Against Digital Worldlessness: Arendt, Narrative, and the Onto-Politics of Big Data/AI Technologies
| June 27, 2023 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 32, Number 2, January 2022 |
|
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 […]
Artifact Functionality and the Logic of Trash in Videogames
| June 26, 2023 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 32, Number 2, January 2022 |
|
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. […]
CFP: Special Issue, “Speculative Fiction and Futurism in the Middle East and North Africa” (March 31, 2024)
| June 13, 2022 | Posted by Webmaster under CFP |
|
Guest Editors: Hoda El Shakry (University of Chicago) & Oded Nir (Queens College, CUNY) –Arabfuturism is a re-examination and interrogation of narratives that surround oceans of historical fiction. It bulldozes cultural nostalgias that prop up a dubious political paralysis and works to solidify and progress a progressive force, towards being subjects and not objects of […]
CFP: Special Issue on Field Theory (January 31, 2023)
| May 19, 2022 | Posted by Webmaster under CFP |
|
Guest editor: Jeff Diamanti, University of Amsterdam This special issue of PMC seeks essays that develop practice-based methodologies and critical theories of fields of research. Traditionally, “the field” of research has been treated as the raw material from which objects and cases are drawn in order to advance knowledge in a given discipline. A forest, […]
CFP: Special Issue, “Afterlives of the Antisocial” (January 31, 2023)
| May 19, 2022 | Posted by Webmaster under CFP |
|
Guest Editors:Austin Svedjan & John Paul Ricc For nearly two decades, the “antisocial thesis” has enthralled queer theoretical thought, permeating a variety of debates concerning relationality, sexuality, gender, race, psychoanalysis, and temporality. So named by Robert L. Caserio during an infamous 2005 MLA panel, the antisocial thesis, Caserio elaborates, described a “decade of explorations of […]
Notes on Contributors
| December 17, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 32, Number 1, September 2021 |
|
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 |
|
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 |
|
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 |
|
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 |
|
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 |
|
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 |
|
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 |
|
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 |
|
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 |
|
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 |
|
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 |
|
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 |
|
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 |
|
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 |
|
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 |
|
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 |
|
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 […]
Coming Down
| September 23, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 31 - Numbers 1 & 2 - September 2020 and January 2021 |
|
Tyler T. Schmidt (bio) A review of Montez, Ricardo. Keith Haring’s Line: Race and the Performance of Desire. Duke UP, 2020. I keep thinking about Juan Dubose crashing in the hallway while his boyfriend, artist Keith Haring, soldiers through a dinner at the poet John Giorno’s house in January 1985. The event, peopled with gay […]
Self-Reflexivity as Infra-Structure
| September 23, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 31 - Numbers 1 & 2 - September 2020 and January 2021 |
|
Jens Andermann (bio) A review of Benezra, Karen. Dematerialization: Art and Design in Latin America. U of California P, 2020. Over the course of little more than a decade, from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, Latin American art experienced a wholesale transformation. As evidenced by the diverse group invited to participate in the […]
Afterword: Across Difference, Toward Freedom
| September 23, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 31 - Numbers 1 & 2 - September 2020 and January 2021 |
|
Keguro Macharia (bio) Invitation I was delighted when SA Smythe invited me to write this Afterword. It extended an earlier invitation issued in 2018 to participate in a symposium, “Troubling the Grounds: Global Figurations of Blackness, Nativism, and Indigeneity,” held in May 2019. My response to Dr. Smythe was short: “My mother has cancer—not a […]
Paradox of Recognition: Genocide and Colonialism
| September 23, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 31 - Numbers 1 & 2 - September 2020 and January 2021 |
|
Zoé Samudzi (bio) Abstract The recognition of and desire to prevent genocide are unquestionable social and political necessities. But despite genocide’s standardization and codification in international law, understandings and applications of its meaning are still contested. Using Germany’s response to the 1904–1908 Ovaherero and Nama genocide and Raphael Lemkin’s response to the Civil Rights Congress’s […]
Black is the Color of Solidarity: Art as Resistance in Melanesia
| September 23, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 31 - Numbers 1 & 2 - September 2020 and January 2021 |
|
Joy Enomoto (bio) Abstract This essay centers on three Melanesian women artist activists who use art as a tool for social justice and as visual archive: Camari Serau and Mere Tuilau both of iTaukei descent living on the island of Viti Levu, Fiji, and Sonja Larson of Papuan Tolai descent living in New Mexico. This […]
Unsettling Diasporas: Blackness and the Specter of Indigeneity
| September 16, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 31 - Numbers 1 & 2 - September 2020 and January 2021 |
|
Sandra Harvey (bio) [T]he wake has positioned us as no-citizen … with no state or nation to protect us, with no citizenship bound to be respected. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake In her much-celebrated The Transit of Empire, Chickasaw critical theorist Jodi Byrd begins a chapter on colonial multiculturalism with a story about land desecration […]
Garifunizando Ambas Américas: Hemispheric Entanglements of Blackness/Indigeneity/AfroLatinidad
| September 16, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 31 - Numbers 1 & 2 - September 2020 and January 2021 |
|
