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Since long before the age of celebrity activism, literary authors have used their public profiles and cultural capital to draw attention to a wide range of socio-political concerns. This book is the first to explore – through history, criticism and creative interventions – the relationship between authorship, political activism and celebrity culture across historical periods, cultures, literatures and media. It brings together scholars, industry stakeholders and prominent writer-activists to engage in a conversation on literary fame and public authority. These scholarly essays, interviews, conversations and opinion pieces interrogate the topos of the artist as prophet and acute critic of the zeitgeist; analyse the ideological dimension of literary celebrity; and highlight the fault lines between public and private authorial selves,'pure'art, political commitment and marketplace imperatives. In case studies ranging from the 18th century to present-day controversies, authors illuminate the complex relationship between literature, politics, celebrity culture and market activism, bringing together vivid current debates on the function and responsibility of literature in increasingly fractured societies.

Dissident Authorship in Mozambique: the Case of António Quadros is the first monograph on the literary works of the pennames of Portuguese poet and painter António Quadros (1933-1994). The book uses Quadros's quirky case-- a Portuguese man who lived in colonial and post-independence Mozambique, where he published poetry and prose under three pennames--João Pedro Grabato Dias, Frey Ioannes Garabatus, and Mutimati Barnabé Joãoto--to examine the question of what it means to be an author in Mozambique and how authorship changed after the end of Portuguese colonial rule. Quadros's engagement with the question of the authors'place and function in authoritarian contexts stands as a fruitful counterpoint to the influential essays by Roland Barthes ('The Death of the Author', 1968) and Michel Foucault ('What is an Author?', 1969), the publication of which coincided with Quadros's literary début in 1968. Quadros's interesting and useful contributions to the question of Mozambican authorship are analysed in historical context and read alongside postcolonial and decolonial theory. Tom Stennett address the political implications of Barthes's and Foucault's erasure of authorial identity and their respective challenges to authorial authority. He makes the case for an approach to the question of authorship that takes into account the anonymous agents and institutions--such as editors, political parties and the State--that are involved in the conferring of authority onto certain authors and readers. In contrast to much extant scholarship on Mozambican authorship, which has tended to focus on questions related to identity and canonicity, Dissident Authorship addresses these themes as well as those of readership, authority, power, and representation.

This book is a timely study of young women's life writing as a form of human rights activism. It focuses on six young women who suffered human rights violations when they were girls and have gone on to become activists through life writing: Malala Yousafzai, Hyeonseo Lee, Yeonmi Park, Bana Alabed, Nujeen Mustafa, and Nadia Murad. Their ongoing life-writing projects diverge to some extent, but all share several notable features: they claim a testimonial collective voice, they deploy rights discourse, they excite humanitarian emotions, they link up their context-bound plight with bigger social justice causes, and they use English as their vehicle of self-expression and self-construction. This strategic use of English is of vital importance, as it has brought them together as icons in the public sphere within the last six years. New Forms of Self-Narration is the first ever attempt to explore all these activists'life-writing texts side by side, encompassing both the written andthe audiovisual material, online and offline, and taking all texts as belonging to a unique, single, though multifaceted, project.

In The Hundreds Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart speculate on writing, affect, politics, and attention to processes of world-making. The experiment of the one hundred word constraint—each piece is one hundred or multiples of one hundred words long—amplifies the resonance of things that are happening in atmospheres, rhythms of encounter, and scenes that shift the social and conceptual ground. What's an encounter with anything once it's seen as an incitement to composition? What's a concept or a theory if they're no longer seen as a truth effect, but a training in absorption, attention, and framing? The Hundreds includes four indexes in which Andrew Causey, Susan Lepselter, Fred Moten, and Stephen Muecke each respond with their own compositional, conceptual, and formal staging of the worlds of the book.

