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“
The new film The Assistant has instigated a breakthrough in the public conversation about sexual abuse and harassment in the workplace. Rave reviews in the mainstream media, including The New Times, the New Yorker, the Daily Beast and Time Out, … Continue reading “On The Assistant“
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 a two-volume anthology on Caribbean political thought, two separate anthologies on Caribbean cultural thought and popular culture (co-edited with Yanique Hume), a co-edited Paget Henry reader, and several special journal issues under his belt, Aaron Kamugisha must have felt … Continue reading “The Caribbean Radical Tradition and the Postcolonial Condition: A review of Aaron Kamugisha’s Beyond Coloniality“
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“
For a long time, similarity was out of fashion. Difference was in and likeness was out; comparisons were odious. To see or assert likeness, the thinking went, was tantamount to denying irrefutable factual differences, often ones related to identity and … Continue reading “Jonathan Flatley’s Like Andy Warhol“
The frenzied pace of the news cycle in the age of Trump has a magnetic pull that makes it hard to take a step back and think strategically about the recent history of popular anti-capitalist and anti-racist struggles that have … Continue reading “Against Racial Capitalism, from Occupy to the Present”
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”
