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KIROKAZE
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@importantbookrecs
today is dr ambedkar's birth anniversary. you can read his works in english and hindi here
This is the online home of Dr Ambedkar's Writings and Speeches
This website too! (didn't mean to step on your toes this is just the place I go to most of the time and wanted to share)
Hot take here but how about everyone shut the fuck up and actually read Indigenous authors from Abya Yala rather than use them as a rhetorical weapon against people you don’t like on the internet
And I’m happy to go first with the recs but I’m on my phone rn so it’ll have to wait
Asterisks mean I'm pretty sure they have English translated work available. Don't be lazy google it yourself
Contemporary writers (mostly nonfiction)
*Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil
*Ailton Krenak
*Davi Kopenawa Yanomami
Arysteides Turpana
Aiban Wagua
*Pedro Cayuqueo
Eliane Potiguara
Carlos Macusaya
Decolonial Feminists
*Aura Cumes
Lélia Gonzalez
Emma Chirix
*Irma Alicia Velásquez Nimatuj
*Gladys Tzul Tzul
Queer creative writers
Elvis Guerra
*Manuel Tzoc
Daniel Nizcub
Ivonne Coñuecar
Juão Nyn
revised/expanded version of my original addition of translated stuff:
poetry
Humberto Ak’abal (K’iche’) has had a bunch of books translated into English, including Here Was Paradise, If Today Were Tomorrow, and In the Courtyard of the Moon
Jaime Luis Huenún Villa (Mapuche) (ed.), Poetry of the Earth: Mapuche Trilingual Anthology
Marcella Lewis (Garifuna), Walagante Marcella / Marcella Our Legacy
Miguelángel Meza (Guaraní), Pyambu / Dream Pattering Soles (tr. Elisa Taber)
Irma Pineda (Zapotec), Stolen Flower (tr. Irma Pineda and Wendy Call)
Basil Rodrigues (Lokono/Arawak), Uncle Basil (biography + poems)
Mikeas Sánchez (Zoque), How to Be a Good Savage and Other Poems (tr. Wendy Call and Shook)
Xemiyulu Manibusan Tapepechul (Nawat), My Woman Card Is Anti-Native & Other Two-Spirit Truths
Xemiyulu Manibusan Tapepechul (Nawat) (ed.), Two-Spirits Belong Here: An Anthology of Works by Two-Spirit Transgender, Intersex, and Gender Non-Conforming Native American Artists
Víctor Terán (Zapotec) has also had several collections of poetry published in English translation, including Poems / Diidxado’, The Spines of Love, and The Thorn of Your Name
Manuel Tzoc (K’iche’), four poems, tr. Paul M. Worley
fiction
Daniela Catrileo (Mapuche), Chilco (tr. Jacob Edelstein)
Pergentino José (Zapotec), Red Ants (tr. Thomas Bunstead)
Mikel Ruiz (Tsotsil), Ch’ayemal nich’nabiletik / Los hijos errantes / The Errant Children (tr. Sean S. Sell)
nonfiction
Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil (Mixe), “Languages and Nation-States” (tr. Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco)
Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil (Mixe), This Mouth Is Mine (tr. Ellen Jones)
Emil’ Keme (K’iche’), Le Maya Q’atzij / Our Maya Word: Poetics of Resistance in Guatemala
María Fernanda Leyva (Yaqui), Au Te Waate / We Remember It: Hiaki Survival Through a Bitter War
making my One (1) promo post for the maybe three people who follow me who have never read my beloved trunk novel. If you liked Netflix's 2013 version of House of Cards but thought "wow I wish this was just a little bit more cyberpunk and Slavic" or, if you enjoyed Han Kang's 2014 Human Acts but thought "what if this was worse but did have trans people to some degree and all the history was fictional," well, do I have a novel for you. Written during my time as a Queer|Arts|Mentorship fellow, revised enough to be agented and then die on sub, finally out in the world in full for free on ao3, I present: DACHA.
Chapters 1- 3 stand alone, and chapters 4-8 sort of do, hence the three promo pics.
Dacha (128182 words) by congressofspirits Chapters: 8/8 Additional Tags: Courtroom Drama, Dysfunctional Family, War Crimes, Human Experimentation, Repression Under the watchful eye of President Nikiforov, the small Baltic country of Galkechnia has made a fortune selling invasive military technology. Then, on a nearly bloodless morning, Nikiforov’s reign comes to an abrupt end. But revolution gives way to bureaucracy. A war crimes trial exposes national traumas, and a messy, prolonged regime change forces personal secrets out of hiding. As the trial falters, and a vacuum of power expands, eight citizens must decide for themselves what the future of their country holds. Told across a decade via interconnecting narratives, from Karina, estranged daughter of the dictator seeking to free her family from its bloodied name, to Max, an agender would-be political assassin who must weigh vengeance against the opportunity for a new life, and Dounia, an Afro-Russian expat politician whose hunger for power previously denied to her tests her legacy, DACHA is a speculative drama about tyranny, family, and moral compromise.
