Issue 6.1

The Interface is the Message

By Andrew Ventimiglia

Lori Emerson, Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound. University of Minnesota Press, 2014. 222 pp.

In Reading Writing Interfaces, media theorist Lori Emerson demystifies the enchanted world of modern digital devices. As recent technological innovations, from the ubiquitous tablet to fully-networked smart appliances, proliferate in a seductive variety of shapes, sizes, and colors, Emerson exposes the ideological project at the heart of this digital transformation.
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Discovering the World

By Michael Mayne

Castellina, Luciana. Discovery of the World: A Political Awakening in the Shadow of Mussolini. Trans. Patrick Camiller. London: Verso, 2014. xiv + 194 pp.

Autobiographies by radicals are essential histories of political eras and of individual roles in collective struggle. As these portraits reveal the dialectics of growth and transformation, they prove that we can make our own history, even if not always as we please.
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Beyond the Real of Capitalism

By Derrick King

Alison Shonkwiler and Leigh Claire La Berge, eds. Reading Capitalist Realism. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014. 260 pp.

Reading Capitalist Realism is an important and timely intervention into the nature of contemporary realism and the ongoing crisis of capitalism. The editors have assembled a powerful collection of essays that interrogate the critical capacity of the term “capitalist realism” to explain both contemporary ideological formations as well as current literary and cultural forms.
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The Bureaucratic Pleasures of Policing Sex

By Marcia Klotz

Jennifer Doyle. Campus Sex, Campus Security. Semiotext(e), 2015. 144 pp.

Campus Sex, Campus Security is not exactly an academic book, though it treats academic themes, and certainly matters of the academy. With a style that slides from the journalistic into the aphoristic and the lyrical, the book at times has the feel of a feminist manifesto from an earlier era, at others that of a jeremiad.
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A Queer Time for Television

By R. Gabriel Dor

Amy Villarejo, Ethereal Queer: Television, Historicity, Desire.  Duke University Press, 2014. 203 pp.

In Ethereal Queer, Amy Villarejo confronts the visibility of LGBT characters featured in recent programming, and the scholarship around these representations, by rejecting the notion that today’s television operates in a particularly queer time. 
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Geopolitics of Hope, Despair and the Arab Spring

By Ranbir K. Banwait

Hamid Dabashi. The Arab Spring: the End of Postcolonialism. Zed Books, 2012. 272 pp.

In The Arab Spring: the End of Postcolonialism, Hamid Dabashi provides a compelling study of the global geopolitical implications of the Arab Spring. The string of uprisings known as the Arab Spring is commonly marked as beginning on December 17, 2010, when a Tunisian man, Mohamed Bouazizi, self-immolated to protest the seizure of his produce cart.
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A Latent History of Everything: Hillel Schwartz’s “Reverb: Notes”

By John Melillo

Hillel Schwartz. “Reverb: Notes,” the endnotes to Making Noise: From the Big Bang to Babel and Beyond. Zone Books, 2011. 349 pp.

Hillel Schwartz’s 2011 history of noise, Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond, offers—through more than 900 pages of sonorous, often punning prose—nothing less than what the titles of its three main “rounds” suggest: a history of sound “everywhere,” “everywhen/everyone” and “everyhow.” In this review, however, I will examine the book’s 349 pages of endnotes, entitled “Reverb: Notes,” that, because of printing costs, could not be included with the published text.
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What’s New? Boris Groys in Translation

By Joshua Synenko

Boris Groys. On The New. Trans. G. M. Goshgarian. Verso, 2014. 208 pp.

It may seem contradictory to release a translation of a work which questions ideas of “the new” some twenty-two years after the German original. Yet the belated English publication of Boris Groys’s On The New (2014), demonstrates the text’s endurance according to the very means encouraged by Groys himself: by crossing the threshold into “valorized” culture.
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Queering the Politics of Life and Death

By Christine Quinan

Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, and Silvia Posocco, eds. Queer Necropolitics. Routledge, 2014. 216 pp.

In the opening to his celebrated essay “Necropolitics,” Achille Mbembe invokes a series of questions that offer a corrective to Michel Foucault’s established notion of biopower:

But under what practical conditions is the right to kill, to allow to live, or to expose to death exercised?
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Leftist Politics on the Couch

By Simon Orpana

Charles Wells. The Subject of Liberation. Bloomsbury, 2014. 245 pp.

When was the last time you left work early for an appointment with your Lacanian analyst? This is not the set-up to yet another Žižekian attempt at instructive humour, but rather one of the possible implications of Charles Wells’ argument for how Lacanian psychoanalysis can help us define and move towards a more liberated society.
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Spectral Places, Subjectivities and Politics

By Juliana Martínez

María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, eds. The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. Bloomsbury, 2013. 569 pp.

With an all-star Table of Contents that includes Giorgio Agamben, Arjun Appadurai, Ulrich Baer, Jacques Derrida, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, among others, The Spectralities Reader compiles the founding texts of what the editors call the “spectral turn,” as well as the more salient critiques that have fuelled one of the more productive debates in the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts over the last twenty-five years.
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Diagramming the Colonial Imagination: Black Subjectivity, Capitalism, and Modernity

By Jason Michelakos

Lindon Barrett. Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity. University of Illinois Press, 2014. 264 pp.

Lindon Barrett (1961-2008) was a Professor of English and African American studies at the University of California, Irvine from 1990 to 2007 before moving to the University of California, Riverside. He was a distinguished scholar and the author of Blackness and Value: Seeing Double (2009), published by Cambridge University Press.
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Inconveniently Yours

By Karl Jirgens

Thomas King. The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America. University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 287 pp.

Thomas King’s book was released shortly before the final Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings held in Edmonton (March, 2014) and more recently, in Ottawa (June, 2015), at which survivors of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools recounted abuse, suffering and hardship (1).
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Regarding Feelings and Forms

By Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst

Eugenie Brinkema. The Forms of the Affects. Duke University Press, 2014. 347 pp.

Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu, eds. Feeling Photography. Duke University Press, 2014. 397 pp.

As a psychoanalytic cultural theorist, thinking about these books together ensnares me in my familiar oscillating trap: between the visceral imagery of Freud and the hygienic schemas of Lacan. Reading Freud is to vicariously feel his theories of psyche; I am seduced by this provocation of idiosyncratic feeling.
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