1 min Watch Now
Treasure in My Mouth
With spacey synths and a disco dance beat, “Treasure in My Mouth” is an intimate portrait of self-care and resistance.
Power
4 min Watch Now
Names
The fifth video from the album Travesti Biológica celebrates the cultural turn when we claim terms that once were used to oppress.
55 min Read Now
Goat Literature: A Future PoL
Trained to be producers and consumers in a marketplace of literature, most writers don’t know how to be citizens of a polity. In the concluding essay of the Polity of Literature series the editor, Matthew Stadler, proposes an experiment to help us: The GOAT PoL (The Geopolitical Open Atlas of The Polity of Literature).
13 min Read Now
Gale
Like the act of pruning a plant, we hurt to trigger growth. In the scarring processes we heal our wounds of memory, of thought, of soul.
11 min Read Now
Non-Monogamy Letter #3
In the midst of a lockdown, Simon(e) van Saarloos questions their relationship to time, to dreams, to public space, and to the sexuality of voles.
87 min Read Now
Collectively Imagining a More Just World
Travis Ray ComesLast committed a terrible crime, but what should happen next? Stories of injury and stories of repair involve us all. We must tell and receive these stories collectively.
27 min Read Now
“Cooperation is built from the ground up…” at Leeszaal Rotterdam West
A Rotterdam activist tells the story of his neighbourhood’s recent effort to make its own reading room after the local library branch closed.
25 min Read Now
Reflections on Existential Preliminaries to a Resistant Polity in Literature and Beyond
In Berlin, writer and philosopher Fred Dewey created a functioning polity of literature by inviting small groups of strangers to meet, discuss, and read out loud from Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition.
14 min Read Now
Drawn Literature: Graphic Novels and Hannah Arendt’s Hair
With examples from his award-winning book, The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt, Polity of Literature illustrator Ken Krimstein tells us how graphic novels and comics can strengthen literature’s capacity to host politics.
34 min Read Now
Summary Justice: A German Divorce
The great polyglot writer, Sybille Bedford, was a mid-20th-century fanboy of court trials. This chapter from her underrated 1961 book The Faces of Justice recalls the drama of court proceedings in Munich, Germany.
35 min Read Now
Refugees Tell Their Stories to the State
When refugees arrive in Europe they must tell their stories to state bureaucrats who control their fate. But is the state capable of hearing what they have to say?
37 min Read Now
The Zines of Terezín
In the Terezín ghetto, near Prague, Jewish children later murdered by the Nazis created and shared their own secret “zines,” acting politically in the face of terror and impending death.