The Lace Makers of Narsapur is a sensitive and groundbreaking study of women at the beginning of the process of globalisation. Maria Mies in this book, first published in 1982, looks at the way in which women are dispossessed by producing luxury goods for the Western market and simultaneously not counted as workers or producers in their fragmented workplaces. Instead they are defined as ‘non-working housewives’ and their work as ‘leisure-time activity’. The rates of pay are far below acceptable levels resulting in accelerating pauperisation and a rapid deterioration in their position in Indian society. Before the latest ‘economic boom’ in India were a number of processes of dispossession. The dispossession of farmers through the ‘green revolution’ and alongside it, the dispossession of women, the lace makers of Narsapur in the state of Andhra Pradesh.


A Bit of Difference
By Sefi Atta



Spinifex Press author Sefi Atta speaking at the launch of her new book 
A Bit of Difference at the Melbourne Writers Festival August 25 2012.


At thirty-nine, Deola Bello, a Nigerian expatriate in London, is dissatisfied with being single and working overseas. Deola works as a financial reviewer for an international charity. When her job takes her back to Nigeria in time for her father’s five-year memorial service, she finds herself turning her scrutiny inward. In Nigeria, Deola encounters changes in her family and in the urban landscape of her home, and new acquaintances who offer unexpected possibilities. Deola’s journey is as much about evading others’ expectations to get to the heart of her frustration as it is about exposing the differences between foreign images of Africa and the realities of contemporary Nigerian life.