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“
Urban renewal means Negro removal. –James Baldwin The concept of gentrification was pioneered by the sociologist Ruth Glass (1912-1990) to depict rapidly upscaling London neighborhoods in the 1950s. What she had earlier called a “middle class invasion” became more … Continue reading “Kushnerism: Gaza Gentrification Means Palestinian Genocide”
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“
In my undergraduate course Criticism: Theory and Practice, at Birzeit University—a course that introduces students to the building blocks of literary form—we read A. E. Housman’s poem “The Grizzly Bear.” The Housman poem reads: The Grizzly Bear is huge and … Continue reading “From the Classroom to Gaza: Belated Narratives and the Shared Struggle for Freedom”
Fitri DK: Nyawiji Ibu Bumi at Cemeti Institute for Art and Society, Yogyakarta, Juni 13 – August 9, 2025 Emerging reports in a 1930 Dutch East Indies newspaper described the Samin movement, an anti-colonial messianic movement that spread throughout Java. … Continue reading “A Hundred Years of Coloniality: Sedulur Sikep and Fitri DK’s Nyawiji Ibu Bumi“
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“
D&G&KRAFFT-EBING masculine days of dumbfounded machinic reserve an hour and a body wanting on animal street oxycephalic wolves and someone sequencing meat some father’s involution from pelvis to rough old they a composition probably watching the horse fish … Continue reading “Two Poems from Neutrøis“
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”
This special issue of Social Text critically thinks through how models of contemporary platforms such as Amazon or Google are reproductions of colonial capitalist enterprises such as The East India Company. Authors are invited to engage the field of digital … Continue reading “Call for Papers: Colonial Studies of the Platform”
[Dogless I] Life is long and I crossed my fingers. Sparred through death and others Through play. School. It’s me. Schooled. Post-Labor Day and the line Down. Good dog. Very good. Like I return to my craft at the end … Continue reading “from DOGLESS“
Social Text remembers the life and work of Fredric Jameson, one of our founding editors. Read an interview with Fredric Jameson and materials about his work establishing the journal here. Read a 2016 interview and a special issue that considers … Continue reading “Remembering Fredric Jameson”
For Capitalism is the Sophisticated and Materialized Form of the Hatred of Man and of his Body. -François Guéry and Didier Deleule In 2023, the trend “Films if they were directed by Wes Anderson” began to gain popularity on TikTok. … Continue reading “The Productive Body Dismembered: Creative Labor and AI Art”
Translated by Kira Josefsson Snow Lessons There are many types of ice: white ice, red ice, slick black ice. If only you’d learned to master the ice. If only you’d learned more about the work of translation. If only your … Continue reading “Two Poems”
Really it’s just that time has passed, what was green Is now orange This poem compares the seasons And philosophizes beauty in the form of strands I think I owe my boss a hello I think I owe him … Continue reading “The problem with beauty is that it convinces me of achievement”
