Citizenship

Resistance in Post-Realist Times

By Kathleen Reeves

Eva Cherniavsky. Neocitizenship: Political Culture After Democracy. New York University Press, 2017. 232 pp.

Any scholar of contemporary culture must grapple with neoliberalism: what is it? how does it work? and how should we respond? A host of theorizations of the present provide helpful descriptions and prescriptions, but it’s rare to encounter a perspectival critique as intuitive and rigorous as Eva Cherniavksy’s Neocitizenship: Political Culture After Democracy.
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Rethinking Political Practice as Continuous Insurrection

By Viren Murthy

Etienne Balibar. Equaliberty: Political Essays. Duke University Press, 2014. 365 pp.

The concepts of equality and liberty form the core of modern political culture. And yet, the definition of these terms changes depending on the qualifiers that are attached to them. For example, political theorists have long debated distinctions of positive or negative liberty, formal or real equality.
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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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