Longing for Lehman Sisters

By Megan Brown

Melissa S. Fisher. Wall Street Women. Duke University Press, 2012. 227 pp.

There is a particularly illuminating moment in the opening chapter of Melissa S. Fisher’s Wall Street Women—a blink-and-you-miss-it comment that serves as a crucial reminder of the book’s significance: “It is difficult to remember the extent of sexual discrimination in the United States, as well as how thoroughly ideas of masculinity structured Wall Street in particular during the sixties and seventies” (7).
» Read the rest

Adorno’s Non-Waking Life

By Ian Balfour

Theodor W. Adorno. Dream Notes. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Polity, 2007.

When was the last time you dreamt of showing up at a party that Trotsky was at? And have you ever dreamt about Fritz Lang after having lunched with him earlier in the day?
» Read the rest

Resistance in the Affirmative

By Dana C. Mount

David Jefferess. Postcolonial Resistance: Culture, Liberation, and Transformation. University of Toronto Press, 2008. 224 pp.

In his first book, Postcolonial Resistance: Culture, Liberation, and Transformation, David Jefferess surveys the meaning of resistance in postcolonialism and attempts to develop a working definition of the term which, while still narrow enough to be effective, can lend itself broadly against interlocking systems of oppression.
» Read the rest

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.
» Read the rest

The Strategies of White American Masculinity

By Fenn Stewart

Hamilton Carroll. Affirmative Reaction: New Formations of White Masculinity. Duke University Press, 2011. 221 pp.

In Affirmative Reaction, Hamilton Carroll examines the “devices and strategies” through which “white masculinist privilege” is currently being “reorient[ed],” and thus maintained, in a “posthegemonic” context (2). Responding to widespread claims that masculinity is in crisis, Carroll suggests that, in the wake of “broad transformations that have radically altered the landscape of labor and opportunity in the United States,” white masculinity recuperates itself through a transformation from the universal to the particular (for instance, queer, Irish, “white trash,” working class) “whereby the particular becomes a location from which privilege can be recouped” (6).
» Read the rest

Querying Transnationalism

By Emily Johansen

Inderpal Grewal. Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms. Duke University Press, 2005. 296 pp.

Inderpal Grewal’s monograph Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms invites its readers to consider the overlapping spheres of postcoloniality, American nationalism and transnationalism, and neoliberalism—and the impact they have on subject formation.
» Read the rest

Something Ordinary

By Ben Highmore

Kathleen Stewart. Ordinary Affects. Duke University Press, 2007.

To name something as ordinary is not without risk. At once the founding act of all that is worthwhile in cultural studies, it also marks the source of all its troubles; the ambiguity of naming culture as ordinary is the stigmata of the burden that cultural studies (often unwittingly and unwillingly) carries.
» Read the rest

Reading Age and Disability in Film

By Dilia Narduzzi

Sally Chivers. The Silvering Screen: Old Age and Disability in Cinema. University of Toronto Press, 2011. 213 pp.

Sally Chivers’s The Silvering Screen: Old Age and Disability in Cinema is an important volume because it examines “contemporary film to ask why claims of physical and mental ability are necessary for older actors – and older people more generally” (xii).
» Read the rest

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).
» Read the rest

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.
» Read the rest

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.
» Read the rest

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).
» Read the rest

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.
» Read the rest

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.
» Read the rest

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).
» Read the rest

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.
» Read the rest

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.
» Read the rest

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
» Read the rest