Monthly Archives: June 2023

Anthony Alessandrini teaches English at Kingsborough Community College and Middle Eastern Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics; the editor of Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives; and the co-editor of “Resistance Everywhere”: The Gezi Protests and Dissident Visions of Turkey. His book Decolonize Multiculturalism […]

Geo Maher (bio) A review of Marriott, David. Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being. Stanford UP, 2018. “The time has come”—with these words, penned more than a decade ago, David Marriott opened the original essay that would later serve as keystone and namesake for this volume (“Whither Fanon?” 33). Such a frame seems […]

Katherine Ford (bio) A review of White, Bretton. Staging Discomfort: Performance and Queerness in Contemporary Cuba. U of Florida P, 2020. Given the country’s unique history and connections with the United States, especially since 1959, Cuba and its theater hold a singular interest for Western scholars, particularly those in the United States. Within Cuban studies, […]

Robert F. Carley (bio) A review of Dardot, Pierre, and Christian Laval. Common: On Revolution in the 21st Century. Translated by Matthew MacLellan, Bloomsbury, 2019. In the “Introduction” to Common: On Revolution in the 21st Century, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval set up an opposition-in-relation between neoliberalism and its challengers. The challenge constitutes a feint […]

Anthony C. Alessandrini (bio) A review of Arnall, Gavin. Subterranean Fanon: An Underground Theory of Radical Change. Columbia UP, 2020. Given the tragically short time Frantz Fanon was given to live and to write, it is remarkable that we can now regard him as one of the most important political and intellectual figures of the […]

Video JLM: wearing a brown unisex apron the hands that pertain to the arm and the arms that belong to the shoulders and the shoulders that weave the delicate fabric of nerves and arteries and musculature what we call the mind or the self or the voice that speaks to you within this system of […]

Judith Goldman (bio) Embedded in an unassuming point on the 1,952-mile Mexico-US border, the scene of counter-surveillance that ends “CCTV”—the collaborative video-poem by Mexican multimedia artist Chantal Peñalosa and Xicano poet José-Luis Moctezuma presented here—subverts through an aestheticized, albeit still uncanny surreality. Rising to the pro-voyeuristic height of the cop car on the hill, the […]

Matthew J. Rigilano (bio) Abstract This article assesses phatic communication now, when symbolic efficiency is in decline. As a result of neoliberal capitalism and industrialized social media, small talk is both obligatory and suffused with anxiety. Under disciplinary society, chitchat has been a threat to biopolitical control. Today, small talk is a form of surplus […]

Ewa Płonowska Ziarek (bio) “The best way to humanize AI is to tell our stories.” — Elizabeth Adams I. A New Referendum on Reality In a February 2020 article in The Atlantic entitled “The Billion Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President,” McKay Coppins offers disturbing insights into the digital extraction of big data used […]

Erick Verran (bio) Abstract This article works out a logic for trash in videogames through its consideration of the ludic artifact. Defining videogame trash as that which graphically outlives the execution of its ludic function, the essay distinguishes trash from objects that signify as real-world refuse, like Mario Kart’s banana peels, and the merely decorative. […]