Leon J. Hilton’s Counter-cartographies: Neurodivergence and the Errancies of Performance (Minnesota UP, 2025) is a book that does what it says. In a vital contribution to the field of performance studies, Hilton’s methodology models performative writing, evading the often drawn … Continue reading “On Counter-cartographies: Neurodivergence and the Errancies of Performance“
Just out with Divided, Henrike Kohpeiß’s Bourgeois Coldness stages an encounter between critical theory and Black studies to offer a diagnosis of an affective condition and social technique that, she argues, structures and sustains the still-colonial present. Bourgeois coldness names … Continue reading “On Henrike Kohpeiß’s Bourgeois Coldness“
In his collection of essays, Reflections on Exile (2000), the late political activist and professor of comparative literature Edward Said generalized about the Arab condition after the Nakba of 1948 (the name given to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from … Continue reading “On Nouri Gana’s Melancholy Acts“
Patricia J. Williams’s The Miracle of the Black Leg: Notes on Race, Human Bodies, and the Spirit of the Law (The New Press, 2024) opens with a meditation on bodily and spiritual integrity, the distinction between constitutional and contractual law, … Continue reading “Black Limbs, White Laws: On Patricia J. Williams’s The Miracle of the Black Leg“
Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman’s Millennial Style: The Politics of Experiment in Contemporary African Diasporic Culture (Duke University Press, 2024) astutely valorizes the speculative power and experimentation practices of black feminist and queer writers and artists who have produced works since the 1980s, … Continue reading “A Review of Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman’s Millennial Style”
In Itamar Moses’s new play The Ally, the “trickiest question”—“whether the fight against anti-Semitism belongs as a coequal branch of the social justice movement”—is itself a kind of trick question. Articulated through Moses’s academic alter ego in the play, Asaf … Continue reading “Parsing the Jewish American Complex”
In the fall of 2023, it is a bit late to be reviewing Stacy Szymaszek’s Famous Hermits, which came out months ago. But that does not matter so much. In fact, there are parts of Famous Hermits that seem already … Continue reading “On Famous Hermits by Stacy Szymaszek”
Do artists belong to the working class? Is artistic work a productive activity contributing to the development of capitalism or is it an “exceptional” activity, a form of “decommodified” labor? (See work by Leigh Clare La Berge and Dave Beech … Continue reading “Class Composition in the Arts: Operaist Art History”
The digital public humanities project A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado, comprising scholarly essays, artistic contributions, and much more, maps the many ways the nuclear arsenal has shaped the state of Colorado. It is the first installment in an even more … Continue reading “Nuclear Knowledge Otherwise: A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado“
“I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant … Continue reading “Generation Loss: A Feeling Called Heaven by Joey Yearous-Algozin”
I live in my TV. Over the past year, I have shifted more and more of my daily social, psychological and affective life into the long running television shows that I substitute for a vital somatic, interpersonal, and interactive existence. … Continue reading “Queer QuaranTV”
The Weak Spot (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2021), Lucie Elven’s debut novel, is a timely fairy tale about the sorcery of disbelief. The book opens when a young woman runs away to a secluded town, in the mountains, only … Continue reading “Once Upon a Time: A Book Review of Lucie Elven’s The Weak Spot“
In her recent book of poetry, I Love It Though (Nightboat Books, 2017), Alli Warren looks at the world skeptically as she explores the nature of desire and the sublime in the present. Warren describes desire for a utopic, alternate … Continue reading ““I did it for the enduring light”: On Alli Warren’s I Love It Though“
In an attempt to shed new light on transnational solidarity, Greg Burris’s The Palestinian Idea: Film, Media, and the Radical Imagination (Temple UP, 2020) poses a question: How can we think of Palestinian (and Black) liberation when history repeats itself … Continue reading “Palestinian Liberation and the Limits of the Present: A Review of Greg Burris’s The Palestinian Idea“
In a moment when the voices of the oppressed are ringing out across the world, Julie Beth Napolin’s The Fact of Resonance brings us toward the literary beginnings of modernism so that we can learn to listen for difference, which … Continue reading “On Julie Beth Napolin’s The Fact of Resonance“