Interviews from the Edge presents a selection of conversations, drawn from 50 years of the international journal New Orleans Review, that dive head-first into the most enduring aesthetic and social concerns of the last half century. From reflections on the making of literature and films to personal accounts of writing inside racial divides and working against capital punishment, the writers, poets, and activists featured in this book offer not only a fresh perspective on our present struggles but also perhaps a way through them-for writers and readers alike. “I think it's frightfully important, and this is really much more difficult than it sounds, only to say what you absolutely believe.” – Christopher Isherwood “Most American writers probably do not think of their writing as a kind of activism. And it shouldn't have to be-I don't think we can impose that on writers-but it can be. I think for many writers, the ones I admire-it is.” – Viet Thanh Nguyen “Do you become a writer because you desire to become famous and make a lot of money? Or do you become a writer because there's something you discovered, this spark, this flash, that you want to share with other human beings knowing that they can enter into the words too?” – Sister Helen Prejean “The hardest part of developing a style is that you have to learn to trust your voice. If I thought of my style, I'd be crippled. Somebody else said to me a long time ago in France,'Find out what you can do, and then don't do it.'” – James Baldwin“As I have grown older, I have come to see that the romantic notion of the outsider in love with death doesn't solve a thing. It only makes life worse. We have to find ways to create communities.” – Valerie Martin

No, Anti-Book is not a book about books. Not exactly. And yet it is a must for anyone interested in the future of the book. Presenting what he terms “a communism of textual matter,” Nicholas Thoburn explores the encounter between political thought and experimental writing and publishing, shifting the politics of text from an exclusive concern with content and meaning to the media forms and social relations by which text is produced and consumed. Taking a “post-digital” approach in considering a wide array of textual media forms, Thoburn invites us to challenge the commodity form of books—to stop imagining books as transcendent intellectual, moral, and aesthetic goods unsullied by commerce. His critique is, instead, one immersed in the many materialities of text. Anti-Book engages with an array of writing and publishing projects, including Antonin Artaud's paper gris-gris, Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto, Guy Debord's sandpaper-bound Mémoires, the collective novelist Wu Ming, and the digital/print hybrid of Mute magazine. Empirically grounded, it is also a major achievement in expressing a political philosophy of writing and publishing, where the materiality of text is interlaced with conceptual production. Each chapter investigates a different form of textual media in concert with a particular concept: the small-press pamphlet as “communist object,” the magazine as “diagrammatic publishing,” political books in the modes of “root” and “rhizome,” the “multiple single” of anonymous authorship, and myth as “unidentified narrative object.” An absorbingly written contribution to contemporary media theory in all its manifestations, Anti-Book will enrich current debates about radical publishing, artists'books and other new genre and media forms in alternative media, art publishing, media studies, cultural studies, critical theory, and social and political theory.

This book traces the ways in which problems of imaginative authority and authorship structure the fiction and non-fiction of V.S. Naipaul and resonate in postcolonial literature. Imraan Coovadia argues that the post-colonial societies Naipaul studies in novels such asA Bend in the RiverandGuerillasare defined by the fragility of their authority. Coovadia demonstrates through close reading, how Naipaul, born in Trinidad to an Indian family and resident of the United Kingdom,asserts hisimaginative authority over many different situations across the globe through a complex literary rhetoric.

Undoing the Silence offers guidance to help both citizens and professionals influence democratic process through letters, articles, reports and public testimony.Louise Dunlap, PhD, began her career as an activist writing instructor during the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s. She learned that listening and gaining a feel for audience are just as important to social transformation as the outspoken words of student leaders atop police cars.'Free speech is a first step, but real communication matches speech with listening and understanding. That is when thinking shifts and change happens.'Dunlap felt compelled to go where the silences were deepest because her work aimed not just at teaching but also at healing both individual voices and an ailing collective voice. Her tales of those adventures and what she knows about the culture of silence -- how gender, race, education, class, and family work to quiet dissent -- are interwoven with practical methods for people to put their most challenging ideas into words.Louise Dunlap gives writing workshops around the country for universities and social justice, environmental, and peace organizations that help reluctant writers get past their internal censors to find their powerful voice. Her insight strengthens strategic thinking and her'You can do it!'approach makes social-action writing achievable for everyone.