Reviews – Page 2 – Social Text

The Politics of Aesthetics in Anticolonial Thought: A Review of Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance by Sandra Ruiz

John Andrews

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”

September 21, 2020 | Features: Reviews

On Free Jazz Communism

Gabriel Bristow

Jazz, declared saxophonist Archie Shepp in 1966, “is anti-war; it is opposed to [the war in] Vietnam; it is for Cuba; it is for the liberation of all people. That is the nature of jazz. That’s not far fetched. Why … Continue reading “On Free Jazz Communism“

September 18, 2020 | Features: Reviews

On Marquis Bey’s Anarcho-Blackness

Andrew Cutrone

Marquis Bey’s Anarcho-Blackness: Notes Toward a Black Anarchism (AK Press, 2020) is (a) concise, necessarily unsettling, Black anarchist work. Here, the propinquity between “Black” and “anarchist” may confuse the reader, as the Black radical tradition and anarchist politics are not … Continue reading “On Marquis Bey’s Anarcho-Blackness“

September 14, 2020 | Features: Reviews

Utopia in Black

Smaran Dayal

The year is 1974, the place is Central Park. The jazz musician and iconoclast Sun Ra appears in the park’s band shell “with a hundred musicians, including six drummers, ten bass players, ten trumpets, ten trombones, and three French horns.” … Continue reading “Utopia in Black”

August 19, 2020 | Features: Reviews

On The Black Aesthetic Season III: Black Interiors

Yasmina Price

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“

August 18, 2020 | Features

An Unbounded Universe of Adventure and Risk: Notes on Hedi El Kholti’s A Place in the Sun

Peter Valente

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“

June 17, 2020 | Features

On The Assistant

Lisa Duggan

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“

February 14, 2020 | Features: Reviews

On Wendy Brown’s In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West

Leerom Medovoi

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“

December 3, 2019 | Features: Reviews

Theorizing Affect through Everyday Fragments: A Review of The Hundreds by Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart

Marshall Hanig

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”

September 17, 2019 | Features: Reviews

The Caribbean Radical Tradition and the Postcolonial Condition: A review of Aaron Kamugisha’s Beyond Coloniality

Therese Kaspersen Hadchity

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“

September 10, 2019 | Features: Reviews

Sohail Daulatzai and Junaid Rana’s With Stones In Our Hands: Writings on Muslims, Racism, and Empire

Hannah Kershaw

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“

April 16, 2019 | Features

Jonathan Flatley’s Like Andy Warhol

Homay King

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“

February 21, 2019 | Features: Reviews

Against Racial Capitalism, from Occupy to the Present

Dan Nemser

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”

February 13, 2019 | Features: Reviews

Baldwin’s FBI Blues

Bill V. Mullen

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”

December 4, 2017 | Features: Reviews

Gaza Fractures

Bashir Abu-Manneh

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”

October 24, 2017 | Features: Reviews