Divided Publishing

In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities

£ 15.99
Buy in Europe UK US Australia
£ 15.99
Buy in Europe UK US Australia

In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, CommunitiesJoy James

£ 15.99

In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities

Joy James

Joy James’s Revolutionary Love is umph-degree love; or love beyond measure. It is anything love. It is love without reckoning. It is love that dares all things, beyond which others may find the spirit-force to survive; to live to fight another day. Such love is also fighting itself, for the sake of ensuring that others may live.

Mumia Abu-Jamal

Read Joy James glossary and buy “Revolutionary Love and Resistance” bundle: 4 books for USD $40 (proceeds to Prison Radio)

Violence is arrayed against us because we’re Black, or female, or queer, or undocumented. There is no rescue team coming for us. With that knowledge, we need a different operational base to recreate the world. It is not going to be a celebrity savior. Never was, never will be. If you’re in a religious tradition that is millennia-old, consider how the last savior went out. It was always going to be bloody. It was always going to be traumatic. But there’s a beauty to facing the reality of our lives. Not our lives as they’re broken apart, written about, and then sold back to us in academic or celebrity discourse. But our lives as we understand them. The most important thing is showing up. Showing up and learning how to live by and with others, learning how to reinvent ourselves in this increasing wasteland. That’s the good life.

Foreword by Da’Shaun L. Harrison.
Afterword by Mumia Abu-Jamal.

  • 978-1-7398431-0-6
  • 1 b&w illustration
  • 21.6 x 13.9 cm
  • 364 pp.
  • Paperback
  • 21 December 2022

About the author

The political theorist Joy James teaches at Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts. Editor of The Angela Y. Davis Reader (Blackwell, 1998), Imprisoned Intellectuals (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), The New Abolitionists (SUNY Press, 2005) and Warfare in the American Homeland (Duke University Press, 2007), James is also author of Resisting State Violence (University of Minnesota Press, 1996), Transcending the Talented Tenth (Routledge, 1997), Seeking the Beloved Community (SUNY Press, 2013), New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the Afterlife of Erica Garner (Common Notions, 2023), and the forthcoming Contextualizing Angela Davis.

Endorsements (3)

To take the path of Revolutionary Love is to take a risk. It means walking the razor’s edge. This is not a politics of the heart, not a politics of charity. No need for self-love or self-pity—it’s enough to know where you stand, to embody that moment ‘just before hate’ and, with the energy of despair, to ward off the worst.

Houria Bouteldja

Rooted in community-activism and the ways in which ‘history is always instructive’, Joy James is clear that she is ‘always thinking about and in the community.’ In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love is a beautiful and effective articulation and representation of those commitments.

Kathryn Sophia Belle

Rich, rigorous, poetic, and accessible, this is a book I will return to again and again for guidance and affirmation, a reminder of the interconnectedness of all who resist oppression, of all who despair, of all who live for Revolutionary Love.

Yassmin Abdel-Magied

Press (15)

Not Your GuruCheryl RiveraLux Magazine, 803/10/2023
Intellectualism As Magic Dust: Conversation with Dr. Joy JamesPierce EldridgeWorms, 707/2023
All words can be found in “In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love” by Joy James.Lady Gaga@ladygaga19/06/2023
Making Revolutionary Love w/ Dr. Joy JamesPhilip L. McKenzieThe Deep Dive25/05/2023
Joy James: Revolutionary Love and Black LiberationRed Medicine04/04/2023
The Alchemy of AbolitionismsJoy JamesInquest28/03/2023
Small Press Newsletter Vol IVNeil GriffithsRepublic of Consciousness24/03/2023
At the impasse of Revolution and Revolutionary Love: An introduction to the Captive Maternal Roundtable, a forum on ‘In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love’ RAW WilcoxScalawag23/03/2023
Joy James on Revolutionary Love, Captive Maternals, and AutonomyTime Talks: History, Politics, Music, and Art19/03/2023
Captive Maternal RoundtableDa'Shaun L. HarrisonBlack Agenda Report Book Forum15/03/2023
Captive Maternal RoundtableRebecca A. WilcoxBlack Agenda Report Book Forum15/03/2023
Für Radikale und RevolutionäreJürgen Heiserjunge Welt13/03/2023
Liebe als revolutionärer AktJürgen Heiserjunge Welt04/03/2023
"In the Presence of Agape, Battles for Life Ensue" - Joy James & K. Kim Holder, In Pursuit of Revolutionary LoveMillennials Are Killing Capitalism16/02/2023
Revolutionary Love, Struggle and AbolitionSean Blackmon & Jacqueline LuqmanBy Any Means Necessary15/02/2023

Holy Smoke

£ 11.99
Buy in Europe UK Australia
£ 11.99
Buy in Europe UK Australia

Holy SmokeFanny Howe

£ 11.99

Holy Smoke

Fanny Howe

At once evocative and subtly incisive Howe’s writing seems almost like a new language, a language that has been in hiding. She can make the familiar haunting and the ordinary a provocation. She has written some of the remarkable books of her time.

Adam Phillips

A wonder of acid wit and Americana, Holy Smoke turns grief into a game and chaos into canticles. Bricolage at its best: incisive, inventive and intimate. It’s the exact work I needed in my life.

Navid Sinaki

Why they said, “Your real name is Anon,” I'll never know . . . But now that I have a name, I know I must write . . . I’m scared, but feel it is time to be really bad.

Republished for the first time since its 1979 release, in a new revised edition, Holy Smoke is an account of the frenzy and paranoia of United States politics refracted through one individual’s psyche. With her theme of a child disappeared – and all that that phrase carries with it – Howe captures the chaos of reality in her salient mix of poetry and prose. Readers will find it hard to believe that this book, which gives fresh sense to the demand for universal human rights, was written in the last century.

Illustrated by Colleen McCallion

  • 978-1-0684395-1-3
  • 21.6 x 13.9 cm
  • 116 pp.
  • Paperback
  • 01 December 2025

About the author

Fanny Howe was born on 15 October 1940 in Buffalo, New York. She was professor emerita in literature at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of more than fifty books of poetry and prose. Howe taught literature and writing throughout her life and mentored a generation of American poets, activists and scholars working at the intersection of experimental and metaphysical thinking. She died on 8 July 2025 in Lincoln, Massachusetts.

Endorsements (3)

Howe prefers the clarity of misunderstanding to the blur of certainty.

The New Yorker

Poet of unsettled dreams.

The New York Times

Reading her fiction feels something like facing a patch of wilderness—startling, beautiful, yet terrifyingly mysterious.

BOMB Magazine

Press (4)

Keeping the Soul Fresh: Fanny Howe's Holy SmokeGeorgia PuiattiTo Be Magazine09/12/2025
Twenty Questions with Fanny HoweFanny HoweThe TLS04/12/2025
Fanny Howe’s Holy Smoke Henry BroomeBOMB Magazine, Fall 202509/2025
Poetry: Fanny Howe reads from her novel "Holy Smoke", just out from Fiction CollectiveSusan HowePacifica Radio Archives15/07/1979