Seeking Mavis Beacon - Essential & Additional Reading
Inspired by our snooping feminist detectices Jazmin Jones and Olivia McKayla Ross we’ve started a reading list for the curious and those who can’t get enough of the world of Cyberfeminism. SEEKING MAVIS BEACON is in cinemas 9th May.
Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto
by Legacy Russell
The glitch is often dismissed as an error, a faulty overlaying, but, as Legacy Russell shows, liberation can be found within the fissures between gender, technology and the body that it creates. The glitch offers the opportunity for us to perform and transform ourselves in an infinite variety of identities. In Glitch Feminism, Russell makes a series of radical demands through memoir, art and critical theory, and the work of contemporary artists who have travelled through the glitch in their work
LONGING FOR LO-FI: GLIMPSING BACK THROUGH TECHNOLOGY by Sébastien Bovie
In the here and today there are many attempts to recreate spaces of comfort. The lo-fi community should be considered one of them. Through the numerous nostalgic references and relaxing beats of lo-fi, we retrieve a glimpse of what was once our home—be it real or imaginary. One might say that Longing for Lo-fi equals longing for the homely. This book-length essay looks at internet culture through the lens of psychoanalysis, semiotics and critical theory, in an attempt to lay the feeling of comfort bare.
On and Off-Screen Imaginaries by Tiffany Sia
This collection of writings by artist and filmmaker Tiffany Sia gathers six essays that offer a framework for an exilic, fugitive cinema. Sia addresses geopolitics in cinema, image circulation, and national imaginaries, highlighting the stakes of deterritorializing the discursive formation of new media and film practices, and making the case for the continued relevance of cinema in an era of networked images and screen ubiquity.
https://primaryinformation.org/product/on-and-off-screen-imaginaries/
Meriem Bennani: Life on the CAPS
Life on the CAPS is a monograph devoted to the artist Meriem Bennani’s film trilogy of the same name. In the bonkers world of the CAPS, air travel has been made obsolete by teleportation, enabling instantaneous passage across borders and oceans. On a fictive island in the middle of the Atlantic, a makeshift detention camp for intercepted migrants has developed into a bustling yet precarious megalopolis, with codes, rituals, and a burgeoning resistance movement of its own. Life on the CAPS offers a panoramic view of Bennani’s wildly inventive worldbuilding, with special consideration of her excursions into science fiction, biotechnology, and vernacular music, and beyond.
https://bidoun.org/projects/books/projects/meriem-bennani-life-on-the-caps
Cybernetics of the Poor by Diedrich Diederichsen, Oier Etxeberria (Eds.
Cybernetics of the Poor examines the relationship between art and cybernetics and their intersections in the past and present. Since the late 1940s, the term cybernetics has been used to describe self-regulating systems that measure, anticipate, and react in response to changing conditions. Initially relevant mostly in the fields of administration, planning, criminology, and early ecology, under digital capitalism cybernetics has become an economic factor (see: big data). In such a cybernetic totality, art must respond to the new situation: as a cybernetics of the poor.
https://www.sternberg-press.com/product/cybernetics-of-the-poor/
Synthetic Becoming
Adopting a decolonial feminist, posthumanist, and new materialist approach, the book embraces queer ecological sensibilities and responds with a series of critical but hopeful provocations that embrace posthuman mutability and articulate our “synthetic becoming” in ways that facilitate caring relations and allow us to envision and enact hopeful futures with and despite these peculiar chemical agents.
https://www.printedmatter.org/catalog/62367/
Cyberfeminism Index - Mindy Seu
In Cyberfeminism Index, hackers, scholars, artists, and activists of all regions, races and sexual orientations consider how humans might reconstruct themselves by way of technology. When learning about internet history, we are taught to focus on engineering, the military-industrial complex, and the grandfathers who created the architecture and protocol, but the internet is not only a network of cables, servers, and computers. It is an environment that shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants and their use.
https://tenderbooks.co.uk/products/cyberfeminism-index-mindy-seu?variant=43885187006682
ASSEMBLING A BLACK COUNTER CULTURE by DeForrest Brown, Jr.
