Divided Publishing

In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities

£ 13.99
Buy in Europe UK US Australia
£ 13.99
Buy in Europe UK US Australia

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

£ 13.99

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
  • 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

Upcoming (2)

07 April London Beyond Cop Cites: A Conversation with author Joy James, Brixton (Tate) Library
05 April London People’s Tribunal on Police Killings, Regent's University London

I have brought you a severed hand

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

I have brought you a severed handGhayath Almadhountrans. Catherine Cobham

£ 11.99

I have brought you a severed hand

Ghayath Almadhoun

trans. Catherine Cobham

Fluid and unselfconscious, Ghayath Almadhoun writes love poems in the shape of nightmares: I have brought you a severed hand is a surreal mix of absurd humour, heteroerotic lust and dead seriousness. Caught between two exiles, the one inherited from his Palestinian father and the one he chose and lives, Almadhoun attempts to explain water and tame hope.

  • 978-1-7398431-2-0
  • 21.6 x 13.9 cm
  • 144 pp.
  • Paperback
  • March 2025

About the author

Ghayath Almadhoun (born 1979, Damascus) is a Syrian-Palestinian poet who moved to Sweden in 2008. He has published five collections of poetry in Arabic, the latest being Adrenalin (Almutawassit, 2017) and I have brought you a severed hand (Almutawassit, 2024). In 2017, Adrenalin was translated into English by Catherine Cobham and published by Action Books. In 2023, Almadhoun curated, edited and translated the poetry anthology Kontinentaldrift: Das Arabische Europa (Verlag Das Wunderhorn and Haus für Poesie), which includes thirty-one Arabic poets living in Europe. The English translation of I have brought you a severed hand is published simultaneously by Divided in the UK and Europe and by Action Books in the USA. Almadhoun currently lives between Berlin and Stockholm. His work has been translated into nearly thirty languages.

Photo: Sina Opalka

About the translator

Catherine Cobham taught Arabic language and literature at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, for many years and was head of the department of Arabic and Persian from 2011 until 2021. She has translated the work of a number of Arab writers, including poetry by Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish, Ghayath Almadhoun, Tammam Hunaidy and Nouri al-Jarrah, and novels and short stories by Yusuf Idris, Naguib Mahfouz, Hanan al-Shaykh, Fuad al-Takarli and Jamal Saeed. She has written articles in academic journals and co-written with Fabio Caiani The Iraqi Novel: Key Writers, Key Texts (Edinburgh University Press, 2013).

Endorsements (3)

This book never misses the defiant beat of an exile’s haunted footing across wars, seas and memory. Almadhoun turns the genocidal logic of colonialism upside down, emptying out the crumbs of humanity and civilisation.

Don Mee Choi

Almadhoun uses every possible means of silence to make the total devastation palpable.

Alfred Schaffer

Many poets attempt to traverse the gulf between the experience of tragedy and the ability to relay its magnitude to anyone else. But few living have done it with such flourish, such sustained passion and formal precision as Ghayath Almadhoun.

Kaveh Akbar

Press (1)

Ghayath Almadhoun: Writing is my real homelandDimitra DidangelouThe Brussels Review10/10/2024

Rights

  • North America (Action Books)