I've also decided I'm gonna focus on these books about the indigenous South African polities for a bit so I can get a better understanding of the colonial period and the ongoings of the indigenous world.
These are:
Anderson, M.S. (2009). Marothodi: The Historical Archaeology of an African Capital
Bhila, H.H.K. (1982). Trade and politics in a Shona kingdom: the Manyika and their African and Portuguese neighbours, 1575 - 1902.
Bonner, P. (2002). Kings, Commoners and Concessionaires: The Evolution and Dissolution of the Nineteenth-Century Swazi State.
Cobbing, J. (1976). The Ndebele under the Khumalos, 1820 - 1896
Delius, P. (1983). The Land Belongs to Us: The Pedi Polity, the Boers, and the British in the Nineteenth-century Transvaal.
Eldredge, E.A. (2002). A South African Kingdom: The Pursuit of Security in Nineteenth-Century Lesotho.
Eldredge, E.A. (2014). The Creation of the Zulu Kingdom, 1815 - 1828
Eldredge, E.A. (2015). Kingdoms and Chiefdoms of Southeastern Africa: Oral Traditions and History, 1400 - 1830.
Gillis, D.H. (1999). The Kingdom of Swaziland: Studies in Political History.
Mager, A.K. and Velelo, J.P. (2018). The House of Tshatshu: Power, Politics and Chiefs North-West of the Great Kei River C 1818 - 2018.
Mvenene, J. (2020). A History of the AbaThembu People from Earliest Times to 1920.
Legassick, M.C. (2010). The Politics of a South African Frontier: The Griqua, the Sotho-Tswana and the Missionaries, 1780 - 1840.
Manson, A. and Mbenga, B. (2014). Land, chiefs, mining: South Africa's North West Province since 1840.
Maylam, P. (1980). Rhodes, the Tswana, and the British: colonialism, collaboration, and conflict in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, 1885 - 1899.
Peires, J.B. (1982). The House of Phalo: A History of the Xhosa People in the Days of Their Independence.
Pikirayi, I. (2001). The Zimbabwe culture: origins and decline of southern Zambezian states
Sanders, P. (2011). Throwing Down White Man: Cape Rule and Misrule in Colonial Lesotho, 1871 - 1884.
Schoeman, K. (2002). The Griqua Captaincy of Philippolis, 1826 - 1861.
Shillington, K. (1985). The colonisation of the southern Tswana, 1870 - 1900.
Stapleton, T.J. (2001). Faku: Rulership and Colonialism in the Mpondo Kingdom.
Wright, J.B. (1983). The Hlubi chiefdom in Zululand-Natal.
hi! I saw the tags in the post about reading widely and just wanted to ask -- do you have any recommendations for books you've read in translation? thanks! :)
It's actually a goal of mine to read more (modern) books in translation as currently I don't read many, although I have several on my TBR and I'm sure there are some I've read that aren't coming to mind currently. So this was a reminder for myself too! I'm regularly inspired by my mutual @grimdr who reads in a number of languages as well as in translation.
I do try to make a point of reading books from outside the UK and US when I can, just to get a fresher set of views on the world, but they're still often English-language books published by English-language publishers (often still in the UK and US), so still shaped by those markets. I have read a number of books in Irish which are interesting because although English-language Irish authors are usually published by UK publishers (or Irish publishers primarily working in the UK bookselling market), Irish-language publishers are a very different market and the creative and practical pressures are different, so those books often have quite a different tone to them. That's also encouraged me to seek out more books written for different audiences and subjected to different publishing expectations to see what I might learn from it.
I spent several years being very up-to-date on UK publishing in my genres because I was reading everything by my friends, everything by the people I was in group chats with, things my publisher was putting out, ARCs, new releases, etc. But I found that it was all getting a little samey, no matter how original the individual novels were, and I'm trying to read more widely this year. More books from outside that market, whether geographically or chronologically.
I assume since the asker is following Finn that they have at least somewhat similar taste, so here are some translated recs:
genre SFF novels
Elia Barceló, Natural Consequences (tr. from Spanish by Yolanda Molina-Gavilán and Andrea Bell): alien contact sci-fi story about gender and communication, by way of aliens in the middle of a demographic crisis who discover they can get human men pregnant.
