By Paul Ardoin
Brian Massumi. Politics of Affect. Polity Press, 2015. 228 pp.
Let’s start—as remains the apparent necessity in every discussion of affect, despite these years since the so-called affective turn—with the definition of “affect” at the center of Brian Massumi’s Politics of Affect volume.
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By Jordan Sheridan
Eben Kirksey, ed. The Multispecies Salon. Duke University Press, 2014. 306 pp.
Between 2008 and 2010 the art show called the Multispecies Salon traveled through San Francisco, New Orleans, and New York City. Whether individual pieces involve human/goat milk cheese, raw donkey soap, dandelions raised on human blood infected with Hepatitis C, or life-sized sculptures of transgenetic companion animals, each challenge preconceived notions of species division.
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By Nandini Thiyagarajan
Brian Massumi. What Animals Teach Us about Politics. Duke University Press, 2014. 137 pp.
“We will see what the birds and the beasts have instinctively to say about this.” — Brian Massumi
At one point or another, we have all found ourselves watching animals play.
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By Bob Johnson
Candis Callison. How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts. Duke University Press, 2014. 316 pp.
Bookshelves (well, at least virtual bookshelves) burst, like breached reservoirs, with new literature on climate change. Only a few years ago, our climate scholarship suffered from a long drought, fed only by a limited stream coming out of the natural sciences and political sciences.
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By Senayon Olaoluwa
Warwick Research Collective. Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool University Press, 205. 196 pp.
The book, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature is yet another effort in seminal literary scholarship. It aims to assess the state of literature as a distinct discipline and make projections about its likely value in the future as that which consciously addresses itself to the predominant dynamics of the “world-system” anchored by the dictates of capital, especially in the past 200 years.
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