On and Off-Screen Imaginaries (Primary Information, 2024) is a collection of six essays by filmaker, artist and writer Tiffany Sia. Sia joins us to discuss how media depictions of political practice and identity are produced, negotiated, memorialized, and transformed through censorship, surveillance, diaspora, and time. 

On and Off-Screen Imaginaries: https://primaryinformation.org/product/on-and-off-screen-imaginaries/

Tiffany Sia: https://www.tiffanysia.com/

HTHQ Workshop: https://hq.creativetime.org/calendar/sonic-literacy-with-tiffany-sia-and-jordan-lord/

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Ben Morea is primarily known for his central involvement with the print magazine Black Mask and the militant anarchist group Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker. Both were active in New York City in the late 1960’s. In the 1970’s, Morea went underground and lived for forty years in the Southern Rockies, immersing himself in ceremonial practice with indigenous communities. In the 2010’s, he returned to New York City. Full Circle is an autobiographical account of his political, artistic, and spiritual life, edited from a series of interviews with 1000 Voices Collective.

We speak with Sabu Kohso and Ariel Uesseler about the process of creating Full Circle, and Morea’s fierce dedication to revolutionary living.

Full Circle: A Life In Rebellion

Our review of Full Circle will be appearing in print in the upcoming issue of Heatwave Magazine. Check out their first issue online.

Sabu Kohso’s writings and translation about the Japanese ultra-left can be found here and here.

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The Unseen Book Club returns! Max and Dan do some light bibliomancy, reflect on the past and cast our gazes to the horizon and discuss the future of the show.

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Event Factory is the first in a cycle of novellas by Renee Gladman. An unnamed linguist-traveler arrives in the city-state of Ravicka, whose inhabitants speak a uniquely place-based, relational, and physically gestural language. The narrator is on a quest for meaning, understanding, and connection, but everything, even the buildings themselves, evade her.  Gladman is especially interested in language, architecture, and meaning; Event Factory echos Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, and Henri Lefabvre's work on the production of space. 

We are joined by two friends, Sirin Cucek and Auden Kotz, to explore the ever-shifting  semiotic and physical landscape of Ravicka. We talk about the violence of premises, ontologies of architecture, crises without conflict, the sensory allure of salsa dancers, and the explicitly political content in this enigmatic and abstract novella. 

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Mitch Anzuoni of Inpatient Press on discovering Marios Chakkas and finding a translator who would do justice to Chakkas’ unique voice.

Review of The Commune in Jacobin Magazine

Mikis Theodorakis' obituary in Monthly Review

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Marios Chakkas wrote The Commune in 1972 shortly before his death of cancer at the age of 41. Chakkas was a prolific Greek writer who lived through decades of hope, aspiration, repression and ultimately defeat for the country’s Left. A unique and unclassifiable novella, The Commune charts the state of Chakkas’ psyche through a dense sequence of memories, dreams, and imagined bureaucratic procedures. He reflects on his youth as communist militant during the Greek Civil War of 1946-1949, the nature of the self, individual and relational, coming to a profound and contradictory understanding of political belonging and collective memory. Having discarded the trappings and failures of political parties and society at large, he seeks communion with his fellow outcasts in his imagined eponymous commune: barely described, only gestured at.

We speak with translator Chloe Tsolakoglou about 20th century Greek political history, theories of translation, texts that produce their own language of understanding, pathos and failure, and the ever-distant horizon of the commune.

Inpatient Press: https://www.inpatientpress.net/
Chloe Tsolakoglou: https://fridaycowgirl.com/

Unseen Book Club
Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcast
Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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Leslie Marmon Silko, Laguna Pueblo author and prominent figure in the first of wave of the Native American Renaissance, spent ten year crafting Almanac of the Dead, published in 1991. Almanac is a sprawling, prophetic, epic novel populated by coke smugglers, arms dealers, sex workers, homeless veterans, scheming businessmen, corrupt politicians, and the people worldwide whose dreams are troubled by the fallout of the spiritual death of European descendants, or touched by the hope, however violent and tenuous, of the re-ascent of indigenous and African gods in the Americas. Much of Almanac takes place in Chiapas, Mexico, the plains of Colombia, or Los Angeles, but the story centers around Tuscon, Arizona and Lecha, a TV psychic who has given up her career and returned to the ranch of her smuggler sister Zeta, to transcribe the Almamanc of the Dead, a centuries old palimpsest of stories, memories and observations given to her by her Yaqui grandmother. Meanwhile, the colonial border societies of Arizona and Chiapas careen towards their reckoning with the disaffected and the dispossessed.

