Policing the beats: Black music, racism and criminal injustice
We are absolutely delighted to welcome Lambros Fatsis to Housmans to discuss the criminalizing of black culture, music and youth. We are thrilled also to welcome back the brilliant Adèle Oliver, author of ‘Deeping it: Colonialism, Culture and Criminalisation of UK Drill’, to interview Lambros about his work.

Policing The Beats is a bold analysis that exposes the racist policing of Black music. The emergence of UK drill music made headline news, portraying it as a criminal enterprise instead of recognising it as an art form. This new rap subgenre, however, is neither the first nor the only Black music to be targeted this way.

Policing the beats rewinds the tape to demonstrate how music has been used as an instrument for policing Black people, from the era of colonial slavery to the present day, revealing the racist legal processes that make crimes out of rhymes.

This original and readable book offers the first in-depth account of the policing of Black music in Britain, highlighting the relationship between politics, culture and criminal (in)justice and inviting music lovers, scholars and activists to tune in.

Lambros and Adèle will talk for around 45 minutes to an hour, followed by a q&a.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book +entry’ your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00.

A Studious Use. Designing from the Undercommons.

Join us for some radical thinking, some real radical autonomist thinking, with one of our favourite vanguardist publishers, Minor Compositions. Come and celebrate the publication of another vital, alert and mind bending work of theory.

A Studious Use invites readers to reconsider the habitual logics and material priorities at play in practices of both study and use. It examines their potential and actual interplay, unravelling the ways in which these are at once shaped by and reproductive of broader social, political, and cultural currents. Here Giovanni Marmont explores how a seemingly inoffensive commitment to the terms of individuation, as a manner of understanding and organising the world first and foremost as an aggregate of separate entities, carries with it profoundly harmful implications. With an eye toward the unseen possibilities of social life, he proposes an alternative mode of engagement with and through artefacts – studious use – predicated instead on our general, shared, practical indebtedness. Through a blend of theoretical critique, philosophical inquiry, and experimental design practices, A Studious Use offers a rethinking of sociality not as a coming together of independent, if interacting subjects and objects but, rather, as a primary, undirected, ongoing collective experiment.

Author of For a Pragmatics of the Useless,Erin Manning says: “How do practices dispossess us? How does use reorient the very question of function and form? Where else can it take us beyond our-selves? In this compelling engagement with use-beyond-use-value, Marmont takes us on a journey to a non-binary account of use that refuses the limited account of any marketable claim. Instead, it moves use toward the surprise of constellations as experimental as they are quotidian.”

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book +entry’ your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00.

Activism, Racial Justice, and Human Rights from Below
Please note this an externally organised event. You can RSVP using this link:

https://www.easy-rsvp.com/G3uqJ0-book-launch-migration-and-mobile-rights

[Eroding Ed’s note: Fuck Roger Hallam, and boo to Housman’s for stroking his ego. We’d delete it but the event is on radar and our script will just import it again.]

Housmans welcome Roger Hallam to discuss his essential new book: Suicide: The Political and Legal Implications of Creating Endless Mass Death. In the age of climate collapse, telling the truth has become a criminal act. From a cell in Wayland Prison, Roger Hallam—farmer, researcher, and co-founder of Just Stop Oil—delivers a searing indictment of a legal system that punishes those who resist, while protecting those who destroy. In July 2024, Hallam was dragged from a British courtroom for refusing to stay silent about the climate crisis. For “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance,” he was sentenced to five years in prison—the harshest punishment for civil disobedience in the UK in modern British history. The case made front-page news and drew global outcry.

Suicide is part memoir, part political reckoning. Drawing on Hallam’s award-winning research and experience representing himself in four Crown Court trials, it lays bare the moral and legal failures of a society sleepwalking into catastrophe. From climate science and the right of necessity, to the collapse of democratic norms and the illusions of secular reason, this is a radical call to rethink justice, truth, and duty in the face of extinction.

Housmans are delighted to be hosting an event around this essential new book — a stalwart guide to strengthen the movement for freedom and equality for all.

Our society is breaking down. Fascists are winning elections, economic inequality is rampant, and the climate crisis is at its tipping point. It feels like the amount of work needed to overcome these injustices is too much to handle. But what if there is a way to lower the threshold to action? Who will free us if not ourselves?

In Radical Justice, international human rights lawyer Nani Jansen Reventlow shows how we can build a fundamentally different future with our own hands. We all have our own spheres of influence, and each of us can be the revolution.  

Taking inspiration from the deep well of anti-racist and social activist writers such as Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and Angela Davis, each chapter offers tips on how to learn, reflect and act in a society where we are told we are powerless. Including advice on strategic litigation, reclaiming our digital rights, reparations demands, climate activism and much more, the information in these pages is indispensable to the struggle for radical justice.

Nani Jansen Reventlow is an international human rights lawyer. She is the founder of Systemic Justice, which advocates for marginalised communities through strategic litigation. Politico named her one of society’s great visionary tech leaders for her work on digital human rights. She has also been honoured with awards from Harvard, Oxford and Columbia Universities.

Nani will read from and talk about the book for about 45 minutes, followed by a Q&A.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book +entry’ your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00.

