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An original and profound portrait of contemporary Britain told
through the testimonies of its inhabitants. 'A spectacularly
enjoyable and compelling reading experience . . . funny, moving,
surprising and thought-provoking. It humanises literature in this
toxic moment.' MAX PORTER, author of Lanny 'Seemingly simple yet so
deeply profound, The Passengers is an absorbing insight into the
lives and minds of so-called ordinary people: their hopes and fears
and idiosyncrasies at a specific moment in time.' CLIO BARNARD,
director of Ali & Ava and The Essex Serpent 'A nation's psyche
comes to the surface. The Passengers is not just an oral history of
the contemporary moment but, drenched in mood and texture, renders
the country itself as a sonic collage.' SUKHDEV SANDHU, GUARDIAN
Between October 2018 and March 2021, Will Ashon collected voices -
people talking about their lives, needs, dreams, loves, hopes and
fears - all of them with some connection to the British Isles. He
used a range of methods including letters sent to random addresses,
hitchhiking, referrals from strangers and so on. He conducted the
interviews in person, on the phone, over the internet or asked
people to record themselves. Interview techniques ranged from
asking people to tell him a secret to choosing an arbitrary
question from a list. The resulting testimonies tell the collective
story of what it feels like to be alive in a particular time and
place - here and now. The Passengers is a book about how we give
shape to our lives, find meaning in the chaos, acknowledge the
fragility of our existence while alleviating this anxiety with
moments of beauty, love, humour and solidarity. 'A magical mystery
tour of Britain . . . extraordinary.' DAILY TELEGRAPH 'Ashon's
gloriously polyphonic book scales the heights. A deeply felt and
humane portrait of where we are.' NIVEN GOVINDEN, author of Diary
of a Film 'This book couldn't have come into my life at a better
time. It's a guiding mate. It enters like a cat through a window,
ready to take your attention and show you what it needs to.' TICE
CIN, author of Keeping the House
Ever wondered what life is really about or why you were even born?
Well . . .
The first monograph by sculptor, filmmaker, and photographer
Shikeith, Notes towards Becoming a Spill brings together a series
of striking studio portraits of Black male subjects as they inhabit
various states of meditation, prayer, and ecstasy. Shikeith
describes the work as "leaning into the uncanny," visualizing
ritual and the process of excavating Black men's erotic potential,
the better to exorcise the "intangible presences that haunt their
bodies and psyches." The men's faces and bodies glisten with sweat
(and tears)-the manifestation and evidence of desire. This ecstasy
is what critic Antwaun Sargent proclaims as "an ideal, a warm
depiction that insists on concrete possibility for another world."
In this revelatory volume, Shikeith redefines the idea of sacred
space and positions a Queer ethic identified by its investment in
vulnerability, tenderness, and joy. Shikeith: Notes towards
Becoming a Spill is made possible, in part, thanks to the generous
contribution of 7G Foundation.
'One of the most rewarding pieces of hip-hop criticism ever
written' Jeff Chang 'Brilliant' Giles Peterson 'Will Ashon's
dazzling study gets to the heart of hip hop, pop culture and the
history of contemporary America. Essential' Matt Thorne 'Each of
these chambers contains wonders of history, destiny and mythology'
Margo Jefferson Will Ashon tells, in 36 interlinked 'chambers', the
story of Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) and how it changed the
world. As unexpected and complex as the album itself, Chamber Music
ranges from provocative essays to semi-comic skits, from deep
scholarly analysis to satirical celebration, seeking to
contextualise, reveal and honour this singularly composite work of
art. From the FBI's war on drugs to the porn theatres of 42nd
street, from the history of jazz to the future of politics, Chamber
Music is an explosive and revelatory new way of writing about music
and culture.
In litter-strewn Epping Forest on the edge of London, might a
writer find that magical moment of transcendence? He will certainly
discover filthy graffiti and frightening dogs, as well as
world-renowned artists and fading celebrities, robbers, lovers,
ghosts and poets. But will he find himself? Or a version of himself
he might learn something from?Strange Labyrinth is a quest
narrative arguing that we shouldn't get lost in order to find
ourselves, but solely to accept that we are lost in the first
place. It is a singular blend of landscape writing, political
indignation, cultural history and wit from a startling new voice in
non-fiction.
An original and profound portrait of contemporary Britain told
through the testimonies of its inhabitants. 'A spectacularly
enjoyable and compelling reading experience . . . funny, moving,
surprising and thought-provoking. It humanises literature in this
toxic moment.' MAX PORTER, author of Lanny 'Seemingly simple yet so
deeply profound, The Passengers is an absorbing insight into the
lives and minds of so-called ordinary people: their hopes and fears
and idiosyncrasies at a specific moment in time.' CLIO BARNARD,
director of Ali & Ava and The Essex Serpent 'A nation's psyche
comes to the surface. The Passengers is not just an oral history of
the contemporary moment but, drenched in mood and texture, renders
the country itself as a sonic collage.' SUKHDEV SANDHU, GUARDIAN
Between October 2018 and March 2021, Will Ashon collected voices -
people talking about their lives, needs, dreams, loves, hopes and
fears - all of them with some connection to the British Isles. He
used a range of methods including letters sent to random addresses,
hitchhiking, referrals from strangers and so on. He conducted the
interviews in person, on the phone, over the internet or asked
people to record themselves. Interview techniques ranged from
asking people to tell him a secret to choosing an arbitrary
question from a list. The resulting testimonies tell the collective
story of what it feels like to be alive in a particular time and
place - here and now. The Passengers is a book about how we give
shape to our lives, find meaning in the chaos, acknowledge the
fragility of our existence while alleviating this anxiety with
moments of beauty, love, humour and solidarity. 'A magical mystery
tour of Britain . . . extraordinary.' DAILY TELEGRAPH 'Ashon's
gloriously polyphonic book scales the heights. A deeply felt and
humane portrait of where we are.' NIVEN GOVINDEN, author of Diary
of a Film 'This book couldn't have come into my life at a better
time. It's a guiding mate. It enters like a cat through a window,
ready to take your attention and show you what it needs to.' TICE
CIN, author of Keeping the House
In this profoundly innovative book, Ashon T. Crawley engages a wide
range of critical paradigms from black studies, queer theory, and
sound studies to theology, continental philosophy, and performance
studies to theorize the ways in which alternative or
“otherwise” modes of existence can serve as disruptions against
the marginalization of and violence against minoritarian lifeworlds
and possibilities for flourishing. Examining the whooping,
shouting, noise-making, and speaking in tongues of Black
Pentecostalism—a multi-racial, multi-class, multi-national
Christian sect with one strand of its modern genesis in 1906 Los
Angeles—Blackpentecostal Breath reveals how these aesthetic
practices allow for the emergence of alternative modes of social
organization. As Crawley deftly reveals, these choreographic,
sonic, and visual practices and the sensual experiences they create
are not only important for imagining what Crawley identifies as
“otherwise worlds of possibility,” they also yield a general
hermeneutics, a methodology for reading culture in an era when such
expressions are increasingly under siege.
