In a provocative yet unexpectedly tender debut, Kopano Maroga immerses themself in Christian myth and mystery, emerging reborn. In a riotous, innovative and unapologetic display of self-exposure, self-examination and self-love, Maroga appropriates and creates a (sometimes literal) collage of religious imagery, sexual want, and embodiedness - eventually widening their gaze to encompass the realities faced by black, queer, femme and trans folk in South Africa and further afield. Indeed, these are poems of pain, loss, introspection, and regret; but they are also works of great and usual beauty, depth, desire, and ambition - in sum, the evidence of a powerful new voice in South African poetry.

This book explores the critical and transformative potential of arts and popular culture for constructions of religion, gender and sexuality. Doing so, it deploys and develops the notion of blasphemous art, honouring and building on the work of Anne-Marie Korte. Deliberately articulated with a question mark, Blasphemous Art? raises questions about the spaces, methods and resources available to individuals and communities at the gendered, sexual and racialized margins of society to tell their stories, claim their bodies and perform symbolic and sacred meaning, and it analyses the productive effects – both aesthetically, politically and theoretically – of such provocative work. The book focuses on a wide range of artistic and cultural expressions, featuring case studies from across Europe, South Africa, Israel and the United States. Drawing on feminist, queer and postcolonial perspectives, the book reveals the critical, constructive and imaginative potential of the creative arts (broadly defined) and popular culture in its complex and diverse representation of, and engagement with, religious life, belief, text, ritual and practice.

Since its publication in April 2017, Collective Amnesia has taken the South African literary scene by storm. The book is in its twelfth print run and is prescribed for study at tertiary level in South African Universities and abroad. The collection is the recipient of the 2018 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry, named 2017 book of the year by the City Press and one of the best books of 2017 by The Sunday Times and Quartz Africa. It is translated into Spanish (Flores Rara, 2019), German (Wunderhorn Publishing House, 2019), Danish (Rebel with a Cause, 2019), Dutch (Poeziecentrum, 2020), Swedish (Rámus förlag). Forthcoming translations: Portuguese (Editora Trinta Zero Nove), Italian (Arcipelago itaca) and French (éditions Lanskine). Collective Amnesia examines the intersection of politics, race, religion, relationships, sexuality, feminism, memory and more. The poems provoke institutions and systems of learning and interrogates what must be unlearned in society, academia, relationships, religion, and spaces of memory and forgetting.

The grumble of the music, the corridors, the streets of Durban, the heat, the sweat, the voices, the loss - everything.

A Library Journal Best Book of 2014: Historical Fiction The amazing power and truth of the Rapunzel fairy tale comes alive for the first time in this breathtaking tale of desire, black magic and the redemptive power of love French novelist Charlotte-Rose de la Force has been banished from the court of Versailles by the Sun King, Louis XIV, after a series of scandalous love affairs. At the convent, she is comforted by an old nun, Sœur Seraphina, who tells her the tale of a young girl who, a hundred years earlier, is sold by her parents for a handful of bitter greens... After Margherita's father steals parsley from the walled garden of the courtesan Selena Leonelli, he is threatened with having both hands cut off, unless he and his wife relinquish their precious little girl. Selena is the famous red-haired muse of the artist Tiziano, first painted by him in 1512 and still inspiring him at the time of his death. She is at the center of Renaissance life in Venice, a world of beauty and danger, seduction and betrayal, love and superstition. Locked away in a tower, Margherita sings in the hope that someone will hear her. One day, a young man does. Award-winning author Kate Forsyth braids together the stories of Margherita, Selena, and Charlotte-Rose, the woman who penned Rapunzel as we now know it, to create what is a sumptuous historical novel, an enchanting fairy tale retelling, and a loving tribute to the imagination of one remarkable woman.

The Arab Revolutions that began in 2011 reignited interest in the question of theory and practice, imbuing it with a burning political urgency. In Revolution and Disenchantment Fadi A. Bardawil redescribes for our present how an earlier generation of revolutionaries, the 1960s Arab New Left, addressed this question. Bardawil excavates the long-lost archive of the Marxist organization Socialist Lebanon and its main theorist, Waddah Charara, who articulated answers in their political practice to fundamental issues confronting revolutionaries worldwide: intellectuals as vectors of revolutionary theory; political organizations as mediators of theory and praxis; and nonemancipatory attachments as impediments to revolutionary practice. Drawing on historical and ethnographic methods and moving beyond familiar reception narratives of Marxist thought in the postcolony, Bardawil engages in "fieldwork in theory" that analyzes how theory seduces intellectuals, cultivates sensibilities, and authorizes political practice. Throughout, Bardawil underscores the resonances and tensions between Arab intellectual traditions and Western critical theory and postcolonial theory, deftly placing intellectuals from those traditions into a much-needed conversation.

In Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity, Gaye Theresa Johnson examines interracial anti-racist alliances, divisions among aggrieved minority communities, and the cultural expressions and spatial politics that emerge from the mutual struggles of Blacks and Chicanos in Los Angeles from the 1940s to the present. Johnson argues that struggles waged in response to institutional and social repression have created both moments and movements in which Blacks and Chicanos have unmasked power imbalances, sought recognition, and forged solidarities by embracing the strategies, cultures, and politics of each others' experiences. At the center of this study is the theory of spatial entitlement: the spatial strategies and vernaculars utilized by working class youth to resist the demarcations of race and class that emerged in the postwar era. In this important new book, Johnson reveals how racial alliances and antagonisms between Blacks and Chicanos in L.A. had spatial as well as racial dimensions.