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Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World
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Five Alchemists. One book. A constellation of ideas.

The second annual Alchemy Lecture was presented in November 2023 at York University to a sold out in-person audience and nearly one thousand live online viewers. Moderated by Dr. Christina Sharpe, the Alchemists-agile thinkers and practitioners working across a range of disciplines and geographies-convened to discuss their radical visions of the beautiful world, and the manifestos that may help to guide us there. Their treatises have been captured and luminously expanded in the pages of this book.

Cherokee Nation citizen and professor Joseph M. Pierce asserts that "[f]or this decolonial future to become possible, the guiding force must no longer be capital but relations." Informed by her practice of "curation as care," Brazilian film curator Janaína Oliveira evokes music and movement as a means toward this relationality: "it's almost by falling that you live. . . . The beautiful world dances the stumbles. The beautiful world dances dancing." Kenyan-British visual artist Phoebe Boswell uses the space of a virtual gallery to ask, "If we burn down the institution, what happens next? Do we trust ourselves to know?" and gestures toward the possibility of this "as yet unlived, unexperienced thing." Professor and MacArthur fellow Saidiya Hartman asks us to consider our capacity to burn, stating that "[P]ragmatism yields a profound tolerance of the unlivable." And Mexican-American author Cristina Rivera Garza gives us the language of the future in the subjunctive, which "lays the groundwork for the irruption. . . . The subjunctive is the smuggler who crosses the border of the future bearing unknown cargo."

Each Alchemist is intimately concerned with the shape of this cargo and our ability to bear its weight, together. Through these expansive, transformative essays, new ways of being are threaded and proposed, illuminating our path towards this possible beautiful world.
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Additional ISBN/GTIN9781039055988
Product TypeE-book
BindingE-book
FormatEPUB
Format noteDRM Adobe
FormatE101
PublisherKnopf Canada
Publishing date17/09/2024
SeriesThe Alchemy Lecture
LanguageEnglish
File size875 Kbytes
IllustrationsB&W ILLUSTRATIONS
Article no.14180910
CatalogsVC
Data source no.5359760
Product groupBU730
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This book has had something of a miraculous resurrection. A few months ago, it looked like it could well be pulped and its author sued for libel after one of his subjects took offence at a less than flattering portrait. British libel laws are such that a writer facing an oligarch in court is not felt to stand much of a chance and there was a strong feeling in the publishing world that Tom Burgis would be required to cough up a considerable sum of cash. For once however, the British courts sided with the little guy and dismissed the case, allowing this excellent book to continue its life out in the wild. Although technical and at times a bit opaque on financial detail, it is an extremely well put together account of how dodgy money (very often channelled through London) can be moved around the world and continuing enriching both its very questionable owners and their willing accessories.
Ein Freund sagte einmal, nachdem er sich durch einen Text von Zizek gearbeitet hatte, dass es doch erstaunlich sei, in welchen Regionen sich manche Menschen bewegen und trotzdem noch in der Lage seien, feste Nahrung zu sich zu nehmen: Zizek-Lektüre ist harte Arbeit. Zizek ist Psychoanalytiker, Philosoph, Filmtheoretiker und Kommunist. Er macht es einem wahrlich nicht leicht, schreibt komplex, meinungsfreudig und erfreut sich an der Provokation. Sein neuestes Buch lässt jedoch kaum Raum für Missverständnisse zu und ist ausgesprochen klar und pointiert. Er fordert eine tatkräftigere Linke, die sich neu formieren muss, um den drängenden Problemen der Zeit zu begegnen. Von der kapitalistischen Weltordnung seien angesichts der globalen Bedrohungen keine Lösungen zu erwarten, von den diversen populistischen Bewegungen schon gar nicht. Ohne eine neue Wirtschaftsordnung sei die Zukunft nicht zu bewältigen. Keine neuen Töne von Zizek, aber selten mit einer solchen Klarheit formuliert.
When the draft to her first novel gets stolen in a robbery, Lasley impulsively upends her life in London and moves to Aberdeen to talk to men in Scotland, who work on oil rigs. Her long year of pub interviews with these workers is shot through by the story of her obssessive affair with Caden, the first oil rig worker she interviews.
The strongest part by far are the snippets of insights into life on the oil rig, the specific lingo and rythm of life offshore in an all male environment. In her own words, Lasley wanted to find out what men are like with no women around. This query gives the book, especially in the passages about the affair, a curiously misogynist angle. At times I found myself reminded of Lisa Taddeo's chronicles of love lives of three American women. Books like these are often heralded for showing 'female desire' when in fact it more often depicts are certain type of needy, unhealthy attachment style. Personally, less pining and more reporting would have pleased me.
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Author

The Alchemy Lecture is a partnership between York University and Knopf Canada, organized by Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York, CHRISTINA SHARPE. She is the author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being; Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects; and Ordinary Notes.

PHOEBE BOSWELL's work is held in collections including the British Museum, LACMA, RISD, the BFI's National Archive and the UK Government Art Collection. She was the Bridget Riley Drawing Fellow at the British School of Rome in 2019, and was Whitechapel Gallery's 2022 writer-in-residence. SAIDIYA HARTMAN is the author of three books, including Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. A MacArthur Fellow, she has been a Guggenheim Fellow, Cullman Fellow, and Fulbright Scholar, and is currently a professor at Columbia University. JANAINA OLIVEIRA is a professor at the Federal Institute of Rio de Janeiro and is the founder of the Black Cinema Itinerant Forum (FICINE). Oliveira has a PhD. in History and was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Center for African Studies at Howard University. JOSEPH M. PIERCE is Associate Professor at Stony Brook University and author of Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910. He is co-curator of the performance series Knowledge of Wounds. CRISTINA RIVERA GARZA is the award-winning author of six novels, four collections of short stories, five collections of poetry, and four nonfiction books. She is the recipient of a 2020 MacArthur Fellowship, and a finalist for the 2020 National Book Critic's Circle Award for Criticism.