Temporality

In The Meantime Without End

By Adam Broinowski

Eric Cazdyn. The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture, and Illness. Duke University Press, 2012. 230 pp.

The Already Dead comes at a critical moment in which the vulgarities of the global capitalist system have become increasingly difficult to conceal. The book’s approach, at once theoretical and personal, historical and cultural, seeks new modes of revolutionary consciousness that can destabilize both within and without the capitalist system so as to reconfigure everything.
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Enlightenment Interrupted

By Alison Shonkwiler

Marie-Hélène Huet, The Culture of Disaster. University of Chicago Press, 2012. 256 pp.

“Our culture thinks through disasters” (2), writes Marie-Helene Huet in The Culture of Disaster. Building an argument that catastrophes have shaped the imagination of modernity, Huet’s book examines new modes of conceptualizing disaster and human power in the late 18th century and 19th centuries.
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Affecting Feminist Subjects, Rewriting Feminist Theory

By Ilya Parkins

Clare Hemmings. Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory. Duke University Press, 2011. 272 pp.

Clare Hemmings’s Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory is poised to prompt a major rethinking of feminist theory, and more importantly, of how we construct our histories of this field – and what this says about feminists’ intellectual investments and our futures.
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The Politics and Erotics of Time

By Amber Jamilla Musser

Elizabeth Freeman. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke University Press, 2010. 256 pp.

What does it mean to take pleasure in or to have fantasies about “rubbing up against the past” (xii)? Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories weaves together affect studies, critical historiography and politics to nuance our understanding of queer time.
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