Djuna, Counterweight (tr. from Korean by Anton Hur): a dizzying, fast-paced cyberpunk thriller musing on epistemology and consciousness. very dialogue- and monologue-heavy — the form might not work for everyone but I enjoyed it.
Sergey and Marina Dyachenko, The Scar (tr. from Russian by Elinor Huntington): dark and dreamy fantasy of manners about a once-carefree (and awful) duelist cursed by a debilitating/disabling cowardice as he tries to reconstruct his life and identity.
Angélica Gorodischer, Kalpa Imperial (tr. from Spanish by Ursula K. Le Guin): novel-in-stories about the longue durée of the titular empire as it is created and recreated over time, thinking about the contingency of history and the accumulation of power.
Kim Sung-il’s Bleeding Empire trilogy (tr. from Korean by Anton Hur; first book Blood of the Old Kings): good, sharp high fantasy about empire and resistance thereto. putting the necro- in necropolitics.
Tanaka Yoshiki, Legend of the Galactic Heroes series (tr. from Japanese, first book Dawn): really good anti-war military sci-fi. unfortunately books 4-6 are very poorly translated by Tyran Grillo, but books 1-3 and 7-10 (translated by Daniel Huddleston (1-3, 7) and Matt Treyvaud (8-10)) more than make up for it imo.
“literary” SFF novels
Chingiz Aitmatov, The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years (tr. from Russian by John French): a sweeping, pensive sci-fi novel about an Aral Sea Kazakh community, the discovery of alien life, and the promise and failures of the Soviet project.
Daniela Catrileo, Chilco (tr. from Spanish by Jacob Edelstein): a speculative novel of uprising, Indigenous survival, and gendered violence in an alternate not-quite-Chile, by a Mapuche writer and activist.
Naguib Mahfouz, Arabian Nights and Days (tr. from Arabic by Denys Johnson-Davies): as the title suggests, a play on the Thousand and One Nights, both beginning in the aftermath of Shahrayar’s decision to marry Shahrazad and also cycling back through some of the most prominent stories in the Nights. very dark but very good.
Ahmed Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad (tr. from Arabic by Jonathan Wright): an unscrupulous scavenger in US-occupied Baghdad creates a composite of corpses that comes alive and begins to wander through the city, seeking justice — or at least revenge — for its component parts. told in a kaleidoscope of perspectives, rightly an International Booker finalist.
non-SFF novels (or novel-ish things)
Fatma Aliye, Scenes of Life (tr. from Ottoman Turkish by the Translation Attached collective): a short feminist epistolary novel-ish by the first Turkish woman novelist, analyzing the status of women in the late 19th-c Ottoman Empire.
Radwa Ashour, Granada (tr. from Arabic; I read the translation by William Granara but there’s also a new one of the full trilogy of which this is book one by Kay Heikkinen): a short, gripping family saga following several generations of a Muslim family in Granada in the years surrounding the conquest of the Emirate of Granada by Castile and Aragon in 1492.
Stella Gaitano, Edo’s Souls (tr. from Arabic by Sawad Hussain): family saga centered on a South Sudanese woman from ca. the ’60s to the mid-’80s, using ’80s Sudanese politics as a mirror for post-independence South Sudan and now with new resonance in light of the renewed Sudanese Civil War.
Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Padmarag (tr. from Bengali by Barnita Bagchi): an early 20th-c short feminist novel about a community of women in Bengal, responding to the tropes of romance. some cool formal stuff going on. it’s often published with Hossain’s English-language feminist utopian short story “Sultana’s Dream”.
Niviaq Korneliussen, Last Night in Nuuk aka Crimson (tr. from Korneliussen’s Danish translation by Anna Halager): really good novel about five young queer people coming of age in contemporary Greenland.
Markoosie Patsauq, Hunter with Harpoon (tr. from Inuktitut by Valerie Henitiuk and Marc-Antoine Mahieu): the first published novel(-ish) in Inuktitut, a gripping, short narrative about a community devastated by a polar bear.
Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile (tr. from Chinese by Bonnie Huie): really good novel of queer love (and obsession) and alienation in ’90s Taiwan, by a groundbreaking Taiwanese lesbian writer.
short fiction
Hassain Blasim (ed.), Iraq + 100 (some stories originally in English, some tr. from Arabic): anthologies are always a mixed bag but there’s some really good stuff here, by Iraqi writers imagining Iraq in 2103, a century after the US invasion. this was the first in Comma Press’s Futures Past series, which now has comparable volumes for Palestine, Kurdistan, Egypt, and Iran.
