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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By ERIC VÁZQUEZ
Fernando Ignacio Leiva. Latin American Neostructuralism: The Contradictions of Post-Neoliberal Development. University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 312pp.
Denouncing neoliberalism’s manifestations has become a boom industry for left-wing academics. It has become a practice so prevalent that even fusty establishmentarians like Stanley Fish have deigned to comment on the uses and abuses of “neoliberalism” as a moniker for the predominance of the market over politics, society, and culture in the present moment.
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By Lily Cho
David L. Eng. The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy. Duke University Press, 2010. 268 pp.
In The Feeling of Kinship, David Eng asks, “[w]e have moved beyond structuralist accounts of language, but have we moved beyond structuralist accounts of kinship?” (16). Not only do his investigations reveal the persistence of structuralism in how we think about family and intimate relationships, he also presents an urgent and sophisticated case for the necessity of a poststructuralist account of kinship.
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