We are joined by friend and scholar E Ornelas to talk about non-linear time and ‘Native Slipstream,' the solidarity through the rejection or refusal of the racial order of colonial white supremacy, prophecy and political conjunctures, indigeneity and revolutionary politics, and are continuously astounded by Leslie Marmon Silko’s mastery of narrative craft.

Check out E’s band, E.T.
https://e-t-music.bandcamp.com/music

Music of Crepusculo Negro can be heard here:
https://crepusculonegro.bandcamp.com/

The lyrics accompanying the Vohlan/Blue Hummingbird on the Left split release are available on the Metal Archives
https://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Volahn/Debajo_del_s%C3%ADmbolo_del_Sol 

Unseen Book Club
Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcast
Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, by French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, is a landmark work of social history first published in 1974. Le Roy Ladurie reconstructs the lives, relationships, and theological worldview of everyday people in the small village of Montaillou in the Pyrenees mountains at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The narratives are sourced primarily from a document known as the the Fournier Register: a collection of interrogations of common people as the Inquisition sought to root out the last strongholds of a popular heretical tendency long referred to as ‘Catharism.’

We’re joined by friend and scholar Joe Albernaz to talk about the enduring legacy of the Cathars, heretical and weird cosmologies, the nature of history, interrogation as a narrative mode, and the origins of modernity.

 Joe’s writings can be found here.
He is also on Twitter: https://twitter.com/albernaj

For more information about the Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade, check out:
This article by historian Elaine Graham-Leigh, and
This english translation of the Fournier Register

Unseen Book Club
Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcast
Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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Writer and translator Bela Shayevich joins the Unseen Book Club to talk about Mikhail Bulgakov’s The White Guard. Bulgakov is primarily known in the West for his novel The Master and Margarita, but his most successful work in his lifetime was The Days of the Turbins, a wildly successful play about a family of White Guard officers in the besieged city of Kiev during the winter of 1918. The White Guard, first serialized in 1925, was the model for this work. Bulgakov was a doctor-turned-literary-bourgeois with reactionary sympathies who sought success from life and work in the Soviet Union. His work was praised by Stalin, yet by the 1930’s he was all but banned from publishing.

The White Guard is an incredible document of nostalgia, family, sacrifice, and the fraying social fabric of a beloved city. Russian intelligentsia, Ukrainian nationalists, peasants, Jews, Cossacks, Germans and at least one Bolshevik clash, scheme, betray and survive in the complex wartime politics of Kiev. We talk about the political chaos of the Civil War, artistic and aesthetic reaction, bourgeois nostalgia in a revolutionary society, and for the very first time on the Unseen Book Club, address ‘the Jewish question.’

Bela Shayevich:
https://www.belashayevich.com/
https://twitter.com/bela6_bela

Unseen Book Club:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcast
Music by ex-official: https://exofficialexo.bandcamp.com/
Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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The Kingdom of this World, written by French-born Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier in 1949, is a cosmologically immersive novel of Haitian society and its ruptures during the Haitian Revolution. Carpentier sought to evoke the texture of 18th century Haiti through exploration of what he termed lo real maravilloso, or the marvelous real. Through the eyes of its central character Ti Noel, we encounter historical  figures like Mackandal, Boukman, Henri Christoph, Pauline Bonaparte, and General Leclerc. However, Carpentier all but ignores the political dimensions of the revolution in favor of the social, the spiritual and ultimately, the liberatory.

We pair The Kingdom of this World with C.L.R. James’ historical masterpiece, The Black Jacobins. The reading is productive, in that both cast Black Haitians as historical protagonists in their liberatory struggle for emancipation; both attend to the dialectic of the Atlantic encounter, and both explore the tragedies and contradictions of Haitian independence. However, these texts are, in multiple dimensions, inverses of one another. 

We talk about vodou and the enlightenment, agency and structure, history and literature, and Carpentier’s excellent prose (masterfully translated into English by Harriet de Onís).

Twitter: https://twitter.com/unseenbookclub
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unseenbookclub_podcast
Music by ex-official: https://exofficialexo.bandcamp.com/
Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/

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