Ken Liu (ed.), Invisible Planets (tr. from Chinese by Liu): a solid, wide-ranging anthology of contemporary Chinese short science fiction.
Sunyoung Park and Sang Joon Park (ed.), Readymade Bodhisattva (tr. from Korean): similar to Invisible Planets but for South Korea, and extending back to include work from the ’70s and ’80s, though the majority of the stories are contemporary.
Mayi Pelot, Memories of Tomorrow (tr. from Basque by Arrate Hidalgo): sci-fi short stories ranging from near-future climate dystopia to space opera Nibelungenlied.
Suzuki Izumi, Terminal Boredom (tr. from Japanese): clever, biting sci-fi short stories by a groundbreaking Japanese feminist writer and avant-garde artist.
I didn’t love every story in Xia Jia’s A Summer Beyond Your Reach (tr. from Chinese), but the ones I did like (taking up the majority of the page count) I really liked.
other (mostly poetry)
Matsuo Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (tr. from Japanese by Nobuyuki Yuasa): classic of Japanese prose and poetry, Basho’s narrations of some of his travels paired with poems written along the way.
C.P. Cavafy, The Collected Poems (tr. from Greek by Evangelos Sachperoglou): Cavafy has a lot of name-recognition but not enough poem-recognition! you want queer desire? you want archaeological musings? you want Homer? you want Hellenistic Alexandria? Cavafy has it for you. Cavafy literally has it for you.
I just read and loved Sophus Helle’s Enheduana: The Complete Poems of the World’s First Author, which collects Sumerian poetry attributed to Enheduana with some excellent accompanying contextual and critical essays.
Hussain Haddawy (ed.), The Arabian Nights (tr. from Arabic by Haddawy): everyone should read Haddawy’s translation of the oldest manuscript of the (shorter, older) Syrian recension of the Thousand and One Nights imo. shapeshifting wizard battles, comedies of errors, early detective fiction, people who can transmit entire poems simply by blinking their eyes — the Nights have it all.
Aqqaluk Lynge, The Veins of the Heart to the Pinnacle of the Mind (tr. from Greenlandic by Ken Norris and Marianne Stenbæk): really good poetry by a major 20th-c Greenlandic writer, by turns funny and sarcastic and bitterly cynical.
anything you can find by Sorley MacLean, the greatest Scottish Gaelic poet of the 20th century.
D.T. Niane (ed.), Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali (tr. from Mandinka by Niane, tr. from French by G.D. Pickett): I believe the earliest version of the Sunjata epic to circulate in English, in a prose version that Niane ostensibly translated from Guinean griot Mamadou Kouyaté’s telling, though I suspect it may be more of an adaptation than a translation as such. either way, it’s extremely good.
side note: if you want to read some killer late 19th century weird fiction by a queer writer: run, do not walk, to Vernon Lee's Hauntings. Lee's queerness falls right in that valley where modern identity categories fail due to the complexity of gendered experience, and it doesn't seem useful to retroactively pronounce One Definitive Label for her life and experience-- she used a male pseudonym and embraced gender-nonconformity by the standards of her era, both in physical presentation and in her career; she had powerful romantic relationships and long term collaborations with women; she had a complex relationship to physical intimacy; she lived a generally offbeat independent life as a scholar and international traveler -- but holy fuck her supernatural fiction is a first-class treat and has a lot of queer valences. Curious phenomena surround a charismatic orphan girl as Italy's pagan Classical past perseveres into its heavily Catholic present; a visiting academic becomes enthralled to a long-dead Renaissance femme fatale; a super-normie-looking married couple manifest troubling echoes of their ancestral forebears in the presence of the artist hired to paint their portrait; an uptight classical musician is tormented by a long-dead CASTRATO SEX GHOST who exerts preternatural force to seduce or to kill through the power of his otherworldly voice. It fucking rules. And you can read that shit for free. Please do.
