Annah, Infinite (Forthcoming)

by Khairani Barokka / translated from the painting annah la javanaise

This is an escape story.

In Annah, Infinite, the dominant narratives surrounding Paul Gauguin’s famous painting Annah la Javanaise (1893-94) are turned upside down. The book argues a simple point: what if the portrait does not depict a romanticised muse, but a pained child, caught in a moment of acute vulnerability?

In questioning the ‘facts’ surrounding Annah’s life, Annah, Infinite draws attention to how historical narratives, shaped by colonial powers, have distorted Annah’s story. It critiques the systems of ablenormativity, racism, and sexism embedded in art institutions, and the way these structures mask the violent colonial legacies still haunting museum walls.

The work doesn't just deconstruct mythologies; it brings to light the material realities of Annah's portrait as both a commodity in the global market and a stark contradiction of the tropes surrounding disabled Southeast Asian girls in the so-called 'developing world.' It is an examination of colonial ableism and a searching exploration of the enduring histories of resistance led by disabled people.

Interspersed with the author’s own poetry, fiction, and visual art on the painting’s subject, this is a book of emotional heft. It asks us all to acknowledge the possibility of pain in every single portrait, as well as the possibility of escape.

praise

‘What is behind a portrait? What layers of meaning and bodily experiences are hidden or distorted when one is objectified by the artist? Khairani Barokka breaks down Annah la Javanaise by Paul Gauguin through a lens of colonialism, ableism, heteronormativity, and racism. The author sees pain written on Annah’s body and reflects on her pain journey, tracing years of torture and neglect. Annah, Infinite is a fascinating exploration of Barokka’s relationship with a brown person who was real and made into a painting.’— Alice Wong, author of Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life

‘Khairani Barokka's Annah, Infinite is staged at the limit of portraiture, metabolizing the body as a composite mode of figuration, both present and redacted in the face of violence that sometimes has a face and sometimes is just that, itself, a broad pressure with no fixed source and "multiple modes." In this context, as night falls and keeps falling, Barokka asks if it's possible: "to translate what we endure as human beings." Is it?"‘ — Bhanu Kapil

‘From the twin poles of An­nah la Javanaise and her own pained body, Khairani Barokka unfurls a bold reimagining of established orthodoxies, punctuated with sharp wit and informed by wide-ranging erudition.’— Jeremy Tiang, author of State of Emergency 

‘A profoundly disturbing, intriguing, and illuminating work—Khairani Barokka is so precise and empathetic that the reader aches with phantom pain.’ — Anton Hur, author of Toward Eternity and 2025 International Booker Prize judge

‘Annah, Infinite focuses on a single canvas and yet contains multitudes. The text combines poetry, fiction, critical analysis, queer theory, colonial history, artwork, pain memoir and even catalogue descriptions, tempting one to describe it as genre-defying, and yet, I would be tempted to say that this ambitious, searing work heralds the birth of a new, yet-to-be-named genre, a form of translation which demands that we summon all our faculties—seeing, sensing, thinking, hearing, raging, loving, truthing—to engage with the enormity of a single artefact.’— Daisy Rockwell, International Booker Prize-winning translator

‘Khairani Barokka exposes the full evil of oppressive systems even as she denies them the power to hold us down. A powerful alternative to life lived forever in the shadow of the colonial and postcolonial. Like Annah, we were and are and will be and always will be free.’ —Tiffany Tsao, author of The Majesties and award-winning translator

‘A major work on language and translation, art-reading and writing, race, femininity and, above all, on pain. It has a definitive and reclamatory power, combining elegy with research and personal experience in a way that is scholarly, expressive, and immensely readable.’ —Preti Taneja

for Indigenous Species

‘Everyone who is interested in art/poetry/politics should be reading and looking at Khairani Barokka’s work.’ — Sophie Collins

contributors’ details

Khairani Barokka (b. 1985) is a writer and artist from Jakarta, based in London. Okka’s work has been presented and acclaimed widely internationally, and centres disability justice as anticolonial praxis, environmental justice, and access as translation; she has a PhD by Practice in Visual Cultures. In 2023, she was shortlisted for the Asian Women of Achievement Awards. Her books include Indigenous Species (Tilted Axis), Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches, as co-editor), Rope (Nine Arches), Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches), shortlisted for the 2022 Barbellion Prize, and 2024’s amuk (Nine Arches) longlisted for the 2025 Jhalak Prize. Annah, Infinite is her speculative nonfiction debut.

more information

• Publication date: 19 August 2025 (UK) | 11 November 2025 (US)

• Extent: 352pp

• Format: B-format paperback (198mm × 129mm)

• Rights held: WEL

• ISBNs: 978-1-917126-03-8 (paperback) / 978-1-917126-04-5 (ebook)

• Price: £19.99 | $20.95 US (paperback) / £10.99 (ebook)