Colonial Trains, Postcolonial Tracks
By Nilak Datta
Marian Aguiar. Tracking Modernity: India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility. University of Minnesota Press, 2011, xxiv +226 pp.
When I first heard Marian Aguiar discuss her book project on Indian Railways at an informal gathering of faculty and graduate students in the fall of 2005, I was excited, skeptical, and optimistic about her project all at once.
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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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After the Aftermath
By Rob Coley
Siegfried Zielinski. […After the Media] News from the Slow-Fading Twentieth Century. Trans. Gloria Custance. Univocal, 2013. 276 pp.
Media theory has a problem with the new. The new is an obstacle, it is obsolete, it is yesterday’s news. Of the many responses to a late 20th century obsession with “new media,” current attempts to rethink the dominant historical narrative of media culture best encapsulate the problem.
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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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The Citizenry of Photography
By John M. Woolsey
Ariella Azoulay. The Civil Contract of Photography. Zone Books, 2008.
Ariella Azoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photography is, among other things, a political theory of photography that investigates and radically rethinks prevalent conceptualizations of citizenship. As a “political theory,” Azoulay’s argument poses a direct challenge to both modernist and postmodernist approaches to “photographs of horror” that depict injured populations.
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The Trouble With Going Gaga
By Derritt Mason
J. Jack Halberstam. Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal. Beacon Press, 2012. 178 pp.
“Who is Lady Gaga?” asks J. Jack Halberstam in the preface to Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal; “What do her performances mean? And more importantly, what do her gender theatrics have to say to young people about identity, politics, and celebrity?” (xii).
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The Endless Circuits of Global Music
By Richard Elliott
Ronald Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan, eds. Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique. Duke University Press, 2016. 432 pp.
The possibilities for connecting the musics of the world to assumptions about cultural identity were amplified significantly with the advent of recorded sound in the late nineteenth century, a period contemporaneous with extensive imperialist projects undertaken by Euro-American powers.
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Popular Culture in the Classroom
By Christine Bold
Susie O’Brien and Imre Szeman. Popular Culture: A User’s Guide. 2nd Edition. Thomson Nelson, 2009. 398 pp.
Use this book! The second edition of Susie O'Brien and Imre Szeman's Popular Culture: A User's Guide traverses a vast range of popular culture—its slippery definitions, its history as a field of study, the stakes in its production and consumption, its relevance to the construction of the body, community, space, globalization—with specificity, nuance and lucidity.
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Approaching Animals: Multispecies Ethnography and the Biocultural Hope of Entanglement
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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Women in Academia: How (re)Discovering Feminisms Can Empower You
By Jennifer Burwell
Brown, Susan, Jeanne Perreault, Jo-Ann Wallace, and Heather Zwicker, eds. Not Drowning But Waving: Women, Feminism, and the Liberal Arts. University of Alberta Press, 2011. 472 pages.
Not Drowning But Waving offers twenty-two feminist essays focusing on the complex relationships between women academics and the liberal arts. Separated into three sections – “Not Drowning/Waving,” “History/Temporality/Generations,” and “Activism” – the anthology gathers together a broad range of topics, including the relationship of liberal arts to academic institutions, the many pressures that women in academia face in their attempts to balance personal life with professional duties and aspirations, the costs and opportunities for women academics who hold administrative positions, and the relation of feminism to the liberal arts.
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Marxism as Science Fiction
By Gerry Canavan
Mark Bould and China Miéville, eds. Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction. Wesleyan UP, 2009.
In 1972, Darko Suvin published “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre”, where he announced science fiction’s importance as “the literature of cognitive estrangement” (372). “SF,” Suvin writes, “is then a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment” (375).
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The Ubiquity of Sound
By Karim Wissa
Michel Chion. Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise. Duke University Press, 2016. 300 pp.
First published in French in 1998, Sound, An Acoulogical Treatise is a broad collection of essays that appears oddly disjointed, traversing disparate disciplinary polemics and philosophical dilemmas, while introducing a dizzying series of new concepts in each chapter.
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Identifying Universal Particularities
By David Lawrimore
John Michael. Identity and the Failure of America: From Thomas Jefferson to the War on Terror. University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 320 pp.
At its heart, John Michael’s Identity and the Failure of America: From Thomas Jefferson to the War on Terror is about the conflict between a national identity that promises justice to all and the various identities that have experienced America’s failure to make good on that promise.
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“What would animals have to teach us?”: Envisioning an Integrally Animal Politics
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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Global Warming: Between History and Ontology
By Emanuele Leonardi
Timothy Morton. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press, 2013. x + 203 pp.
In the numerous debates concerning the multifarious threats posed by global warming, it is frequent to be exposed to arguments about the inability of human thought to grasp the enormity of such threats, their incalculability, their unprecedented magnitude.
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Affecting Feminist Subjects, Rewriting Feminist Theory
By Ilya Parkins
Clare Hemmings. Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory. Duke University Press, 2011. 272 pp.
Clare Hemmings’s Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory is poised to prompt a major rethinking of feminist theory, and more importantly, of how we construct our histories of this field – and what this says about feminists’ intellectual investments and our futures.