Paul Joseph López Oro (bio) Abstract Central Americans of African descent are in the margins on the histories of transmigrations and political movements in the isthmus and their diasporas. The absence of Black Central Americans in Latinx Studies and Central American Studies is an epistemological violence inherited from Latin American mestizaje. The insurgence of Afro-Latinx […]
The Politics of Witchcraft and the Politics of Blood: Reading Sovereignty and Sociality in the Livingstone Museum
| September 16, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 31 - Numbers 1 & 2 - September 2020 and January 2021 |
|
Alírio Karina (bio) Abstract Thoroughly entangled in the legacies of colonial anthropology, witchcraft is often presented as evidence of primitiveness or superstition, or as a metaphor for reality. This paper examines a set of witchcraft objects held at the Livingstone Museum in Zambia, reading them against anthropological and political-theoretical efforts to treat witchcraft as a […]
The Grounds of Encounter: Racial and Colonial Discourses of Place
| September 16, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 31 - Numbers 1 & 2 - September 2020 and January 2021 |
|
Sarah E.K. Fong (bio) Abstract Bridging Black and Native Studies, this essay juxtaposes the speeches of late-nineteenth century social reformers with Black and Indigenous place-making practices to show that white settler spatial imaginaries depict both Black and Indigenous peoples as placeless within the lands currently called the United States. Moving beyond an analytical separation of […]
Other Intimacies: Black Studies Notes on Native/Indigenous Studies
| September 15, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 31 - Numbers 1 & 2 - September 2020 and January 2021 |
|
Chad Infante, Sandra Harvey, Kelly Limes Taylor, and Tiffany King (bios) In 2015, we began assembling a dialogue among Black identified scholars committed to research focusing on Black diasporan people about how Black Studies might approach Native and Indigenous Studies. Tiffany Lethabo King reached out to Shona Jackson, Melanie Newton, Faye Yarborough, Tiya Miles, Chad […]
Introduction: Unsettle the Struggle, Trouble the Grounds
| September 15, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 31 - Numbers 1 & 2 - September 2020 and January 2021 |
|
SA Smythe (bio) The interrelated quest to map the unknown—the geographic unknown, the corporeal indigenous/black unknown—sets forth what Neil Smith calls “uneven development,” albeit from a very different analytical perspective: the systematic production of differential social hierarchies, which are inscribed in space and give a coherence to disproportionate geographies. —Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds We, to […]
Notes on Contributors
| September 15, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 31 - Numbers 1 & 2 - September 2020 and January 2021 |
|
Jens Andermann teaches at NYU and is an editor of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. He is the author of Tierras en trance: arte y naturaleza después del paisaje (2018, forthcoming in English from Northwestern), New Argentine Cinema (2011), The Optic of the State. Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil (2007), and […]
Radical Friends: Botany and Us
| September 13, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 30, Number 3, May 2020 |
|
Erin Obodiac (bio) A review of Meeker, Natania and Antónia Szabari. Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction. Fordham UP, 2020. In The Groves of Academe (1952), Mary McCarthy begins her campus novel with a Latin epigraph from Horace: Atque inter silvas academi quaerere verum (and seek for truth in the garden of Academe, Epistle II, […]
“This book … of traces and tremors, if book it be”
| September 12, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 30, Number 3, May 2020 |
|
Cory Austin Knudson (bio) Taussig, Michael. Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown. U Chicago P, 2020. In Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown, anthropologist and ethnographer Michael Taussig confronts the reciprocal problems of theorizing and representing climate change. In this, he joins a popular strain of contemporary environmental humanities literature that […]
Reasons for Self-Dislocating
| September 12, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 30, Number 3, May 2020 |
|
Miriam Jerade (bio) A review of Cadahia, Luciana, and Ana Carrasco-Conde, editors. Fuera de sí mismas. Motivos para dislocarse. Herder, 2020. This edited collection features contributions by Spanish-speaking women scholars who share the same motif—self-dislocation. The eleven authors seek to question the locus of philosophy and the discourses that frame it. The book is founded […]
Idyllic Visions of the Past and/or the Death Drive? Right-Wing Responses to a Crisis of Futurity
| September 12, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 30, Number 3, May 2020 |
|
Adam Dylan Hefty (bio) A review of Nilges, Mathias. Right-Wing Culture in Contemporary Capitalism: Regression and Hope in a Time Without Future. EPUB, Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Something is different about time in late capitalism. Whatever this something is, it has intensified with the fall of 20th century communism, the increasing financialization of capital, and the […]
Fictionalizing Marx, or Towards Non-Dialectics: Baudrillard and Laruelle
| September 12, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 30, Number 3, May 2020 |
|
Jonathan Fardy (bio) Abstract This essay offers a comparative reading of the post-Marxian work of Jean Baudrillard and François Laruelle, arguing that both thinkers seek to establish a way forward for theory that remains faithful to the spirit of Marxism without reaffirming dialectics. In order to do so, both turn to the concept and strategy […]
Negative Ecology: Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty at 50
| September 12, 2021 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 30, Number 3, May 2020 |
|
John Culbert (bio) Abstract This essay reassesses the significance of Robert Smithson’s land art for environmental politics in a time of climate crisis. Drawing on analyses of fossil capital and petrocultures, it argues that Smithson’s aesthetics of entropy—particularly as conveyed in the 1970 earthwork Spiral Jetty—provide a valuable dialectical methodology for critical theory in the […]