Free kindle book and epub digitized and proofread by volunteers.
here's my non-exhaustive reading list of trans fem authored horror fiction. it is non-exhaustive in the sense that there are many hidden corners of the world, and that I have excluded YA and works that trend more toward the "paranormal" instead of horror unless I really want to read them. basically, it's a list for me and not any hypothetical reader, but I'm open to potential suggestions
there is only one book per author listed, which is to give me a starting point. I will of course check out other works by these authors if I like what's on here
The Transfag Readings Project booklist
Someone asked for the list of Transfag Readings Project books so this is what I'm looking at so far. (I guess this is what it's called now)
21st Century Novels by Trans Men
Austin Chant, Peter Darling
H. E. Edgmon, The Witch King
E. E. Ottoman, The Doctor's Discretion
Andrew Joseph White, Hell Followed With Us
Aiden Thomas, Cemetery Boys
Kacen Callender, Felix Ever After
Zeyn Joukhadar, Thirty Names of Night
Alex Myers, Revolutionary
Yoon Ha Lee, Phoenix Extravagant
James Frankie Thomas, Idlewild
21st Century Poetry by Queer Trans Men
Keaton St. James, LIGHT and GROWING
Nathaniel Orion G. K., Phantom Limbs
Silas Denver Melvin, Grit
Stephen Ira, Chasers
Oscar Upperton, The Surgeon's Brain
Shaawan Francis Keahna, Mayday
Cyree Jarelle Johnson, Watchnight
21st Century Nonfiction by Queer Trans Men
Harry Nicholas, A Trans Man Walks Into a Gay Bar
????
20th Century Literature (stretched a little)
Lou Sullivan, We Both Laughed in Pleasure
Lou Sullivan, From Female to Male: The Life of Jack Bee Garland
Anton Prinner, La Femme Tondue
Gary Bowen, Diary of a Vampire
Isaac Bashevis Singer, "Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy"
Louise Erdrich, Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
Tamora Pierce, Alanna: The First Adventure and In the Hand of the Goddess
20th Century Film and TV (stretched a little also)
Ich möchte kein Mann sein (1918)
The Love Eterne (1963)
Je t'aime moi non plus (1976)
Yentl (1983)
He's a Woman, She's a Man (1994)
Mulan (1998)
Romeos (2011)
Rūrangi (2020)
Pre-20th Century
Rachilde, Monsieur Venus
Theodore Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme
Herman Mann, The Female Review
The Female Sailor and other texts relating to James Gray/Hannah Snell
The Female Marine and Related Works
Charles Johnson, A General History of the Pyrates
Diane Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry
Never read Baldwin before?
Nonfiction
The Price of The Ticket (borrow from IA)
The Fire Next Time (pdf download)
Notes of A Native Son (pdf download)
Nothing Personal (read on IA - not great quality sorry)
The Last Interview (pdf download) (only 10 pages!)
Fiction
Giovanni's Room (pdf download)
If Beale Street Could Talk (pdf download)
BONUS
Little Man Little Man (read or pdf download on scribd) (Baldwin's only children's book)
Go Tell It On The Mountain (pdf download)
Another Country (pdf and epub download)
Sonny's Blues (pdf download)
Going to Meet the Man (pdf download)
My next Black History Month request:
Pick one of James Baldwin's works and read it!!! The Fire Next Time is an excellent essay, most of us are familiar with the quote on gay white people from The Last Interview but not the rest of it. If Beale Street Could Talk even has a movie!
hi all, and happy Black History Month! in honor of this month, I wanted to highlight some recs by Black, mostly queer woman authors that I don't see often on rec lists, and which I generally think need more readers. this is a mix of prose, poetry, experimental, and performance writing.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive
Sharon Bridgforth, the bull-jean stories
Renee Gladman, To After That (TOAF)
Gayl Jones, Mosquito
Robin Coste Lewis, Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Blue Talk and Love
Diamond Forde, Mother Body
Bettina Judd, Patient.
Monica Prince, Roadmap
some of these books can be harder to find - much like other works by marginalized writers that challenge both sociocultural norms and the way those norms materialize in literary publishing, many only emerge via self- and small-publishing, in limited runs that can easily go out of print. however, i want to emphasize that giving these writers their flowers includes putting in the time and effort to find, locate, and share these texts: at the library, on ebay, via contact with the authors, and other friction-full steps.
so much Black queer feminist literature exists, but remains obscured by a publishing industry invested in profit over difficulty. take this opportunity to celebrate white, cisheteropatriarchal expectations of "safety" and "profitability" in publishing.
Transfem Butch Books:
The Scales of Seduction by Rien Gray [historical fiction, retelling, erotica]: An erotic lesbian monster novella reinterpreting the Medusa myth. Romance between Medusa and a basilisk warrior. Transfem butch protagonist.
Reverse Tomboy by Auto Anon [literary fiction, autofiction, essays]: A novella about a trans woman who struggles with relationships, familial dynamics, and reclaiming her masculinity after transitioning. Comes with an essay on transfeminine butchness and masculinities. Transfem Jewish butch protagonist and author.
