Divided Publishing

In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities

£ 15.99
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£ 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

Bourgeois Coldness

£ 13.99
Pre order in rile* books
£ 13.99
Pre order in rile* books

Bourgeois ColdnessHenrike Kohpeißtrans. Grace Nissan

£ 13.99

Bourgeois Coldness

Henrike Kohpeiß

trans. Grace Nissan

Foregrounding affect, this timely book provides an inestimable philosophical argument for the centrality of Blackness in critical examinations of capitalism’s violence.

Denise Ferreira da Silva

Elegant and erudite in equal measure, this book will stand as a landmark diagnosis of the practices of denial in our time.

Andreas Malm

Bourgeois coldness refers to an affective strategy that offers an explanation for how self-preservation works. Bourgeois coldness is one of the most advanced affective and aesthetic forms of preserving the structure of the colonial status quo. It creates an affective shelter in the world, unencroached upon by the immediate consequences of its many catastrophes. It functions like air conditioning – a complex technology which reliably stabilises the climate until those inside consider it natural. Bourgeois spaces – institutional and affective – stay cool and pleasant. But outside it’s burning.

Canonical critical theory by Adorno and Horkheimer enters a dialogue with Black studies through Hartman and Moten.

  • 978-1-7395161-2-3
  • 21.6 x 13.9 cm
  • 280 pp.
  • Paperback
  • September 2025

About the author

Henrike Kohpeiß is a philosopher in Berlin, working on social and political philosophy, critical theory, affect studies, Black studies and feminist philosophy. She regularly publishes work in academic journals and criticism in magazines. She organises and hosts events in Berlin, such as the conversation series ‘Feelings at the end of the world’ at Volksbühne. Bourgeois Coldness is her first book, and was published in German in 2023 by Campus Verlag.

Photo: Inke Johannsen

About the translator

Grace Nissan is the author of The Utopians (Ugly Duckling Presse) and The City Is Lush With / Obstructed Views (DoubleCross Press), as well as the translator of War Diary by Yevgenia Belorusets (New Directions) and kochanie, today i bought bread by Uljana Wolf (World Poetry Books). Their translations of Yevgenia Belorusets were presented in the 59th Venice Biennale, as well as in the accompanying publication In the Face Of War (Isolarii). They are the recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Translation Fellowship to translate the Austrian poet Ann Cotten’s Banned! An Epic Poem into English.

Press (2)

Eine Kälte, die das Leben gut durchwärmtMartin Hartman Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 2711021/11/2023
The Colonial Lives of Bourgeois ColdnessHenrike Kohpeiß and Jonas BensAffect and Colonialism Web Lab21/03/2023

Upcoming (6)

10 November Amsterdam Henrike Kohpeiß launch
06 November London Book launch Bourgeois Coldness, Historical Materialism
04 November London Bourgeois Coldness launch, Housmans Bookshop
23 October Berlin Save the date: Bourgeois Coldness launch, hosted by Hopscotch (venue TBC)
02 October Malmö Launch of Bourgeois Coldness, Anti Bok
30 September Stockholm Bourgeois Coldness launch, Nord Books