Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination

Title: Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination
Author: Benedict Anderson
ISBN: 978-1844670901
Binding: Paper
Date: 2007
Publisher: Verso
Number of Pages: 256
Price: £9.99

In this sparkling new work, benedict anderson provides a radical recasting of themes from Imagined Communities, his classic book on nationalism, through an exploration of fin-de-siècle politics and culture that spans the Caribbean, Imperial Europe and the South China Sea.

A jewelled pomegranate packed with nitroglycerine is primed to blow away Manila’s 19th-century colonial elite at the climax of El Filibusterismo, whose author, the great political novelist José Rizal, was executed in 1896 by the Spanish authorities in the Philippines at the age of 35. Anderson explores the impact of avant-garde European literature and politics on Rizal and his contemporary, the pioneering folklorist Isabelo de los Reyes, who was imprisoned in Manila after the violent uprisings of 1896 and later incarcerated, together with Catalan anarchists, in the prison fortress of Montjuich in Barcelona. On his return to the Philippines, by now under American occupation, Isabelo formed the first militant trade unions under the influence of Malatesta and Bakunin.

Anderson considers the complex intellectual interactions of these young Filipinos with the new “science” of anthropology in Germany and Austro-Hungary, and with post-Communard experimentalists in Paris, against a background of militant anarchism in Spain, France, Italy and the Americas, José Marti’s armed uprising in Cuba and anti-imperialist protests in China and Japan. In doing so, he depicts the dense intertwining of anarchist internationalism and radical anti-colonialism.

Under Three Flags is a brilliantly original work on the explosive history of national independence and global politics.

An Unspeakable Betrayal: Selected Writings of Luis Buñuel

Title: An Unspeakable Betrayal: Selected Writings of Luis Buñuel
Author: Luis Buñuel

With a Foreword by Jean-Claude Carriere and a new Afterword by Juan Luis Buñuel and Rafael Buñuel. Translated by Garrett White.
ISBN: 978-0520234239
Binding: Paper
Publisher: University of California Press
Number of Pages: 277
Price: $18.95

Although Luis Buñuel, one of the great filmmakers of the century, was notoriously reluctant to discuss his own work in public, he wrote--and wrote well--on many subjects over the years. This collection proceeds chronologically, from poetry and short stories written in Buñuel's youth in Spain to an essay written in 1980, not long before his death. Newly translated into English, the writings offer startling insights into the filmmaker's life and thought.

The earliest pieces came well before Buñuel joined the Surrealist movement in Paris and created the landmark film Un chien andalou with Salvador Dalí. Yet these and the early Surrealist writings reveal the inventiveness of the mind that would later create such masterpieces of cinema as L'Age d'or, Los olvidados, Viridiana, The Milky Way, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, and That Obscure Object of Desire.

Later writings, which include screenplays and reflections on his own and others' films, illuminate many aspects of Buñuel's career, as well as the ways of thinking and perceiving that underlie his unique cinematic style. The final essay by this extraordinary artist sums up his view of the world--still vibrant and full of contradictions--at the end of his life.

Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction

Title: Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction
Author: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
ISBN: 978-0822320401
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Duke University Press
Number of Pages: 516
Price: £ 20.99

Novel Gazing is the first collection of queer criticism on the history of the novel. The contributors to this volume navigate new territory in literary theory with essays that implicitly challenge the "hermeneutic of suspicion" widespread in current critical theory. In a stunning introductory essay, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick delineates the possibilities for a criticism that would be "reparative" rather than cynical or paranoid. The startlingly imaginative essays in the volume explore new critical practices that can weave the pleasures and disorientations of reading into the fabric of queer analyses.Through discussions of a diverse array of British, French, and American novels—including major canonical novels, best-sellers, children’s fiction, and science fiction—these essays explore queer worlds of taste, texture, joy, and ennui, focusing on such subjects as flogging, wizardry, exorcism, dance, Zionist desire, and Internet sexuality.

Interpreting the works of authors as diverse as Benjamin Constant, Toni Morrison, T. H. White, and William Gibson, along with canonical queer modernists such as James, Proust, Woolf, and Cather, contributors reveal the wealth of ways in which selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them. The dramatic reframing that these essays perform will make the significance of Novel Gazing extend beyond the scope of queer studies to literary criticism in general.

