates resilience. Jhaish honors her heritage, mourns ongoing violence, and clings to hope, dedicating the work to Gaza and Palestinian martyrs. Blending English and Arabic, her poetry is a testament to ancestral love and the unyielding spirit of her people.
20% of the income from e-book orders will be donated to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.
If you are a bookstore, please get in touch with [email protected] for special offers.
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