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‘An urgent, vital contribution to the feminist conversation – one that tears through the comfortable myth of universal sisterhood’ – Alya Mooro, author of The Greater Freedom

Growing up, journalist Shahed Ezaydi was often asked how she could call herself a feminist and still practise her faith. It’s a question that reveals a deeper issue that Muslim women often face: being ignored in feminist spaces entirely, or cast as passive victims in need of being saved. This mindset fuels gendered Islamophobia and a narrow white feminism. But Muslim women don’t need rescuing.

The Othered Woman is the book Ezaydi wishes her younger self could have turned to. It challenges the myths of how Muslim women are oppressed and who by, and shows that these myths translate into very real harm both in Britain and around the world, showcasing the voices of intersectional feminists who are fighting for liberation on their own terms. Accessible and compelling, this is urgent reading for anyone who considers themselves a feminist.

And we are delighted that Ezaydi is able to join us at Housmans to discuss this essential book.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book +entry’ your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00.

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Using the stealth capacities of hermeneutic distrust as his weapon of choice, de Sutter’s writing breaks into unrecovered areas of subtle teachings, shedding light on philosophemes gleaned from Aristotle to punk-led attitude, biojewelry, and the historical buildup of authority billed to the triumph of reason in its many intrusive morphs.— Avital Ronell, New York University

We welcome back the brilliant Alfie Bown to Housmans, this time in the company of Belgian philosopher Laurent de Sutter. The two will be focusing their conversation on the nature and necessity (or, rather, superfluity [as posited by Laurent]) of critique. As a jumping off point they will be using Laurent’s recent work of theory, Superweak: Thinking in the 21st Century. The book is described below:

‘We have become superheroes. Nothing can resist us anymore: not persons, ideas, facts, realities, or beings. We owe our superhuman strength to a tool we have taken up that submits everything to the scrutiny of our judgment: critique. After its first formulation at the end of the sixteenth century, the project of critique spread from one sphere to another until it became almost universal: we have all of us been transformed by our equal capacity to judge, approve, and reject.

If modernity is defined as the journey we have taken to move away from the myths and dogmas of the past, then critique, with its emphasis on reason and the autonomy of judgment, has been the lynchpin of modernity.

Today, however, the critical project shows signs of exhaustion. We are beginning to realize that being right is useless, now that everyone can lay claim to the same power as we can. The democratization of reason, proceeding alongside the development of critique through modernity, has produced a stalemate: for every judgment that we pronounce, there is another opposing one – with grounds as solid as our own, and the same right to assert itself. Rather than elevating us above the world, critique has mired us in an impasse of claim and counter-claim. The age of critique is now over and in its place we need to develop a postcritical form of thinking, one he calls “superweak,” a form of thinking based not on establishing grounds, pronouncing judgment, and determining duty, but on welcoming possibility, exploring what the world has to offer, and cultivating a vertiginous appreciation for moving within a world less grounded and less bounded by the terms of critical reason.’

Professor Laurent de Sutter is Professor of Legal Theory at Vrije Universiteit Brussels. He is the author of more than twenty books translated into a dozen languages. In English, he is the author of Narcocapitalism: Life in the Age of Anaesthesia (Polity, 2017) and After Law (Polity, 2020, French Voices Award, Leopold Rosy Prize of the Belgian Royal Academy). He is the editor of the Theory Redux series at Polity Press and of Perspectives Critiques at Presses Universitaires de France.

Dr Alfie Bown is Lecturer in Digital Media Culture and Technology at Royal Holloway, University of London. His books include Dream Lovers (Pluto, 2022), an investigation into dating apps, sexbots and virtual relationships, Post-Comedy (Polity, 2024), Post-Memes (Punctum, 2019) and The Playstation Dreamworld (Polity, 2017), a psychoanalytic study of video games which is available in Spanish, Portuguese, Serbian, Slovak and many other languages. Currently, he is working on the relationship between psychoanalysis and cybernetics. He is also editor of Everyday Analysis, a pamphlet house and monthly talk series.

Alfie and Laurent will talk for around one hour, we will then have an open discussion. At Housmans, we welcome debate and challenging ideas, so please do attend in that spirit.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book +entry’ your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00.

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Join us for an evening with Dr Sohail Jannesari as we discuss his groundbreaking new work of non-fiction, The Migrant Art of Coping.

Refugees don’t just survive displacement, they build strength, community, and new ways of coping that challenge everything we know about mental health.

The Migrant Art of Coping shares stories of refugees navigating harsh borders, restrictive laws, and failing support systems. Drawing on their words, experiences, and creative practices, each chapter offers insights and activities on belonging, care, and survival. Whether you’re a mental health professional, a concerned citizen, or simply curious about how people find hope in the face of upheaval, this book will shift the way you see wellbeing, identity, and healing.

This event will take a slightly different form to usual: rather than Sohail engaging in conversation with an interviewer, he will instead begin my talking a little bit about the book; its history, its intentions and most important arguments, before asking the audience to split off into different groups so that they can discuss the book themselves, and how it reflects their own experiences,
before coming back together for an open discussion.

Dr. Sohail Jannesari is a researcher, writer, and educator bridging mental health, migration, and social justice. He partners with sanctuary seekers, young people, survivors of human trafficking, and community groups to explore lived experience, challenge harmful systems and support wellbeing. Find out more on www.sohailj.com.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book +entry’ your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00.

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