Hot Girls with Balls by Benedict Nguyen [litfic, satire]: A contemporary satire novel about two trans lesbian volleyball players, who have to grapple with the anxieties of stardom as well as their their own off-court relationship drama. Transfem Asian-American protagonist. Transfem author.
Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) by Hazel Jane Plante [litfic]: A trans lesbian mourns her straight trans friend, and comes to terms with her death by writing a personalized encyclopedia/love letter about the latter's favorite obscure TV show. Transfem soft butch protagonist. Transfem author.
Herculine by Grace Byron [litfic, horror]: A disaffected and traumatized young woman arrives at an all-trans girls commune founded by her toxic ex-girlfriend, only to discover something sinister afoot. Transfem butch love interest and side characters. Transfem author.
Our Monsters by Jemma Topaz (mystery, erotica, satire): In a futuristic city inhabited by monsters, a human woman tries to solve a series of grisly murders, while romancing several monster girls. Transfem butch love interest (poly romance, not the only love interest). Transfem author.
Always open to recs. Transfem butches are loved and appreciated, and I don't tolerate invisibilization of transfeminine people when speaking of butchness and lesbian masculinity.
toss a coin to a silly butch 🐻
Like I really do wish people remembered more about the Anti-Imperial struggles of Southern Africa in the late 20th century. As incomplete as their revolutions may have been, with the politically free nations succumbing to the overwhelming force of Western Imperialism and being taken over by neo-colonial comprador regimes, what they did manage to achieve was still so very impressive. A struggle for human dignity against the most openly cruel and brutish forms of colonialism, the mobilisation and education of the most impoverished and super-exploited people on the planet in the name of not only liberating their own people but with the understanding that they were advancing the interests of humanity as a whole. Nationalist in character and internationalist in spirit, seeking to build independent nations that could co-operate in solidarity with all the progressive minded peoples of the world. Introducing healthcare, education and fair exchange into the forgotten and exploited parts of their country, giving a purpose to millions who enthusiastically gave their lives to defend and advance their gains both material and psychological.
The MPLA in Angola, FRELIMO in Mozambique, the alliance of ZANU and ZAPU in Zimbabwe, SWAPO in Namibia and the ANC of South Africa. It's also worth remembering the PAIGC of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde who, despite their geographical separation, faced a common enemy and so forged deep bonds with their comrades to the south. Whatever their eventual fates after independence, triumphs and failures alike, the struggles they fought against the reactionary White Supremacist regimes of Portugal, Rhodesia and South Africa were nothing short of heroic. Despite vast differences in space and time, I think these struggles hold both inspiration and lessons for progressives peoples all over the world to this day. It's truly a great shame how much they've been forgotten, these conflicts only ever brought up as a footnote to something more well known rather than as an area of interest in their own right.
If you're curious, the Africa section of the Marxist Internet Archive has a lot of good material from the period that's a good place to start learning more, even if it is rather lacking in information from the latter portion of the struggle. ARG's Race to Power gives a good overview of the general situation in Southern Africa as of 1971, while LSM has some good general collection of material collected from Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. The entire LSM "Life Histories from Revolution" series provides some really interesting first hand ground-level accounts of the conditions of life under Imperialism and the movements that formed to oppose it, while their Interviews with Liberation Movement Leaders provides the views of people higher up in the revolutionary movements. I'd recommend checking them out to at least broadly familiarise yourself with these tragically neglected struggles.
I'm going to take a moment to be an advertisement for the University of Alabama Press's Archaeology of Food book series - PLEASE go check it out if you're into food history!
There are two that might be especially of interest to tumblr:
The Story of Food in the Human Past: How What We Ate Made Us Who We Are by Robyn E. Cutwright is a "sweeping history" of how humans have related to food; it seems to cover a large time period and various regions.
Plant Foods of Greece: A Culinary Journey to the Neolithic and Bronze Ages by Soultana Maria Valamoti offers a more specific location that I know many tumblrites love: ancient Greece (technically I think this is BEFORE what we usually call "ancient Greece").
Where the series really shines, however, is in its coverage of Indigenous North American food, a topic that is extremely understudied and not well-known to most people. A few titles that look exciting include:
Ancient Indigenous Cuisines: Archaeological Explorations of the Midcontinent, which focuses on a broad overview of cuisine in the upper midwest of the US and eastern Canadian prairies. I just bought it and I'm very excited to dig in.
