Art Metropole

24 Sep. 2022

Reception: Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire and the VAGABONDS series, with author/editor Max Haiven

Time

4-6PM

Please join us for a casual reception for an introduction to the VAGABONDS series of short radical books from Pluto Press and its latest issue: Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire. The author of the book and editor of the series, Max Haiven, will be in attendance.

About the book: From its origins in West Africa to today’s Southeast Asian palm oil superpowers, Haiven’s sweeping, experimental narrative takes us on a global journey that includes looted treasures, the American system of mass incarceration, the history of modern art and the industrialisation of war. Beyond simply calling for more consumer boycotts, he argues for recognising in palm oil humanity’s profound potential to shape our world beyond racial capitalism and neo-colonial dispossession. One part history, one part dream, one part theory, one part montage, this kaleidoscopic and urgent book asks us to recognise the past in the present and to seize the power to make a better world.

About the series: VAGABONDS is a series of radical pamphlet-style books from London’s Pluto Press, edited by Max Haiven. VAGABONDS strives to publish an eclectic mix of long revolutionary essays and experimental works at the intersection of radical action, interventionist art, and critical inquiry. Other titles include Angela Mitropoulos’s Pandemonium: Proliferating Borders of Capital and the Pandemic Swerve, Cassie Thornton’s The Hologram Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future, and Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan’s We Are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself.

Max Haiven is Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination at Lakehead University. His other books include Art After Money, Money After Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization (2018) and Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (2020).