What IS Rupture Press?

The academic hypocrisy is unbearable, propelling the creation of Rupture Press. The productive stream of so-called ‘revolutionary,’ ‘decolonial’, ‘queer feminist,’ ‘insurgent,’ ‘anarchist’ and ‘scholar-activist’ publications behind paywalls and sustaining the enormous profits of the ‘big five’ publishers is shameful. The collective behind Rupture Press, and associated book series editors, can no longer tolerate the exploitation, enclosure and extraction of critical ideas from academic works. The Academic self-exploitation, the plundering of libraries (or gated university ‘book enclosures’) and corporate profiteering makes a mockery of critical knowledge production, our politics and, of course, ourselves. While we still believe in academic inquiry, theoretical and practical political development, Rupture Press represents an effort towards (re)connecting theory with practice by breaking with these academic publishing practices.

Rupture Press is a collective effort that provides not-for-profit, open access, affordable paperbacks for critical academic works. We are seeking to support academic books making ruptures with the existing system of extractivism, exploitation and socioecological catastrophe. This press seeks to create an outlet for academics who want to depart from corporate publishing, working towards an anti-paywall, not-for-profit model that makes work open access and affordable.

We despise how corporate publishers externalize costs, barely copy edit books, enclose them and profit from them. We represent an effort to break with this, working to build a credible network of academic publishing. We offer a home to anarchist, autonomous, queer and other critical works intersecting with political ecology, critical development studies, geography, anthropology, history, sociology and political science. This also includes speculative fiction, graphic novels, science fiction and more with the Ruins Series. Rupture Press welcomes academic submissions seeking to make a rupture with the existing statist and capitalist systems, revealing radical histories and promoting an insurrection in subjugated knowledges to create lived pathways towards liberatory futures for everyone. Rupture Press publishes for total liberation.  

What to Expect?

Rupture Press manuscript proposals are placed under a blind peer-review. If a proposal is accepted, aside from formatting/typesetting the authors should be prepared to embrace responsibility for finalizing their books. Because of the open-access and the most affordable academic paperbacks on the market, we need the authors to take increasing responsibility in matters of copy editing, creating an index and, overall, producing the final work the authors want to see published. We need authors to care about their works, not only to take them away from book enclosures, but to perfect them and want to promote them. Rupture Press will provide support with copy-editing, formatting and edition design in collaboration with the authors. The strength of corporate publishers remains their distribution networks, internet algorithms and credibility. The ‘big five’ academic publishers, as well as other ‘radical’ presses, often fail to adequately promote the works of authors. We seek to develop this credibility, participating in the market metric game to further develop academic publishing power, but will be dedicated to working with authors through promoting their books through our distribution networks, social media and producing flyers for them. Nonprofit publishing power will be co-created through the efforts of Rupture, their authors, supporters and other publishers working together to destabilize the dominance and exploitation of the corporate academic publishers.