unshelf and NORIENT BOOKS

"PLAN B. A GATHERING OF STRANGERS (OR) THIS IS NOT WORKING"

Queering a dissertation submitted for a Masters degree, this book explores how strategies of Technology as Self-reflection and Radical Sharing, Queer Love and Queer Disobedience contribute to “making whiteness strange” by destabilising the normal invisibility of whiteness to bring the white body under surveillance.

"On Being Human as Praxis"

The Jamaican writer and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter is best known for her diverse writings that pull together insights from theories in history, literature, science, and black studies, to explore race, the legacy of colonialism, and representations of humanness. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis is a critical genealogy of Wynter’s work, highlighting her insights on how race, location, and time together inform what it means to be human. The contributors explore Wynter’s stunning reconceptualization of the human in relation to concepts of blackness, modernity, urban space, the Caribbean, science studies, migratory politics, and the interconnectedness of creative and theoretical resistances. The collection includes an extensive conversation between Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick that delineates Wynter’s engagement with writers such as Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. DuBois, and Aimé Césaire, among others; the interview also reveals the ever-extending range and power of Wynter’s intellectual project, and elucidates her attempts to rehistoricize humanness as praxis.

"Beyond Homophobia: Centring LGBTQ Experiences in the Anglophone Caribbean"

aims to disrupt the conventional rendering of the Caribbean as uniquely and deeply homophobic by focusing on the experiences and agency of LGBTQ people in the region. Presenting a wide range of perspectives and approaches, this book grew out of presentations at two groundbreaking events on the Jamaican campus of the University of the West Indies: a symposium discussing LGBTQ experiences and research in Jamaica, and a conference that expanded the focus to provide a regional scope. Activists, artists and academics came together to challenge and change the narratives about LGBTQ issues in the Caribbean, exploring sexualities, gender identities and queer practices beyond the discourse of violence, as well as the stereotypes, assumptions and limitations presented by conventional norms around gender and sexuality. Beyond Homophobia combines a variety of academic disciplines with poetry and prose. Its contributions move from cyberspace to the dancehall, from literary analysis to ethnographic research, from pedagogical to methodological concerns, and from thoughts on the past to ideas about the future. The collection presents a range of perspectives on and techniques with which to interrogate notions of identity, sexualities, victimhood, agency, activism, fluidity, fixity, visibility, invisibility, class, homophobia, coming out, belonging and spirituality.

The book explores decolonising approaches to increasing diversity and equality in curation in the cultural industry. What if curation wasn't just the careful organisation of festival lineups, but also the way a DJ selects their tracks? Let's break apart this overdetermined and fossilised term and re-evaluate it - together.
Edited by Berlin-based writer, musician, curator and editor Philipp Rhensius and Monia Acciari, Associate Professor of Film and Television History at De Montfort University, the book contains a wide range of essays, academic texts, poems, photographs and commentaries by 32 writers, artists, journalists and academics from around the world.