Contributors. Stephen Barber, Renu Bora, Anne Chandler, James Creech, Tyler Curtain, Jonathan Goldberg, Joseph Litvak, Michael Lucey, Jeff Nunokawa, Cindy Patton, Jacob Press, Robert F. Reid-Pharr, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Melissa Solomon, Kathryn Bond Stockton, John Vincent, Maurice Wallace, Barry Weller

“This is brilliant. . . and it represents some brilliant critics at their best. These essays illustrate a different and immensely attractive discursive mode. I know of no work more resonant or anywhere near as generous. Beyond that, it marks Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s first move into reparative criticism—and that is a momentous event. ”—James R. Kincaid, University of Southern California

The Seducer’s Diary - Kierkegard

Title: The Seducer’s Diary
Author: Soren Kierkegaard
ISBN:9780141032818
Binding: paperback
Date: 1992
Publisher: Penguin books
Number of Pages: 135
Price: £ 2.00

Johannes is an aesthete, dedicated to creating the possibility of seduction through the careful manipulation of young women. He stealthily pursues the innocent Cordelia until she becomes increasingly drawn to him. But when she is ready to give herself completely, she realizes she may have got everything wrong.
United by the theme of love, the writings in the Great Loves series span over two thousand years and vastly different worlds. Readers will be introduced to love’s endlessly fascinating possibilities and extremities: romantic love, platonic love, erotic love, gay love, virginal love, adulterous love, parental love, filial love, nostalgic love, unrequited love, illicit love, not to mention lost love, twisted and obsessional love…

Red Sun: Travels in naxalite country

Title: Red Sun: Travels in naxalite country
Author:Sudeep Chakravarti
ISBN:9780143066538
Binding: paper back
Date: 2008
Publisher: penguin books
Number of Pages: 411
Price: INR 350

‘The Maoists are patriots, by their own admission . . . India’s Maoists do not want a separate country. They already have one. It’s just not the way they would like it—yet.’

In 1967, Naxalbari, a village in West Bengal, became the centre of a Mao-inspired militant peasant uprising guided by firebrand intellectuals. Today, Naxalism is no longer the Che Guevara-style revolution that it was. Spread across 15 of India’s 28 states, it is one of the world’s biggest, most sophisticated extreme-Left movements, and feeds off the misery and anger of the dispossessed. Since the late 1990s, hardly a week has passed without people dying in strikes and counter-strikes by the Maoists—interchangeably known as the Naxalites—and police and paramilitary forces.

In this brilliant and disturbing examination of the ‘Other India’, Sudeep Chakravarti combines political history, extensive interviews and individual case histories as he travels to the heart of Maoist zones in the country: Chhattisgarh (home to the controversial state-sponsored Salwa Judum programme to contain Naxalism), Jharkhand, West Bengal, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh (where a serving chief minister was nearly killed in a landmine explosion triggered by the Naxalites). He meets Maoist leaders and sympathizers, policemen, bureaucrats, politicians, security analysts, development workers, farmers and tribals—people, big and small, who comprise the actors and the audience in this war being fought in jungles and impoverished villages across India. What emerges is a sobering picture of a deeply divided society, and the dangers that lie ahead for India.

The indivisible remainder , Slavoj Zizek

Title: The indivisible remainder
Author: Slavoj Zizek
ISBN:139781844675814
Binding: Paper back
Date: 2007
Publisher: Radical thinkers,London new york
Number of Pages: 248
Price: £ 6.99

The feature which distinguishes the great works of materialist thought, from Lucretius’ De rerum natura through Capital to the writings of Lacan, is their unfinished character: again and again they tackle their chosen problem. Schelling’s Weltalter drafts belong to this same series, with their repeated attempt at the formulation of the ‘beginning of the world,’ of the passage from the pre-symbolic pulsation of the Real to the universe of logos.

F.W.J. Schelling, the German idealist who for too long dwelled in the shadow of Kant and Hegel, was the first to formulate the post-idealist motifs of finitude, contingency and temporality. His unique work announces Marx's critique of speculative idealism, as well as the properly Freudian notion of drive, of a blind compulsion to repeat which can never be sublated in the ideal medium of language.

The Indivisible Remainder begins with a detailed examination of the two works in which Schelling's speculative audacity reached its peak: his essay on human freedom and his drafts on the “Ages of the World.” After reconstituting their line of argumentation, Slavoj Zizek confronts Schelling with Hegel, and concludes by throwing a Schellingian light on some “related matters”: the consequences of the computerization of daily life for sexual experience; cynicism as today's predominant form of ideology; the epistemological deadlocks of quantum physics.

Although the book is packed with examples from politics and popular culture — the unmistakable token of Zizek’s style — from Speed and Groundhog Day to Forrest Gump, it signals a major shift towards a systematic concern with the basic questions of philosophy and the roots of the crisis of our late-capitalist universe, centred around the enigma of modern subjectivity.

Doveglion:Collected poems by Jose Garcia Villa

Title: Doveglion:Collected poems
Author: Jose Garcia Villa
ISBN:9780143105350
Binding: paper back
Date: 2008
Publisher: penguin classics
Number of Pages: 260
Price: $ 11.00

Known as the “Pope of Greenwich Village,” José Garcia Villa had a special status as the only Asian poet among a group of modern literary giants in 1940s New York that included W. H. Auden, Tennessee Williams, and a young Gore Vidal. But beyond his exotic ethnicity, Villa was a global poet who was admired for “the reverence, the raptness, the depth of concentration in [his] bravely deep poems” (Marianne Moore). Doveglion (Villa’s pen name—for dove, eagle, and lion) contains Villa’s collected poetry, including rare and previously unpublished material.