Portside

The South African poet Ronelda S. Kamfer pokes a sharp finger at trendy styles of race and color among women she deems “dumb as shit.”

Saying Marxism is a science is preface. Add organized sarcasm and we come closer to mocking not so much intimate feelings associated with worldly illusions but their form in a particular perishable world. It aims to give new form to certain aspirations, the better to regenerate them. Yet if Marxist movements are to be effective, they must create new tastes and a new language for struggles to be born. Sarcasm then is about what outrages our sense of what should be.

Audre Lorde (1934-1992) was one of the most significant U.S. writers of the last quarter of the 20th Century. She described herself as "Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet." This new collection of her poetry and prose allows readers to remind themselves of her thought and its significance.

Black Panther is a story we haven't seen told before in popular cinema — a story about black people completely untouched by colonialism, who exist entirely outside the global systems of institutionalized racism.

For her book, America: The Cookbook, Gabrielle Langholtz looked at cookbooks as well as narrative and anthropological books to fully explore America’s culinary history—Little House on the Prairie and the Sterns’ many varied books among them.

Aside from the sheer entertainment of the series, Babylon Berlin offers its new American audience the warning it needs in 2018. As the plot progresses, Rath must choose between his morals and nationalism—something Americans struggle with often in the 21st century. But Babylon Berlin shows us how a progressive nation can crumble when it allows bigotry and intolerance to fester.

Northern California poet Dawn McGuire, author of American Dream with Exit Wound, turns a sharp eye on the American Nightmare: “Every bedroom ransom./Every day the war.”

We’re not living in the dystopias of George Orwell or Aldous Huxley, the author insists, but in the shifty algorithmic universe of Philip K. Dick, where the world that the Internet and social media shape is less a system than an ecology, a proliferation of unexpected niches, and entities created and adapted to exploit them in deceptive ways. In this view, it’s a world in which technology is developing in ways that fudge the difference between the human and the artificial.

This "very important" book offers a new examination of the role of African Americans in the American Revolution and of how racism was used in the service of creating the United States in the late 18th Century.

The Young Karl Marx is a nuanced and surprisingly accurate portrait of the revolutionary as a young man.