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Form as History
Form as History: When History No Longer Requires Us offers a concise yet profound critique of contemporary historical thought. It argues that while modern scholarship has rendered Muslim life increasingly legible as a site of ethics, resistance, and normativity, this progress often masks a deeper, more unsettling possibility: that history itself has learned to proceed without requiring meaning, address, or human obligation.
The pamphlet centers on a crucial tension. On one side is the European figure of the Muselmann (from Holocaust testimony), who embodies history’s capacity to continue efficiently while ceasing to demand anything from the humans it governs—a state of abandonment, not mere loss. On the other side is the Muslim, positioned in modern discourse as a knowable subject of history. The book argues that emphasizing the latter’s agency can function as a displacement, allowing the radical threat of the Muselmann—history’s indifference—to be misrecognized as a cultural or religious attribute.
Refusing both nostalgia and moralizing, the text examines how forms of life—particularly historical Muslim commercial and legal practices—have sustained obligation and necessity even after political protagonism faded. Its aim is diagnostic: to make visible the quiet threshold where life is managed rather than addressed, and to clarify how historical necessity depends not on power or visibility, but on the persistence of forms that compel the world to answer.
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Jahan Malek Khatun
This book presents the first extensive English study and translation of the poetry of Jahan Malek Khatun, a fourteenth-century Persian princess and one of the most important women in the history of Persian literature. Translator Sheema Kalbasi first introduced Jahan Malek Khatun to the general English-speaking audience in 2008 through her anthology Seven Valleys of Love: A Bilingual Anthology of Women Poets from Medieval Persia to Present Day Iran, which marked the earliest appearance of Jahan’s poetry in English translation. Her surviving divan, which contains more than a thousand ghazals along with qasidas and shorter lyric forms, offers an unparalleled window into the intellectual, emotional, and cultural world of a noblewoman who wrote with clarity, restraint, and philosophical depth during a period of profound political instability.
The volume introduces readers to the historical and literary contexts that shaped her life and work, and it situates her authorship within a long Iranian tradition in which women participated in governance, education, and artistic patronage from the ancient empires through the Islamic period. It recreates the refined yet precarious milieu of fourteenth-century Shiraz, where poetry functioned not only as an aesthetic practice but also as a medium of political expression and ethical contemplation.
Through close readings, the book explores the disciplined craft of Jahan Malek Khatun’s ghazals. Her poetry turns repeatedly to a stable constellation of images, such as wind, candle, threshold, and healer, that guide the reader through themes of longing, moral endurance, sovereignty, and judgment. Each couplet acts as a brief meditation, and the poems together form a sustained inquiry into the relationship between beauty, discipline, and survival.
The study also examines the transmission of her work, the role of women as readers and preservers of literary culture, and the challenges inherent in translating a voice shaped by both privilege and constraint. Through this analysis and the accompanying translations, Jahan Malek Khatun emerges as a major intellectual presence and an essential figure for understanding the richness and complexity of the Persian lyric tradition.
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94A6325
94A6325 is the compelling coming-of-age memoir of Dr. Kirk “Jae” James, a Black male, Jamaican immigrant, and father, chronicling his nearly decade-long experience (3,268 days) within the New York State carceral apparatus. The narrative is anchored by his arrest on April 13, 1994, when he was 18 years old, charged under the draconian Rockefeller Drug Laws and subsequently sentenced to life in prison. The story details his survival in infamous facilities such as Rikers Island, the maximum-security adolescent prison “The Cat” (Coxsackie), and Wyoming, where he fought to maintain his humanity while facing overwhelming fear and anxiety.
The book powerfully illustrates how legislative actions like the 13th Amendment, “tough on crime” rhetoric, the 1994 Crime Bill, and the 1996 Immigration laws acted as contemporary black codes and slave catchers, perpetually dehumanizing and criminalizing Black and brown populations. Jae endures three denials by the Parole Board while simultaneously fighting a six-year battle against a mandatory deportation order.
Drawing inspiration from mentors and comrades—including revolutionaries and activists like George Jackson and Pops—Jae transforms his time in prison into a quest for knowledge and self-actualization, culminating in earning an Associate Degree and winning his 212c waiver hearing against deportation in 2002.
More than just a survival story, 94A6325 serves as a vital first-person account and a call to embrace Abolition. The author, now a Clinical Assistant Professor at NYU, shares his journey as essential knowledge needed to confront the historical violence and systemic white supremacy woven into American democracy, urging readers to imagine a world without human cages, grounded in abundance and love. The story officially ends with his release on March 25, 2003.
This book is the first part in a series, with this one focusing on his incarceration from 1994 to 2003.
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Ghostlines – Re-Drawing the LAPSSET Corridor in Kenya
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
This book presents the work of the Translocal Learning Network (TLN), a social justice framework fostering non-hierarchical connections and mutual learning between localized social movements across the Global South and Canada. It argues that while local movements are most effective at creating tangible change, they often operate in isolation. The TLN bridges this gap, building solidarity among communities in South Africa, Ghana, and Guatemala confronting interconnected crises of social, economic, and environmental injustice. The chapters are written by the movement partners themselves, offering firsthand accounts of their struggles against state-corporate power, extractive industries, and top-down development models. These narratives detail the violent repression, dispossession, and corruption communities face when defending their land, livelihoods, and rights. Key case studies include the fight against a World Bank dam in Guatemala, the resistance to corporate salt mining in Ghana, the shack dwellers’ movement in South Africa, and opposition to large-scale gold mining in Ghana. Through these stories, common themes emerge: the use of state violence to enable corporate imperialism, the failure of nominal democracies to serve the poor, the silencing of subaltern knowledge, and the disproportionate impact on women. Crucially, the book also highlights the alternatives being built—people-centered, sustainable development visions rooted in self-determination, collective action, and grassroots theorizing. It documents how these diverse movements learn from each other’s strategies and analyses, forging a translocal theory of social movement learning that is essential for building powerful, global solidarities to contest unjust development and advance social and environmental justice.
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Beyond the Neocolonial: Africa and the Dialectics of Human Emancipation
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