POSTMODERN CULTURE

Emily Sibley (bio)New York University A review of Cheah, Pheng. What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Duke University Press, 2016. The basic premises of Pheng Cheah’s book are encapsulated in its title: first, that any consideration of world literature requires a return to theorizing “world” beyond its spatial dimensions, and second, […]

Graham J. Matthews (bio)Nanyang Technological University A review of Mandel, Naomi. Disappear Here: Violence After Generation X. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2015. The idea that the people who make up a generation share certain characteristics dates back to the mid-nineteenth century French lexicographer and philosopher, Émile Littré, whose authoritative Dictionnaire de la langue française (1863–72) […]

Stefan Mattessich (bio)Santa Monica College French-born artist Marc Fichou has exhibited an intriguing body of work in a string of shows around L.A.: “Contenant Contenu” at the Robert Berman gallery (January–February 2013), “Ouroboros” at the Young Projects gallery (January–April 2014), “Outside-In” at the Chimento Contemporary (June–July 2016), and, most recently, “Uncertainty,” a group show at […]

Adam Haaga (bio)Memorial University of Newfoundland A review of Goh, Irving. The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject. New York: Fordham UP, 2014. Motivated in large part by Jean-Luc Nancy’s question, “who comes after the subject?,” Irving Goh’s book delivers a reply, provocatively arguing in favor of the reject, a figure resistant to […]

Diletta De Cristofaro (bio)University of Birmingham A review of Wark, McKenzie. Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. London: Verso, 2016. Print. McKenzie Wark’s Molecular Red is a provocative call for new critical theory – or “new-old” (Wark xii), given its roots in marginalized strands of the Marxist tradition – for the age of the Anthropocene. […]

Melinda Cooper (bio)University of Sydney Abstract In the wake of the global financial crisis, a number of high profile economists have sought to revive Alvin Hansen’s Depression-era theory of “secular stagnation” to account for the stagnant tendencies in the American economy, citing Japan as a cautionary tale of combined demographic and economic decline. Following Hansen, […]

Amanda Armstrong (bio)University of Michigan Abstract This article deploys a genealogy of looting to mark out a history of the present. Looting entered the English language in the mid-nineteenth century. During its first decades of use, the term helped naturalize racial violence enacted along imperial infrastructures. Looting’s early history not only gives us insight into […]

Two Girls2: Sedgwick + Berlant, Relational and Queer Gila Ashtor (bio)Tufts University Abstract This essay asks what relationality has to do with self-transformation by analysing Lauren Berlant’s reading of Mary Gaitskill’s novel, “Two Girls, Fat and Thin,” an essay in which Berlant reads her own relationship to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick through the novel’s lens. This […]

Ronald Bogue is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Deleuze and Guattari (1989), Deleuze on Literature (2003), Deleuze on Cinema (2003), Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts (2003), Deleuze’s Wake: Tributes and Tributaries (2004), Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics (2007), […]

Stuart James Taylor (bio)Glasgow University A Review of Bolger, Robert K. & Scott Korb, eds. Gesturing Toward Reality: David Foster Wallace and Philosophy. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. Cahn, Steven M. & Maureen Eckert, eds. Freedom and the Self: Essays on the Philosophy of David Foster Wallace. New York: Columbia UP, 2015. In 1985, long before […]

James Liner (bio)University of Washington Tacoma A review of Potts, Jason and Daniel Stout, eds., Theory Aside. Durham: Duke UP, 2014. Print. We all know better than to believe that the complex history of theory (to say nothing of its present) can be reduced to a sequence of compartmentalized, oversimplified schools and movements or a […]

Ronald Bogue (Bio)University of Georgia A review of Baross, Zsuzsa. Encounters: Gérard Titus-Carmel, Jean-Luc Nancy, Claire Denis. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2015. Print. Baross, Zsuzsa. Encounters: Gérard Titus-Carmel, Jean-Luc Nancy, Claire Denis. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2015. Print. The epigraph of Zsuzsa Baross’s outstanding study comes from Gilles Deleuze: “To encounter is to find, to […]

Jason Frydman (bio)Brooklyn College Abstract This essay argues that narco-narratives–in film, television, literature, and music–depend on structures of narrative doubles to map the racialized and spatialized construction of illegality and distribution of death in the circum-Caribbean narco-economy. Narco-narratives stage their own haunting by other geographies, other social classes, other media; these hauntings refract the asymmetries […]

Julia C. Obert (bio)University of Wyoming Abstract This essay argues that contemporary postcolonial cities are definitive of Anthony Vidler’s “architectural uncanny,” and it forwards Windhoek, Namibia’s capital city, as a particularly palpable example of this phenomenon. This essay reads local literary texts and other historical documents to investigate how Windhoek’s architectural spaces condition structures of […]

James J. Hodge (bio)Northwestern University Abstract This essay argues for the impersonally social character of phatic communication in the context of contemporary networked media culture. Georg Simmel’s theorization of sociability as a playfully impersonal mode of social being prior to difference provides the basis for a discussion of the pleasures of phatic communication in digital […]

Christopher Schmidt (bio)LaGuardia Community College Abstract This essay examines the split function of Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules as both research archive and unrealized art project. It suggests that the Time Capsules epitomize Warhol’s career-long preoccupation with consumption and waste (a concern animating much of his art production), and that the extreme materiality of the 610 […]