Power of the People?

By Justin Paulson

Mark Fenster. Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture (revised and updated edition). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 400 pp.

Was 9/11 an inside job? Stickers declaring so can be found on stop signs and utility poles in urban centres throughout North America. And many of them are new: I recently watched a young, well-dressed gentleman plastering such stickers around downtown Montréal.
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Provoking Matter

By Stephanie Clare

Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Duke University Press, 2010. 336 pp.

If a sentence could summarize Diana Coole and Samantha Frost’s 2010 edited collection, it would be the editors’ claim that “materiality is always something more than ‘mere’ matter: an excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders matter active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable” (9).
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Pattern Pre-Recognition

By Russell Kilbourn

Richard Grusin. Premediation: Affect and Mediality in America after 9/11. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 208 pp.

While visiting Amsterdam recently, I asked a friend if he had heard the weather report for that afternoon. He responded by calling up a ‘real-time’ satellite weather tracking website on his laptop, which showed us in convincing graphics that it would rain at 1:00 pm that afternoon.
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Broaching the Subject of War: Toward an Ethics of Vulnerability

By Jeffrey Barbeau

Rosalyn Deutsche. Hiroshima After Iraq: Three Studies in Art and War. Columbia University Press, 2010. 88 pp.

Rosalyn Deutsche’s Hiroshima After Iraq: Three Studies in Art and War is a slim volume at eighty-eight pages, but it represents a timely meditation on the often tense relationship between political resistance and contemporary visual culture.
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Smart Homes and Shrunken Visions

By Will Straw

Davin Heckman. A Small World: Smart Houses and the Dream of the Perfect Day. Duke University Press, 2008.

More than anything else, Davin Heckman’s A Small World: Smart Houses and the Dream of the Perfect Day is about the slow disappearance of utopian scenarios concerning everyday life from American culture.
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Establishing Binaries

By Jeff Heydon

Alberto Toscano. Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea. Verso, 2010. 277 pp.

A quick Google search using ‘Kim Jong Il’ and ‘fanatic’ as the terms brings up the following results: “Kim Jong Il: The Movie Fanatic”; “Kim Jong Il’s golfing accomplishments will never be repeated”; and “Farewell to a Fanatic.” The search also brings up a number of references to websites that include the word ‘fanatic’ in the title, more often than not in a positive context.
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New Media, New Documentary

By Mark Terry

Kate Nash, Craig Hight and Catherine Summerhayes, eds. New Documentary Ecologies: Emerging Platforms, Practices and Discourses. Pelgrave, 2014. 266 pp.

New Digital Ecologies: Emerging Platforms, Practices and Discourses begins with a quotation from Katerina Cizek, a Canadian documentary filmmaker, in which she claims that “[R]eally great documentary is about remaining open to what’s actually happening around you” (1).
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Quotation as Critical Practice

By Adam Barbu

Patrick Greaney. Quotational Practices: Repeating the Future in Contemporary Art. University of Minnesota Press, 2014. 224 pp.

What does it mean to return to the question of authorship in a seemingly “post-everything” theoretical context? Patrick Greaney’s recent book Quotational Practices: Repeating the Future in Contemporary Art (2014) responds to this question by analyzing the historical and critical function of quotation in modern and contemporary art.
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Reverse Teleologies

By Helen Kapstein

Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff. Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa. Paradigm, 2012. 261 pp.

This volume opens with an amazing epigraph from South Africa’s Ministry of Higher Education and Training, part of which reads, “We should not only be consumers of theory from the developed world.
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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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Professor, Heal Thyself!

By Heather Zwicker

Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities. Fordham University Press, 2008.

As soon as you spy the title’s keywords—professors, corporate, humanities—you suspect you’ve read this book before. But you haven’t. What sets Donoghue apart from the populous field of other hand-wringing institutional-critique narratives (Aronowitz, Bousquet, Giroux) is that he takes professors to task directly for our complicity in the dismal state of the twenty-first-century academy.
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Architecture’s Struggle with Authorship

By Matthew Allen

Mario Carpo. The Alphabet and the Algorithm. MIT Press, 2011. 169pp.

Mario Carpo’s The Alphabet and the Algorithm presents a concise and compelling account of the rise and fall of what he calls the “modern paradigm” of architectural practice from its emergence in the authorial obsession of Alberti to its obsolescence following the “digital turn” of the 1990s.
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Queering Anarchism

By Michael Truscello

Jamie Heckert and Richard Cleminson, eds. Anarchism and Sexuality: Ethics, Relationships and Power. Routledge, 2011. 232 pp.

It may surprise some people outside of the study of anarchism that, alongside race, sexuality is perhaps the least studied subject within anarchist scholarship. This absence in the scholarly literature is often mirrored in practice, and as such the recent publication of Jamie Heckert and Richard Cleminson’s Anarchism and Sexuality provides a necessary intervention.
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Beware the Rays of Imitation

By Claire Barber

Tony D. Sampson. Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks. University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 235 pp.

The cover of Tony D. Sampson’s Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks incorporates the image of a flock of crows sitting on power lines, a scene with the potential to inspire the type of fear captured by films like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963).
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The Depths of Design

By Melissa Aronczyk

Guy Julier and Liz Moor, eds. Design and Creativity: Policy, Management and Practice. Berg, 2009.

It must have been inconceivable to the audience at the 8th International Design Conference, held in 1958, why the sociologist C. Wright Mills was invited to give a lecture. Only a few sentences into his speech, Mills thrashed the design industry for pulling art and craftsmanship under the umbrella of the market, and for joining the ranks of ad men, PR flacks and market researchers to ally “the struggle of existence with the panic for status” (Mills, The Man in the Middle” 70):

The silly needs of salesmanship are thus met by the silly designing and redesigning of things.
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The Culture of Urbanization in (Post)Socialist China

By Joshua Neves

Yomi Braester. Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract. Duke University Press, 2010. 405 pp.

Robin Visser. Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China. Duke University Press, 2010. 362 pp.

Yomi Braester’s Painting the City Red and Robin Visser’s Cities Surround the Countryside offer complementary engagements with urban transformation in P.R. China—though Braester also has a single chapter on Taipei.[1] Each takes as their focus the cultural restructuring that has shaped and been shaped by (post)socialist urbanization and the shifting designs on the city.
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Psycho-History

By Theo Finigan

Joan Wallach Scott. The Fantasy of Feminist History. Duke University Press, 2011. 187pp.

In The Fantasy of Feminist History an eminent cultural and gender historian interrogates some of the basic methodological and epistemological assumptions that constitute her discipline. While affirming history’s continued intellectual relevance—it is historians who, crucially, “introduce the difference of time” into interdisciplinary theoretical discourse, for instance (42)—Joan Wallach
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