October brings an especially wide-ranging collection of new books from Ideas on Fire authors.
Across Palestine, Burkina Faso, Colombia, India, the United States, and the digital worlds people build and inhabit, these authors trace how power takes shape through land, labor, race, media, aesthetics, sound, and everyday forms of relation.
Their work moves between archives and video games, fashion and farming, poetry and popular history, illuminating both the structures that organize our lives and the creative practices through which people contest and remake them.
We’re thrilled to celebrate this remarkable group of books and the authors bringing them into the world.
Working on a book of your own? Our editorial team supports scholars from proposal through publication with developmental editing, copyediting, manuscript reviews, indexing, and publisher insight reports. Learn more here.
Notes from the Sex Worker Left: Lumpen Theory
Heather Berg
A fierce queer feminist love letter to sex workers’ radical theories of labor, mutual aid, refusal, and collective political transformation.
Dressed for Dissent: Decolonial Fashion and the Queer Struggle for Palestine
Roberto Filippello
University of California Press
A vibrant account of Palestinian fashion activism linking queer decolonial aesthetics, land, embodiment, and collective political resistance.
Wild Tongue: A Borderlands Mixtape
Jonathan Leal
A lyrical mixtape weaving borderlands music, cultural performance, and Latinx expressive traditions into collective resistance and worldmaking practices.
The Trembling City: The Sonic and Atmospheric Violence of Vibrational Warfare
Gascia Ouzounian
A chilling study of sonic warfare examining how vibration, occupation, and atmospheric control transform urban life into conflict zones.
The Inquisition’s Gambit: Making Wealth and Race in Cartagena de Indias
Ana María Silva Campo
University of Pennsylvania Press
A meticulous history revealing how inquisitorial dispossession forged racialized wealth accumulation in colonial Cartagena’s evolving economic order.
A Mobile Popular: Media Entertainment and the Political in Digital India
Aswin Punathambekar, Sangeet Kumar, and Sriram Mohan
A landmark analysis of digital India’s mobile publics, vernacular media cultures, and algorithmically mediated political expression.
Erased: True Stories about Race and Racism in America That You Probably Weren't Taught in School
Nikki Khanna and Kathleen Korgen
A poignant popular history of the core role race and racism have played across the United States past and present.
The Upright Farmer: Racial Capitalism and Agricultural Modernization in Burkina Faso
Jessie K. Luna
A fascinating ethnography of agricultural modernization, racial capitalism, and technological aspiration within Burkina Faso’s transforming cotton economy.
Rooted Movements: The Radical Poetics of Palestinian Space
Amanda Batarseh
An Indigenous reading of Palestinian literature exploring rooted movement, spatial liberation, and enduring relationships to land and futurity.
Play Like a Fangirl: Creative Desire in Video Games
Kristine Ask, Ashley Guajardo, Tanja Sihvonen, and Jess Tompkins
A playful investigation of fan creativity, erotic attachment, and marginalized community-building within contemporary video game cultures.
On Closeness: Minoritarian Method and Forms of Relation
Olivia Michiko Gagnon
A contemplative meditation on relational ethics, archival intimacy, and embodied forms of knowing across histories of violence and difference.