Abolition can be a spiritual practice, a spiritual journey, and a
spiritual commitment. What does abolition mean and how can we get
there as a collective and improvisational project? To posit the
spirituality of abolition, is to consider the ways historical and
contemporary movements against slavery, prisons, the wage system,
animal and earth exploitation, racialized, gendered, and sexualized
violence, and the death penalty necessitate epistemologies that
have been foreclosed through violent force by Western thought of
philosophical and theological kinds. It is also to claim that the
material conditions that will produce abolition are necessarily
Black, Indigenous, queer and trans, feminist, and also about
disabled and other non-conforming bodies in force and verve.
Abolition and Spirituality asks what can prison abolition teach us
about spiritual practice, spiritual journey, spiritual commitment?
And, what can these things underscore about the struggle for
abolition as a desired manifestation of material change in worlds
we inhabit currently? Collecting writings, poetry, and art from
thinkers, organizers, and incarcerated people the editors trace the
importance of faith and spirit in our ongoing struggle towards
abolitionist horizons.
In The Lonely Letters, A tells Moth: "Writing about and thinking
with joy is what sustains me, daily. It nourishes me. I do not
write about joy primarily because I always have it. I write about
joy, Black joy, because I want to generate it, I want it to emerge,
I want to participate in its constant unfolding." But alongside
joy, A admits to Moth, come loneliness, exclusion, and unfulfilled
desire. The Lonely Letters is an epistolary blackqueer critique of
the normative world in which Ashon T. Crawley-writing as
A-meditates on the interrelation of blackqueer life, sounds of the
Black church, theology, mysticism, and love. Throughout his
letters, A explores blackness and queerness in the musical and
embodied experience of Blackpentecostal spaces and the potential
for platonic and erotic connection in a world that conspires
against blackqueer life. Both a rigorous study and a performance,
The Lonely Letters gestures toward understanding the capacity for
what we study to work on us, to transform us, and to change how we
inhabit the world.
In The Lonely Letters, A tells Moth: "Writing about and thinking
with joy is what sustains me, daily. It nourishes me. I do not
write about joy primarily because I always have it. I write about
joy, Black joy, because I want to generate it, I want it to emerge,
I want to participate in its constant unfolding." But alongside
joy, A admits to Moth, come loneliness, exclusion, and unfulfilled
desire. The Lonely Letters is an epistolary blackqueer critique of
the normative world in which Ashon T. Crawley-writing as
A-meditates on the interrelation of blackqueer life, sounds of the
Black church, theology, mysticism, and love. Throughout his
letters, A explores blackness and queerness in the musical and
embodied experience of Blackpentecostal spaces and the potential
for platonic and erotic connection in a world that conspires
against blackqueer life. Both a rigorous study and a performance,
The Lonely Letters gestures toward understanding the capacity for
what we study to work on us, to transform us, and to change how we
inhabit the world.
Ever wondered what life is really about or why you were even born?
Well . . .
Will Ashon spent the day of Tuesday May 21st 2019 hitching around
the motorways and 'A' roads of England, chatting to whoever picked
him up about their lives, dreams, aspirations, fears and favourite
foods. The resulting transcripts, presented here edited and
cross-cut through one another into a collage of voices, form a work
in which generosity plays a far greater role than hate, reminding
us of our nation's better self. Sitting somewhere between Svetlana
Alexievich and Rachel Cusk, NOT FAR FROM THE JUNCTION is a fresh,
funny, moving and quietly radical work of non-fiction, exploring
who we are and how we see the world.
In this profoundly innovative book, Ashon T. Crawley engages a wide
range of critical paradigms from black studies, queer theory, and
sound studies to theology, continental philosophy, and performance
studies to theorize the ways in which alternative or "otherwise"
modes of existence can serve as disruptions against the
marginalization of and violence against minoritarian lifeworlds and
possibilities for flourishing. Examining the whooping, shouting,
noise-making, and speaking in tongues of Black Pentecostalism-a
multi-racial, multi-class, multi-national Christian sect with one
strand of its modern genesis in 1906 Los Angeles-Blackpentecostal
Breath reveals how these aesthetic practices allow for the
emergence of alternative modes of social organization. As Crawley
deftly reveals, these choreographic, sonic, and visual practices
and the sensual experiences they create are not only important for
imagining what Crawley identifies as "otherwise worlds of
possibility," they also yield a general hermeneutics, a methodology
for reading culture in an era when such expressions are
increasingly under siege.
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