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21 April 08: The Federal case against Steve Kurtz has finally been dropped! Bookstore note: We're having serious database issues with our online bookstore, which we hope to have resolved as soon as possible. Meanwhile, though, our entire catalog (including new titles) is available via AK Press and Small Press Distribution. Thanks for your patience and support. |
| About Autonomedia |
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Autonomedia is an autonomous zone for arts radicals in both old and new media. We publish books on radical media, politics and the arts that seek to transcend party lines, bottom lines and straight lines. We also maintain the Interactivist Info Exchange, an online forum for discourse and debate on themes relevant to the books we publish. Keep up-to-date on new releases and special offers from Autonomedia. Autonomedia books can be ordered through our secure online bookstore, as well as through AK Distribution, Small Press Distribution, and outside of North America, Pluto Press. In New York City, most of our books are available at Bluestockings Books, 172 Allen Street in Manhattan. |
recent books
These insurgent essays describe, prolong and critique some of the cultural and artistic projects that arose with the worldwide wave of protests around the turn of the millennium, against what the global South calls neoliberalism. Dissent and the refusal of a programmed existence continually return to the streets; but they also unfold in the imagination. Complex discourses and elaborate fictions weave their way through images, gestures and hilarious scenarios, hovering at the edges of reality and searching for whoever will give them voice. Museums, cinemas, books and theaters are temporary abodes for such things, and authors are only a convenience. But none of the wilder spirits ever really disappears. Time leaches away the graffiti of revolt, and the cynicism of power lays a new coat of paint. Still the collective phantoms return.
isbn 978-1-57027-175-5 : price $15.95 : 192 pagesClick here to buy the book
In the warped underworld of Uptown Chicago, two petty thieves, Jack and Vince — Dostoevskyan in their criminal use of philosophy, exalting in the stealing of art as the highest human act — meet their target, their nemesis and their double: Madame Little-Ease, a Satanic Grandma Moses, who paints on refuse with polluted blood.
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isbn 978-1-57027-185-4 : price $15.95 : 258 pagesClick here to buy the book
Our 16th annual wall calendar of radical saints and sheroes, with artwork by James Koehnline, and text by the Autonomedia Collective.
Hundreds of radical cultural and political heroes are celebrated here, along with the animating ideas that continue to guide this project — a reprieve from the 500-year-long sentence to life-at-hard-labor that the European colonization of the "New World" and the ensuing devastations of the rest of the world has represented. It is increasingly clear — at the dawn of this new millennium — that the Planetary Work Machine will not rule forever! Celebrate with this calendar on which every day is a holiday!
isbn 978-1-57027-198-4 : price $9.95 : 32 pagesClick here to buy the book!
How much of contemporary medical practice still derives from a practice rooted in the witch-hunts that plagued Europe from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, and burned at the stake, after horrible torture, hundreds of thousands of midwives and healers along with other poor women — the greatest sexocide in recorded history?
Women’s bodies and their medical knowledge were burned on those stakes to be replaced by a male “science” and a male gynecological profession controlled by the state and church. Has history run its course? Or, among the many reasons given today for hysterectomies, does its abuse still conceal, more or less covertly, a yearning for male domination over women’s bodies that reaches this most lethal form of conquest because it expropriates and destroys what makes a body a woman’s body?
The powerful essays (and accompanying glossaries and testimonials) collected in Gynocide examine the historical, legal, ethical, psychological and medical aspects of deeply sexist practices in defining and treating these issues of contemporary women’s health.
Contributors draw on the important theoretical insights and perspectives developed in recent decades by radical Italian feminism, revealing the complicity of widespread assumptions about the structures and roles of gender, the nuclear family, educational practices, and the state.
isbn 978-1-57027-176-2 : price $14.95 : 160 pagesClick here for more info on this book.
In the 1980s, p.m.’s book bolo’bolo became an indispensable guide to new autonomous projects, a manual for "applied utopias" on a human scale, stressing cultural diversity, freedom of movement, ecological sustainability, and a relaxed attitude towards work — themes which remain essential in his new novel, Akiba.
Akiba combines the age-old schemes of millennial and modern utopias with recent research in ecology, quantum physics and computing, the mathematics of the Big Bang, Peak Oil theories, and the work of Roger Penrose, J. R. Searle, and others.
isbn 978-1-57027-194-6 : price $15.95 : 274 pagesClick here for more info on Akiba.
