Dear Shiv, You told me to write to you. It was kind of you to tell me to write. You were writing to me of heartbreaks and hangovers and whether we’ll ever love or write again, and how to replace … Continue reading “Epistolary Romance on Love and Friendship”
Work Reviewed: Lorey, Isabell: State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious New York & London: Verso, 2015. Editor’s Note: What does it mean to make a living, or a life for oneself, today? We live in a moment when corporations … Continue reading “On Precarity and the Freedom from Security”
The following is an edited transcript of an e-mail interview between the artist Luke Willis Thompson and Social Text editor Tavia Nyong’o that was conducted over the spring and summer of 2015, during and after the New Museum triennial, within … Continue reading “In Conversation with Luke Willis Thompson”
This short essay was commissioned by Dissent Magazine, which after putting me through an arduous editorial exchange rejected it. (Draw your own conclusions). I attach the original essay here, slightly revised and welcome any comments. I hope to expand … Continue reading “A Note on Race and the Left”
It is with great sadness that we open this page to commemorate the passing of our colleague and friend Randy Martin. Martin, who joined Social Text in 1983 and served as one of its co-editors from 2000-2006, was one of … Continue reading “Remembering Randy Martin”
Matter matters. For critics working at the interface of science studies, feminism, philosophy, and political theory such as Karen Barad and Jane Bennett, the universe kicks back. While human beings shape knowledge through their culturally embedded perspectives, the things … Continue reading “Radical Materialism Introduction”
Among the most widely circulated photographs of all time is one snapped by astronauts aboard the Apollo 17 spacecraft, just hours after its launch toward the moon, in December 1972. This image, often referred to as the “Blue Marble,” … Continue reading “Earth Seeing”
World of Matter defines a cutting-edge mode of collective artistic and interdisciplinary research, mediated through constellations of texts, images, and videos, which shares the imperative to explore how the world matters — how it enters into both materialization and conflicted forms of valuation.
Many of my video essays have elaborated the convergence of the movement of people, resources, and capital in a globalized world, building the video material into complex human geographies. Deep Weather (2013), by exploring the ecologies of oil and water, … Continue reading “Metachemistry”
In the essay “The Author as Producer,” which was written as a speech but never delivered to an actual audience, Walter Benjamin distinguishes two types of authors: the writer who informs, and the “operative writer.” Both are engaged in the … Continue reading “The Artist as Coauthor”
A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting (State: As of Bonn Climate Change Conference, October 2014) is a collection of items contributed from places that may disappear owing to the combined physical, political, and economic impacts of climate change, … Continue reading “A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting”
An analysis of postcolonial ecologies requires engaging with the everyday dynamics of ruination and resistance.
o “Cotton is in our clothes, in banknotes, cattle feed, gauze, toothpaste, and film rolls. All the while, cotton is traded more unfairly than any other commodity, and its reputation as a natural product is easily exposed as an illusion: cotton uses up more pesticides than any other plant, devastates entire regions such as the Aral Sea due to its excessive thirst, acts as the Trojan horse of genetic engineering, and drives the global industrialization of agriculture.”
The World of Matter is an “international art and media project [whose collective works critique] the global ecologies of resource exploitation and circulation.” WoM artists take to task such instances of exploitation as Monsanto’s “white gold revolution” — a … Continue reading “Representing India’s “Suicide Economy””
Where James Lovelock’s Gaia meets Pachamama, at the confluence of indigenous knowledge, modern environmental activism, and ecological/climate sciences, the politics of the Rights of Nature were gradually forged in Ecuador.