Assembling a Black Counter Culture reframes techno from a Black theoretical perspective distinct from its cultural assimilation within predominantly white, European electronic music contexts and discourse. With references to Theodore Roszak’s Making of a Counter Culture, writings by African American autoworker and political activist James Boggs, and the “techno rebels” of Alvin Toffler’s Third Wave, among others, Brown draws parallels between movements in Black electronic music and Afrofuturist, speculative, and Afrodiasporic practices to imagine a world-building sonic fiction and futurity embodied in techno.
https://goodpress.co.uk/products/assembling-a-black-counter-culture-by-deforrest-brown-jr
Curating Digital Art. From Presenting and Collecting Digital Art to Networked Co-curation
Curating Digital Art is dedicated to pioneering curators, artists and designers and presents a collection of interviews that were conducted between 2011 and 2020. The interviews emerged from the concern that too little knowledge was available about the potential of exhibiting digital art, either offline in museum spaces and galleries, or on the web. In an attempt to address this hiatus this publication provides an overview of the different perspectives and practices of nearly a decade of curating digital art in physical space and online.
Indivisible By Fanny Howe
The conclusion of a radically philosophical and personal series of Fanny Howe novels animated by questions of race, spirituality, childhood, transience, resistance, and poverty.
Dark Mirrors
By Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa
The book sets out an argument that one of the most dynamic sites of artistic invention in photographic practice over the past decade has been the photographic book, and thus many of the essays in the volume assess artistic works as they are bodied forth in that form. Among the recurrent themes that emerge from these rigorous, probing essays are the complex interrelationship of anti-blackness and visuality, the fragility and complexity of embodied difference in portraiture, the potency of verbal and visual media as social forms, and the politics of attention.
Experiments in Imagining Otherwise By Lola Olufemi
In these playful written experiments, Lola Olufemi navigates the space between what is and what could be. Weaving together fragmentary reflections in prose and poetry, this is an exploration of the possibility of living differently, grounded in black feminist scholarship and political organising.
Olufemi shows that the horizon is not an immaterial state we gesture toward. Instead, propelled by the motion of thinking against and beyond, we must invent the future now and never let go of the otherwise.
https://www.hajarpress.com/books/experiments-in-imagining-otherwise
Black Utopias By Jayna Brown
In Black Utopias Jayna Brown takes up the concept of utopia as a way of exploring alternative states of being, doing, and imagining in Black culture. Musical, literary, and mystic practices become utopian enclaves in which Black people engage in modes of creative worldmaking.
Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz
Maltz was the first researcher and author to explain how the self-image (a term he popularized) has complete control over an individual's ability to achieve, or fail to achieve, any goal. He developed techniques for improving and managing self-image visualization, mental rehearsal and relaxation which have informed and inspired countless motivational gurus, sports psychologists, and self-help practitioners for more than sixty years.
Black and Female: Essays by Tsitsi Dangarembga
This paradigm-shifting essay collection weaves the personal and political in an illuminating exploration of race and gender. Dangarembga recounts a painful separation from her parents as a toddler, connecting this experience to the ruptures caused in Africa by human trafficking and enslavement. She argues that, after independence, the ruling party in Zimbabwe only performed inclusion for women while silencing the work of self-actualized feminists. She describes her struggles to realize her ambitions in theater, film, and literature, laying out the long path to the publication of her novels.
https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/black-and-female
Futures of Black Radicalism Edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin
In a time when activists in Ferguson, Palestine, Baltimore, and Hong Kong immediately make connections between their movements, this book makes clear that new Black radical politics are thoroughly internationalist and redraws the links between Black resistance and anti-capitalism. Featuring the key voices in the new intellectual wave of Black radical thinking, this collection outlines one of the most vibrant areas of thought today.
Blackness at the Intersection Kehinde Andrews , Kimberlé Crenshaw, Annabel Wilson
Focusing on Blackness in Britain, the contributors examine how scholars and activists are employing intersectionality to foreground Black British experiences. Its essays encompass key issues such as gender and Black womanhood, issues of representation within contemporary British culture, and the position of Black Britons within institutions such as the family, education and health. The book also looks to the role intersectionality can play in shaping future political activism, and in forging links beyond 'Blackness' to other social movements.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/blackness-at-the-intersection-9781786998651/
“Rest as resistance:” Black cyberfeminism, collective healing and liberation on @TheNapMinistry by Mel Monier
With a vibrant social media following, the Nap Ministry builds upon a strong history of Black feminist activism that centers the lived experiences of Black women. According to Hersey, rest is personal and political, a fight against the commodification and exploitation of laboring Black folks from chattel slavery to contemporary grind and hustle culture.
