POSTMODERN CULTURE

Rotimi Babatunde‘s stories have been variously published and translated. His plays have been staged across continents. He is a recipient of the Caine Prize. He lives in Nigeria. Lauren Bajek is a writer, parent, and literary agent living in the American Rust Belt. Her fiction is published or forthcoming in Baffling Magazine, the Magazine of […]

TJ Benson (bio) Before the screams got to Zuana, he sprang out of sleep and clamped his teeth to mute his own. Panting, he looked around to make sure he was really alive, then he did the ten inhale-pause—exhale breath exercises his mother had taught him. Yes, this world was real, the nightmare was over. […]

Gaby Zabar (bio) Knuckles tapped on the plexiglass encasing Janice. It was a chrysalis built for truckers in stasis, which meant she wasn’t on her craft. She had retired, finally, and she was at the blue house. Every trucker had the same choice in retirement packages: a generous pension with the freedom to settle on […]

Lauren Bajek (bio) Sacrifice towns? Of course I know about them. Half the runaways I catch, they get caught up in one. That’s their whole promise, isn’t it. When you can’t trust Mommy or Daddy anymore, at least you can trust the magic of the town. Hell, I lived in one for a few years […]

123 Simon(e) van Saarloos (bio) “I am trying to find out if Kwati had a dream about me last night,” Lala said, rushed, making up a lie rather than just admitting she was late for no particular reason. “And?” Tommy asked matter of fact. Lala looked into his eyes, trying to figure out if he […]

Rotimi Babatunde (bio) 1. Q Question: This is already inheriting the alphabet What a strange city and what a strange school and what a strange class. Topaz stared at his desk. His mum had said it would be a nice city and a nice school and a nice class, and he didn’t want to be […]

Alexis Pauline Gumbs (bio) Gift to the one who wondered, too verbal to know. Gift to the one who listened. But not for her own sake. _____ We send this transmission in honor of the forgotten one known verbally as John Gibbs Jr. That is not his name. One of many labeled cognitively disabled, non-verbal, […]

Malka Older (bio) Malka Older is a writer, aid worker, and sociologist. Her science-fiction political thriller Infomocracy was named one of the best books of 2016 by Kirkus, Book Riot, and the Washington Post. She created the serial Ninth Step Station on Realm, and her acclaimed short story collection And Other Disasters came out in […]

As a journal of theory and criticism of contemporary cultures, Postmodern Culture has published fiction rarely, in moments when we have sought to recognize creative interventions into conceptual discourse. In the early 1990s, PMC published postmodern fiction by Kathy Acker, Robert Coover, and William T. Vollmann, among others. Issues of PMC have featured poetry by […]

Diego Falconí Trávez (bio) and Robin Myers (bio) Introduction: Dis/integrations — The Outline of an Empty Signifier1 To address disintegration as the starting point for this text obliges me, firstly and briefly, to reflect on the polysemic and contextual nature of words. To begin, for a signifier, there is almost always a series of signifieds […]

Diego Falconí Travéz (bio) and Robin Myers (bio) A Brief Theoretical Chronicle of Cuy(r)ness In 2013, the conference Queering Paradigms V: Queering Narratives of Modernity was held in Quito. This was the second time an international academic discussion of queerness had come to Ecuador. In 2012, two colleagues and I coordinated the colloquium Rethinking Queerness […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]