Business has a mad crush on collaboration — witness the billions spent on social networking sites, or all the hype around “collaboration studies.” But beneath all the flirtation, business needs to remain the boss. As long as the process of collaboration is controlled and monetized, the relationship will always be one of forced cooperation. This book argues for Free Cooperation — an alternative way of doing things together, from parenting and the workplace to event organization and cultural production. Brian Holmes, Howard Rheingold, Christoph Spehr and the editors critique the dominant methods of socio-economic integration, and elaborate a practical alternative, one that promises to surmount both the problems of inequality and the lack of independence in daily life.
The Art of Free Cooperation includes a DVD with a feature-length film collage, narrated by Tony Conrad, illustrating the principles of Free Cooperation through the visual language of science fiction movies, additional texts, interviews and highlights from the international “Free Cooperation” conference, organized by the editors, that led to this book.
isbn 978-1-57027-179-3 : price $20 :Buy it from Autonomedia (click here!)
Provo staged political and cultural interventions into the symbolic and everyday spaces of Holland from 1962–1967. In this first book-length English-language study of their history, Richard Kempton narrates the rise and fall of Provo from early Dutch “happenings” staged in 1962 to the “Death of Provo” in 1967. He chronicles Robert Jasper Grootveld’s anarchist anti-cancer campaign, the riots against Princess Beatrix’s marriage to an ex-Nazi, and the famous White Bicycle program. He also comments on parallel contemporary and near-contemporary movements (including Dada and Situationism), Amsterdam’s previous anarchist traditions, the spread of Provo through Holland and the development of the Kabouter party, and ends by offering an existentialist critique of Provo and other anarchist movements of the 1960s.
isbn 9781570271816 : price $14.95 : 160 pagesBuy it from Autonomedia (click here!)
Blue-Eyed Devil traces a century of American Islam, as well as a 20,000-mile spiritual journey across the U.S., through the perspective of a white convert. Keeping in mind the five permitted purposes of spiritual travel — seeing a holy site, deriving instruction, seeking knowledge, visiting a venerable person, and visiting the tomb of a saint — Michael Muhammad Knight criss-crossed the country in search of a parallel Islamic history, and struggled to understand his own place in that history.
From the remnants of Quranic oral traditions in the Georgia Sea Islands to the coded language of the Five Percenters, from the shrouded origins of the Nation of Islam to the Egypto-Futurist mythology of Malachi York, and from woman-led prayers in West Virginia to Muslim prison populations in northern New York, Blue-Eyed Devil takes a unique perspective on Islam’s intersection with race, gender, and Americanization.
Listen to an excerpt of Blue-Eyed Devil here.
Listen to a radio interview about Blue-Eyed Devil here.
isbn 978-1-57027-179-3 : price $14.95 : 224 pagesBuy it from Autonomedia (click here)!
Set in a Muslim punk-house in Buffalo, New York, this novel explores the twin identities of punk and Islam in their many varieties and degrees of orthodoxy. The story here is primarily with the characters -- such as Umar, the straight-edge Sunni; Rabeya, the burqa-clad riot grrl; Jehangir, the dope-smoking mohawked Sufi (who plays rooftop calls-to-prayer on his electric guitar) -- and their collective articulation of a heresy-friendly, pluralist Islam. Full of punk references (real and invented) and enough Arabic phrases to fully deck out your skateboard, The Taqwacores is a great introduction to the cracks in the surface of mainstream Islam with a peculiarly American face.
Read the passages censored in the British edition here.
Listen to an excerpt of the book, mixed by Al-Thawra, here.
isbn 1-57027-167-4 : price $10 : 256 pagesBuy it from the Autonomedia bookstore
Marching Plague examines the scientific evidence and the rhetoric surrounding biological warfare, particularly the development of anthrax and other bio-weapons, and makes a strong case against the likelihood of such weapons ever being used in a terrorist situation. Studying the history and science of such weapons, they conclude that for reasons of accuracy and potency, biological weapons lack the efficiency required to produce the widespread devastation typically associated with bioterrorism.
Why the public urgency around biowarfare, then, and why the channeling of enormous resources into research and development of tools to counter an imaginary threat? This is the real focus of Marching Plague: the deconstruction of an exceedingly complex political economy of fear, primarily supporting biowartech development and the militarization of the public sphere.
isbn 1-57027-178-X : price $9.95 : 160 pagesBuy it from Autonomedia (click here)!