Feeding Cahokia: Early Agriculture in the North American Heartland by Gayle J. Fritz takes a look at how people grew and made enough food to feed North America's largest city to exist before the year 1800: Cahokia (ca. 1050-1250 CE).
Salt in Eastern North America and the Caribbean: History and Archaeology covers a topic even I didn't know about, which is the ways Indigenous people produced salt, an essential nutrition item for human survival.
Baking, Bourbon, and Black Drink: Foodways Archaeology in the American Southeast considers the southeastern region, mostly focusing on pre-European periods but also including a section on the archaeology of whiskey use!
Hope you find something to enjoy!
okay so I finished Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriet Jacobs, and here are my takeaways, because it was AMAZING and I can't believe all US students aren't required to read it in school:
shows how slavery actually worked in nuanced ways i'd never thought much about
example: Jacobs's grandmother would work making goods like crackers and preserves after she was done with her work day (so imagine boiling jars at like 3 a.m.) so that she could sell them in the local market
through this her grandmother actually earned enough money, over many years, to buy herself and earn her freedom
BUT her "mistress" needed to borrow money from her. :)))) Yeah. Seriously. And never paid her back, and there was obviously no legal recourse for your "owner" stealing your life's savings, so all those years of laboring to buy her freedom were just ****ing wasted. like.
But also! Her grandmother met a lot of white women by selling them her homemade goods, and she cultivated so much good will in the community that she was able to essentially peer pressure the family that "owned" her into freeing her when she was elderly (because otherwise her so-called owners' white neighbors would have judged them for being total assholes, which they were)
She was free and lived in her own home, but she had to watch her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren all continue to be enslaved. She tried to buy her family but their "owners" wouldn't allow it.
Enslaved people celebrated Christmas. they feasted, and men went around caroling as a way to ask white people in the community for money.
But Christmas made enslaved people incredibly anxious because New Years was a common time for them to be sold, so mothers giving their children homemade dolls on Christmas might, in just a few days' time, be separated from their children forever
over and over again, families were deliberately ripped apart in just the one community that Harriet Jacobs lived in. so many parents kept from their children. just insane to think of that happening everywhere across the slave states for almost 200 years
Harriet Jacobs was kept from marrying a free Black man she loved because her "owner" wouldn't let her
Jacobs also shows numerous ways slavery made white people powerless
for example: a white politician had some kind of relationship with her outside of marriage, obviously very questionably consensual (she didn't hate him but couldn't have safely said no), and she had 2 children by him--but he wasn't her "master," so her "master" was allowed to legally "own" his children, even though he was an influential and wealthy man and tried for years to buy his children's freedom
she also gives examples of white men raping Black women and, when the Black women gave birth to children who resembled their "masters," the wives of those "masters" would be devastated--like, their husbands were (from their POV) cheating on them, committing violent sexual acts in their own house, and the wives couldn't do anything about it (except take out their anger on the enslaved women who were already rape victims)
just to emphasize: rape was LEGALLY INCENTIVIZED BY US LAW LESS THAN 200 YEARS AGO. It was a legal decision that made children slaves like their mothers were, meaning that a slaveowner who was a serial rapist would "own" more "property" and be better off financially than a man who would not commit rape.
also so many examples of white people promising to free the enslaved but then dying too soon, or marrying a spouse who wouldn't allow it, or going bankrupt and deciding to sell the enslaved person as a last resort instead
A lot of white people who seemed to feel that they would make morally better decisions if not for the fact that they were suffering financially and needed the enslaved to give them some kind of net worth; reminds me of people who buy Shein and other slave-made products because they just "can"t" afford fairly traded stuff
but also there were white people who helped Harriet Jacobs, including a ship captain whose brother was a slavetrader, but he himself felt slavery was wrong, so he agreed to sail Harriet to a free state; later, her white employer did everything she could to help Harriet when Harriet was being hunted by her "owner"
^so clearly the excuse that "people were just racist back then" doesn't hold any water; there were plenty of folks who found it just as insane and wrongminded as we do now
Harriet Jacobs making it to the "free" north and being surprised that she wasn't legally entitled to sit first-class on the train. Again: segregation wasn't this natural thing that seemed normal to people in the 1800s. it was weird and fucked up and it felt weird and fucked up!
Also how valued literacy skills were for the enslaved! Just one example: Harriet Jacobs at one point needed to trick the "slaveowner" who was hunting her into thinking she was in New York, and she used an NYC newspaper to research the names of streets and avenues so that she could send him a letter from a fake New York address
I don't wanna give away the book, because even though it's an autobiography, it has a strangely thrilling plot. But these were some of the points that made a big impression on me.