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National Ghosts and Global Literature
By Fiona Lee
Vilashini Cooppan. Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing. Stanford University Press, 2009. 322 pp.
“National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach,” wrote Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1827, thus coining a term that has gained renewed currency in literary studies today (qtd in Damrosch 1).
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Late Postmodernism
By Daniel Worden
Phillip E. Wegner. Life Between Two Deaths, 1989-2001: U.S. Culture in the Long Nineties. Duke University Press, 2009.
The “two deaths” in the title of Phillip E. Wegner’s new book are the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. During the gap between these two events, Wegner finds a cluster of cultural possibilities, a flourishing of “what we might call a ‘late’ postmodernism that only emerges in the 1990s” (5).
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A Logical Revolt
By Tully Rector
Alain Badiou. Philosophy for Militants. Trans. Bruno Bosteels. Verso, 2012. 98pp.
Philosophy for Militants comprises three essays on the interanimation of politics and philosophy, plus a brief interview with Badiou, tacked on as an appendix, about the student protests in Québec in 2012.
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Straight Sense
By Andy Campbell
Jean-Luc Nancy. Corpus II. Trans. Anne O’Byrne. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013.
I often ask undergraduates encountering philosophical texts for the first time to initially read as though they were encountering poetry instead of philosophy. Not only does this tactic soften the array of feelings (overwhelmed indignation is perennially popular) that inevitably seem to arise when reading dense texts, but it also opens a student’s capabilities to understand and imagine alongside a text.
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A Call to Theoretical Indiscipline
By Carolyn Elerding
Jonathan Sterne. MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Duke University Press, 2012. 341 pp.
The last decade has been a truly exciting one in cultural studies of sound, largely due to the generous and catalytic contributions of Jonathan Sterne. These include several significant articles, a strong intellectual and activist web presence, and a provocative genealogy of early sound reproduction and transmission entitled The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction.
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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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Mapping the “Relational Geographies of Storytelling” in Emilie Cameron’s Far Off Metal River
By Margaret Boyce
Emilie Cameron. Far Off Metal River: Inuit Lands, Settler Stories, and the Making of the Contemporary Arctic. UBC Press, 2015.
I was attending an undergraduate survey of Canadian History when I first encountered the 1771 story of Samuel Hearne watching in horror as his Dene companions slaughtered a group of Inuit in the Central Arctic.
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Rebuilding the Machine
By Matthew MacLellan
Gerald Raunig. A Thousand Machines: A Concise Philosophy of the Machine as a Social Movement. Trans. Aileen Derieg. Semiotext(e), 2010.
A follow-up to his Art and Revolution (2007), Gerald Raunig’s A Thousand Machines uses a combination of Marxian theory and Deleuzian philosophy to examine today’s radical social movements as they negotiate the post-fordist landscape.
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Back to the Slaughterhouse
By Tristan Sipley
Nicole Shukin. Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
While it may seem redundant to assert the materiality of animal life, the emerging branch of cultural theory known as “animality studies” has in fact been riddled with philosophical idealism. On one hand, poststructuralist approaches have tended to reduce animals to linguistic and cultural signifiers, overlooking their historical role as actual bodies.
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Democracy, Limited
By Randall K. Cohn
John Keane. The Life and Death of Democracy. Norton, 2009.
In John Keane’s introduction to his sweeping new survey history, The Life and Death of Democracy, he lays out a promising—and ambitious—task for the project. “With an even hand,” he writes, “and one eye constantly on the past, the book tries to expose the worrying lack of clarity about what democracy means today” (xxxiii).
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Where the Wild Things Are
By Veit Braun
Eben Kirksey. Emergent Ecologies. Duke University Press, 2015. 312 pp.
Over the last couple of years, Eben Kirksey has been a major figure in carving out a niche for the fledgling field of multispecies ethnography somewhere in between human–animal studies, feminist science and technology studies, and ecology.
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The Art of Seeing Without Being Seen
By Susan Cahill
Sandra S. Phillips, ed. Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera Since 1870. San Francisco and New Haven: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Yale University Press, 2010. 256 pp.
The widespread viewing of previously unseen activities and spaces has become commonplace in a moment characterized by cell phone cameras, youtube videos, reality television and programmes such as Google Earth. The need to uncover and see has gained increased social importance through the elevated use of CCTVs, UAVs and airport body scanners—surveillance technologies that are legitimized as innocuous, yet essential to ensuring global security.
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Eat and Be Eaten: The Gastropolitics of the (Post) Colony
By Julietta Singh
Parama Roy. Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial. Duke University Press, 2010. 277 pp.
If ever a work took seriously Jacques Derrida’s insistence that we must understand eating as an act through which we both consume and are consumed, it is Parama Roy’s remarkable new book, Alimentary Tracts.
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The Trouble with Creativity
By Sarah Brouillette
Andrew Ross. Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times. New York University Press, 2009.
In the first dozen or so pages of his new book, Andrew Ross suggests that high-end creative industries (CI) work and low-level service or manufacturing labour have something in common. Both manifest the spread throughout the workforce of conditions of “precarity,” defined by the absence of social welfare, by “intermittent employment” and by “radical uncertainty about the future” (4).
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