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“
Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse observes that “Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle” (72). This, in short, … Continue reading “The Politics of Aesthetics in Anticolonial Thought: A Review of Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance by Sandra Ruiz”
How can a short, single, stable text account for a set of interpersonal, collective, cinematically ephemeral experiences? In mathematics, a fractal is a geometrical figure in which each part has the same statistical character as the whole. The Black Aesthetic, … Continue reading “On The Black Aesthetic Season III: Black Interiors“
Hedi El Kholti’s book of collages, A Place in the Sun (Hesse Press: Los Angeles, CA, 2017), collects images of subversive beauty, drawn largely from magazines, and transforms them as they play off each other, creating resonances over a wide … Continue reading “An Unbounded Universe of Adventure and Risk: Notes on Hedi El Kholti’s A Place in the Sun“
With her new book, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (Columbia 2019), Wendy Brown joins more than a few scholars now reconsidering what we thought we knew about neoliberalism. Her previous book, Undoing the … Continue reading “On Wendy Brown’s In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West“
The Hundreds by Laurent Berlant and Kathleen Stewart is an assemblage of one hundred hundred-word poetic prose musings on the affective complexities of life in the contemporary United States. In each hundred, the authors bring their expertise in literary, cultural, … Continue reading “Theorizing Affect through Everyday Fragments: A Review of The Hundreds by Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart”
With Stones In Our Hands: Writings on Muslims, Racism, and Empire, edited by Sohail Daulatzai and Junaid Rana, is an ambitious collection of essays that draws important connections between the perceptions of Islam in the twenty-first century and the enduring … Continue reading “Sohail Daulatzai and Junaid Rana’s With Stones In Our Hands: Writings on Muslims, Racism, and Empire“
On James Baldwin: The FBI File. 2017. Edited by William J. Maxwell. Arcade Books. “Isn’t Baldwin a well-known pervert?” So wrote FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in a 1964 internal FBI memo, a single page in a file that extended … Continue reading “Baldwin’s FBI Blues”
Is there a characteristically Gazan sentence? Could it be this one from Asmaa al-Ghul’s recent short story “You and I,” published in The Book of Gaza (Comma Press, 2014): “Drops of morning dew evaporate taking the pain with them, because … Continue reading “Gaza Fractures”
Richard Owens tells only one joke as such in No Class (Barque Press, 2012). Will you get it? Three cops walk into a bar: a dialectician an artist and a hedge fund manager. The artist says to the hedge fund … Continue reading ““But funny how”: Richard Owens’ No Class“
“People getting together.” This is a phrase that comes up early and often in Organize Your Own: The Politics and Poetics of Self-Determination Movements (Soberscove, 2017). In the introduction to the book, Daniel Tucker, the curator of the exhibition and … Continue reading “A Politics of Dissonance”
“What if we’re living in a world full of super-social psychopaths?” is the question posed by Tristam Vivian Adams early on in his book The Psychopath Factory: How Capitalism Organizes Empathy. Scary, as the term “psychopath” immediately triggers thoughts about … Continue reading “A New Diagnosis for Capitalism: Tristam Vivian Adams’ The Psychopath Factory“
Journalist Farhad Manjoo describes the “post-fact society” as “a parallel universe of fact: a place at once part of the mainland but profoundly distant from it, a place where another truth—a truth pocked with holes, but one just true enough … Continue reading “Nonknowledge as Capacity: Randy Martin’s Knowledge LTD and the Limits of Rationality in the Age of the Derivative”
