By Pablo Castagno
Ahmed Kanna. Dubai: The City as Corporation. University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 262 pp.
No doubt Dubai’s image is one of its principal Siren-like allures, calling us to leap to a prelapsarian imagination, simply to swoon immediately at the site of architectural fantasies of the future.
» Read the rest
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).
» Read the rest
By Jaafar Aksikas
Paul Smith. Primitive America: The Ideology of Capitalist Democracy. University of Minnesota Press, 2007. 176 pp.
The field of contemporary cultural studies, especially with its importation into the American academy, often assumes a scepticism toward the uses of Marxist political economy and of Marxist approaches to culture, including more robust, non-reductive Marxist approaches and models, where cultural phenomena and cultural forms are understood within the context of their social totality—economic, political, and cultural. Paul Smith is one of the very few cultural studies scholars writing today who does not share this scepticism in the least and the result, in the case of his latest book Primitive America, is a provocative, original, and unorthodox critique of contemporary American capital and culture.
» Read the rest
By Terry Goldie
Jasbir K. Puar. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke University Press, 2007. 368 pp.
The intention of this book is obvious and quite simple. Terrorist Assemblages confronts the American tendency post-9/11 to see terrorists under every bed and often in every bed. Jasbir Puar attacks the racist underpinnings of counter-terrorism, the heteronormativity of American “ethnic” groups who try to assert that they are not terrorists, and the homonormativity of gay and lesbian groups who try to assert that they are just as proudly American as anyone else who hates terrorists.
» Read the rest
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.
» Read the rest