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl also inspired the first novel written by a Black American woman, Frances Harper, who penned Iola Leroy. And Iola Leroy, in turn, helped inspire books by writers like Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston. Harriet Jacob is also credited in Colson Whitehead's acknowledgments page for informing the plot of The Underground Railroad. so this book is a pivotal work in the US literary canon and, again, it's weird that we don't all read it as a matter of course.
(also P.S. it's free on project gutenberg and i personally read it [also free] on the app Serial Reader)
update!!!!
So Harriet Jacobs's brother was named John Swanson Jacobs, and in her memoir she's like "btw my brother ran away too." But we don't learn a lot about him.
Well, guess what? John Swanson Jacobs wrote a memoir, too. And it was rediscovered. Recently. It was published in full for the first time since 1850 last year, in 2024.
Harriet and John Jacobs both ran away, but they lived very different lives. Harriet Jacobs took a more "typical" path for a Black abolitionist of her era: She asked a white abolitionist to take the credit for her book, since otherwise it wasn't going to get published/read (it was only proven in the 21st century that Harriet herself wrote it).
But John Swanson Jacobs?
He gave all of America the middle finger, became a sailor, traveled the world (the Caribbean, England, Russia, Ukraine, Thailand, India, all over), then ended up in Australia and got his memoir published in a newspaper in Sydney, where he didn't need white people's "permission" to publish it, didn't have to accept the indignity of having a white editor, and didn't need to pretend that he wasn't really the author of his own book.
He called it The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, referring to the 600,000 slaveowners living in the US.
Like, whoa.
The historian who discovered his memoir,,and wrote a biography on him, describes him as a man with "apocalyptic intelligence."
It is so cool that this book exists. And it kinda sucks because I just know if it'd come out in 2020 people would have been all over it, but I haven't seen it in any bookstores. I got my library to stock it; maybe you can request it at your library, too.
The new edition is annotated by Jonathan D. S. Schroeder, the historian who found Jacobs's memoir in an 1850 Australian newspaper. He recommends--and I do too--reading Harriet and John Swanson Jacobs's memoirs back-to-back, and the annotations in Six Hundred Thousand Despots highlight parts where the siblings' books corroborate or differ from each other's accounts, something I'm personally enjoying a lot.
Lost on the other side of the world since 1855, the story of John Swanson Jacobs finally returns to America. This comprehensive edition incl
So yeah. Our only extant fugitive slave narrative written by a world-traveling sailor who told all of America to fuck off and went to live his life. Very very cool book. 10/10 recommend.
I thought that if John Jacobs' story was published in an Australian newspaper, then it would almost certainly be on Trove (the online newspaper and magazine archive for the National Library of Australia), and I was right. You can read the original text (obviously sans annotations) as it was printed in The Empire in two parts, here and here.
Also while I'm linking things, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl can be found on Gutenberg here.
note that Frances W. Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892) is not the first novel by a Black American woman, though it is an early one.
the first published novel by a Black American woman as far as I/we know is Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig (1859), a short, autobiographical novel about a freeborn woman who is de facto enslaved by a white family in the Northern United States (Wilson herself, also freeborn, was legally indentured in New Hampshire as a child). the book sold poorly when it was published precisely because it focused on the treatment of Black people — both free and unfree — in the ostensibly “free” North rather than the South. you can read it online at the Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg.
the other contender for first novel written by a Black American woman (that we know of) is The Bondswoman’s Narrative, by Hannah Bonds aka Hannah Crafts, also an autobiographical novel and as far as I know it’s the only known novel written by a formerly enslaved Black American woman. the manuscript was likely written between 1853 and 1861, but it was only published for the first time in 2002 so it’s not readily available online.
I recently read A. Revathi’s second book, A Life In Trans Activism, which was REALLY good and I highly recommend it to everyone (I am thinking of assigning it in my class this fall)
but one thing I’m struck by seeing convos about trans male privilege over trans women in the workplace is the disconnect in how Revathi tells the reader that trans men have it harder than trans women in India (and there is a lot to grapple with in that statement that I’m not going to touch rn) but she also writes that the only work trans women can get is sex work and begging, while trans men are able to get (still very low paying) jobs as lorry drivers, delivery people, laborers, and (this is the big one for me) at [queer] NGOs.
She doesn’t articulate that as a privilege but it definitely struck me as notable. Anyway, in spite of some reservations about her framing of transmasc vs transfem issues, I highly recommend the book, and I appreciate that she took the time and space in it to include the narratives of 5 trans men.