https://academic.oup.com/ccc/article-abstract/16/3/119/7236850?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Digital Black Feminism By Catherine Knight Steele
Steele traces the longstanding relationship between technology and Black feminist thought Black women are at the forefront of some of this century's most important discussions about technology: trolling, online harassment, algorithmic bias, and influencer culture. But, Catherine Knight Steele argues that Black women's relationship to technology began long before the advent of Twitter or Instagram. To truly "listen to Black women, " Steele points to the history of Black feminist technoculture in the United States and its ability to decenter white supremacy and patriarchy in a conversation about the future of technology. Using the virtual beauty shop as a metaphor, Digital Black Feminism walks readers through the technical skill, communicative expertise, and entrepreneurial acumen of Black women's labor—born of survival strategies and economic necessity—both on and offline.Positioning Black women at the center of our discourse about the past, present, and future of technology, Steele offers a through-line from the writing of early twentieth-century Black women to the bloggers and social media mavens of the twenty-first century.
LOTE By Shola von Reinhold
Lush and frothy, incisive and witty, Shola von Reinhold's decadent queer literary debut immerses readers in the pursuit of aesthetics and beauty, while interrogating the removal and obscurement of Black figures from history.
Digital Misogynoir Report by Glitch
‘The Digital Misogynoir Report: Ending the dehumanising of Black women on social media’ is the first report to examine the widespread prevalence of digital misogynoir across social media platforms. This report was unique in that it highlighted misogynoir across multiple online platforms in collaboration with Textgain. We analysed one million posts across Twitter (now known as X), Facebook, Instagram, Gab and 4Chan.
Distributed Blackness African American Cybercultures by André Brock, Jr
Distributed Blackness places blackness at the very center of internet culture. André Brock Jr. claims issues of race and ethnicity as inextricable from and formative of contemporary digital culture in the United States. Distributed Blackness analyzes a host of platforms and practices (from Black Twitter to Instagram, YouTube, and app development) to trace how digital media have reconfigured the meanings and performances of African American identity. Brock moves beyond widely circulated deficit models of respectability, bringing together discourse analysis with a close reading of technological interfaces to develop nuanced arguments about how “blackness” gets worked out in various technological domains.
Introduction: Thinking of a Black Digital Ethos By Meredith D. Clark
This special issue offers a series of cross-disciplinary perspectives from a network of Black scholars in sociology, technology, media studies and humanities living through economic, political, social, and technological paradigm shifts that prompt us to revisit Stuart Hall’s question, “What is this Black in Black popular culture?” in the context of Black Digital Culture. We take up the challenge to center Black technocultural production on social media platforms through an intersectional lens. Using critical approaches including Black Feminist Thought (as articulated by Patricia Hill Collins, Sylvia Wynter, bell hooks, and Kimberlé Crenshaw among others), Black Cyberfeminism (Kishonna Gray, Catherine Knight Steele, and Tressie McMillan Cottom), and Andre Brock’s Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis, we investigate how race, gender, and digital media technologies have informed and influenced Black digital culture.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20563051221117568
Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices By Maria Fernandez
Part performative intervention, part radical polemic and activist manual, Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices introduces a diverse international group of feminist writers, artists, theorists, and activists engaged in formulating a contestational politics for tactical cyberfeminism. This recombinant book highlights productive intersections of feminist and postcolonial discourses through critical analyses of the embodied politics of digital culture. Opening areas repressed in previous cyberfeminist discourses, the authors map contemporary social relations between women as they are mediated and transformed by digital and bio technologies. “If you want another e-feminist volume rehashing Lacan, weaving as metaphor, or the icon as on-line identity, don’t buy this book. These cyberfeminisists take no prisoners as they march through the virtual territories of postcolonial power vectors in an attempt to establish living models of resistance.
https://autonomedia.org/product/domain-errors/
Black Meme: A History of the Images that Make Us by Legacy Russell
Russell argues that without the contributions of Black people, digital culture would not exist in its current form. These meditations include the circulation of lynching postcards; why a mother allowed JET magazine to publish a picture of her dead son, Emmett Till; and and how the televised broadcast of protesters in Selma changed the debate on civil rights. Through imagery, memory, and technology, BLACK MEME shows us how images of Blackness have always been central to our understanding of the modern world.
