Monthly Archives: December 2021
Notes on Contributors
| December 17, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 32, Number 1, September 2021 |
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Bret Benjamin is Associate Professor of English at the University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY). Author of Invested Interests: Capital, Culture, and the World Bank (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), Benjamin teaches courses in Marx and Marxist theory, postcolonial studies, and globalization studies. He is co-President (with Ericka Beckman and Neil Larsen) of the Marxist […]
Alone We Fall
| December 17, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 32, Number 1, September 2021 |
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Shmuel Lederman (bio) A review of Gaffney, Jennifer. Political Loneliness: Modern Liberal Subjects in Hiding.Rowman & Littlefield, 2020. Donald Trump’s election to the presidency of the United States was met with consternation and often horror at home and around the world. To make sense of the nonsensical, many turned to books that seemed to offer […]
Prowling Foucault
| December 17, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 32, Number 1, September 2021 |
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Britton Edelen (bio) A review of Huffer, Lynne. Foucault’s Strange Eros. Columbia UP, 2020. Lynne Huffer’s Foucault’s Strange Eros is a translation, but not in the usual sense. This original work translates not a text from one language to another, but a person: Michel Foucault. Huffer invites us to perceive Foucault differently, with slightly squinted […]
Dispossession, Property, and the Clash of Interests: Reflections on Early Marx and Late Bensaïd
| December 17, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 32, Number 1, September 2021 |
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Bret Benjamin (bio) A review of Bensaïd, Daniel. The Dispossessed: Karl Marx’s Debates on Wood Theft and the Right of the Poor. Translated by Robert Nichols, U of Minnesota P, 2021. No honest history of capitalist modernity can fail to account for the violence of dispossession. Marx famously grapples with the distinction between the ideal […]
Renewing Humanism Against the Anthropocene: Towards a Theory of the Hysterical Sublime
| December 17, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 32, Number 1, September 2021 |
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Matthew Flisfeder (bio) Abstract This article puts to question performative contradictions in theories developing a resistance to anthropocentrism in the context of rising interest in the Anthropocene narrative and Posthumanist theories seeking to evade human exceptionalism. By developing the aesthetic category of the hysterical sublime—a term first coined by Fredric Jameson in his early writing […]
The Impossibility of Multiracial Democracy
| December 15, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 32, Number 1, September 2021 |
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Christopher Chamberlin (bio) Abstract Democracy becomes modern after it abolishes slavery and assumes its primary feature—race. Paradoxically, political theory cannot formalize a notion of democracy that incorporates the ex-slave or a post-slavery democracy that does not prescribe racial genocide. This essay shows that this paradox is structural, and tracks its transformation from Alexis de Tocqueville’s […]
The Impassable Dream
| December 15, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 32, Number 1, September 2021 |
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John Mowitt (bio) Abstract This essay approaches the theme of “impasse and democracy” through the motif of the American dream, a dream, as many have noted, unfulfilled both at home and abroad. This lack of fulfilment is here read as a structural impasse within democracy, as a sign that democracy dreams, or is a dream, […]
Resistance and Biopower: Shame, Cynicism, and Struggle in the Era of Neoliberalism and the Alt-Right
| December 15, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 32, Number 1, September 2021 |
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A. Kiarina Kordela (bio) Abstract This essay examines the relation between neoliberalism and the alt-right, showing that their shared cynical amoralism elevates irresponsibility to the level of absolute morality, such that the Democrats’ exhortation to shame proves counterproductive. The alt-right’s outrage-inducing effect on the Democrats is due to its double relation to biopower: insofar as […]
Notes on Contributors
| December 1, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 31, Number 3, May 2021 |
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Sharon P. Holland is the Townsend Ludington Distinguished Professor and Chair of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Raising The Dead: Readings Of Death And (Black) Subjectivity (Duke UP, 2000), and co-author of a collection of trans-Atlantic Afro-Native criticism with Professor Tiya Miles (American Culture, […]
A Disordered Review of Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, The Disordered Cosmos
| December 1, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 31, Number 3, May 2021 |
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Sean Yeager (bio) A review of Prescod-Weinstein, Chanda. The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred. Bold Type Books, 2021. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s new book, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, offers one possible answer to Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s question, “how might black feminism … imagine […]
Pork to the Future
| December 1, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 31, Number 3, May 2021 |
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Steven Ruszczycky (bio) A review of Florêncio, João. Bareback Porn, Porous Masculinities, Queer Futures: The Ethics of Becoming-Pig Routledge, 2020. It is difficult to overstate the impact that the HIV/AIDS epidemic has had on gay erotic culture. Whether one experienced life in the bathhouses before its outbreak or came of age in the chastened era […]
Patterns within Grids
| December 1, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 31, Number 3, May 2021 |
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Susanna Paasonen (bio) A review of Roach, Tom. Screen Love: Queer Intimacies in the Grindr Era. SUNY Press, 2021. What would follow from detaching considerations of hookup apps from simplistic, pessimistic diagnoses of neoliberal commodification and exploitation, and from coupling critiques of the data economy with a potential queer ethics of relating instead? These are […]
No Country for Old White Men: Living at the Boundary of Blackness
| December 1, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 31, Number 3, May 2021 |
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Sharon P. Holland (bio) A review of Bennett, Joshua. Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man. Harvard UP, 2020. Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York UP, 2020. No one will dispute that the SARS-CoV-2 virus has set the stage for deeper engagements with our […]
My Mother’s Bones: The Photographic Bodies of Camera Lucida and Halving the Bones
| December 1, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 31, Number 3, May 2021 |
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Chelsea Oei Kern (bio) Abstract This essay brings together Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida and Ruth Ozeki’s documentary Halving the Bones in order to situate the conceit of maternal photography within discourses of social and racial reproduction. Although Barthes’s theory of photography neglects race, it prepares the ground for a logic of maternal reproduction through photography […]
Mediating Neo-Feudalism
| December 1, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 31, Number 3, May 2021 |
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Travis Workman (bio) Abstract This essay discusses contemporary film and media in relation to the political economic concept of neo-feudalism. Questioning the application of a science-fiction dialectics to these media and the tendency to see them as symptoms of the rise of neofascism, the essay rather connects their themes, narratives, and visual styles to Marxist […]
Breakpoints and Black Boxes: Information in Global Supply Chains
| December 1, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 31, Number 3, May 2021 |
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Miriam Posner (bio) Abstract Supply chain management (SCM) deals with the procurement and assembly of goods, from raw material to the consumer. With the growing prevalence of offshore manufacturing and suppliers’ reliance on “just-in-time” inventory management, SCM has become both astoundingly complex and critical to companies’ competitiveness. This essay examines how data works in global […]
Alain Badiou’s Age of the Poets: The Desacralizing of the Poem
| December 1, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 31, Number 3, May 2021 |
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Alberto Moreiras (bio) Abstract This essay examines Alain Badiou’s claims concerning the historical end of what he calls “the Age of the Poets”: a configuration of thought that keeps philosophy sutured to poetry, which can never be the only condition of philosophy but merely one of them. The Age of the Poets stretches from Friedrich […]