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Cultural Critique

Cultural Critique
Editors: John Mowitt, Cesare Casarino and Simona Sawhney
The path-breaking journal of cultural criticism.

Cultural Critique provides a forum for creative and provocative scholarship in the theoretical humanities and humanistic social sciences. Transnational in scope and transdisciplinary in orientation, the journal strives to spark and galvanize intellectual debates as well as to attract and foster critical investigations regarding any aspect of culture as it expresses itself in words, images, and sounds, across both time and space. The journal is especially keen to support scholarship that engages the ways in which cultural production, cultural practices, and cultural forms constitute and manifest the nexus between the aesthetic, the psychic, the economic, the political, and the ethical intended in their widest senses. While informed by the diverse traditions of historical materialism as well as by the numerous critiques of such traditions from various parts of the globe, the journal welcomes contributions based on a variety of theoretical-methodological paradigms.

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  • Volume 97 Contents Purchase This Issue

    Table of Contents, Volume 97

    Editorial Statement
    ARTICLES
    Once More, With Fredric Jameson by Pansy Duncan
    Demystification and the Management of Affect by Dalglish Chew
    “This Great Passion for Producing”: The Affective Reversal of Brecht’s Dramatic Theory by Vidar Thorsteinsson
    Reviving the Elephant, or Cinema Plays Dead by Matthew Noble-Olson
    Improvisational Ethics: Moral Technologies in Déjà vu and Minority Report by Scott Krzych
    Going Rogue or Becoming Salmon? Geoengineering Narratives in Haida Gwaii by Zach Horton
    REVIEW ESSAY
    The History of the Devil by Laurence Rickels
    James Clifford and the Ethical Turn in Anthropology by Hoon Song
    BOOK REVIEW
    The Touch of Things. The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism by Steven Shaviro by Ian James
  • Volume 96 Contents Purchase This Issue

    Table of Contents, Volume 96

    Editorial Statement
    ARTICLES
    Life After the Subject by Christian P. Haines and Sean Grattan
    The Subject-Object of Commodity Fetishism, Biopolitics, Immortality, Sacrifice, and Bioracism by A. Kiarina Kordela
    Solon’s Ekstatic Strategy: Stasis and the Subject/Citizen by Dimitris Vardoulakis
    The Worker Subjects by Peter Hitchcock
    I Think We’re Alone Now: Solitude and the Utopian Subject in Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist by Sean Grattan
    Of Markets and Materiality: Financialization and the Limits of the Subject by Christopher Breu
    The Impersonal is Political: Adrienne Rich’s The Dream of a Common Language, Feminism, and the Art of Biopolitics by Christian P. Haines
    Who/What, Before/After: The Unrest of the Subject by Warren Montag
    REVIEW ESSAY
    Thinking at the Enlightenment’s Limit by Siraj Ahmed
    BOOK REVIEW
    Post-Cartesian Ascesis. The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject by Irving Goh. Review by Allan Stoekl.
  • Volume 95 Contents Purchase This Issue

    Table of Contents, Volume 95

    Editorial Statement
    ARTICLES
    Jokes and the Performative in Austin and Derrida; or, The Truth is a Joke by Jeffrey T. Nealon
    Indigeneity, Apartheid, Palestine: On the Transit of Political Metaphors by Mark Rifkin
    The Inaudible Nation: Music and Sensory Perception in Post-Apartheid South Africa by Gavin Steingo
    Magical Modernity: Fallacy of Affect in Ritwik Ghatak's Ajantrik by Suvadip Sinha
    The Present is a Void: Americanist Criticism, Unfinished and Half in Ruin by Matt Tierney
    Dating Markets and Love Stories: Rationality, Intuition, and Risk in Romantic Relationships Online and Offline by Nina Varsava
    Future Hospitalities by Julietta Singh
    REVIEW ESSAYS
    Sex and Negativity, or What Queer Theory Has for You [Review Essay of: Sex, or the Unbearable by Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman] Review by Robyn Wiegman.
    Why Does the West Need to Save Muslim Women? [Review Essay of: Do Muslim Women Need Saving? By Lila Abu-Lughod] Review by Mahua Sarkar.
    Announcing the End of the Film Era [Review Essay of: The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come by Francesco Casetti] Review by Dudley Andrew.
    BOOK REVIEW
    Accounting for Difference [Review of: Debt to Society: Accounting for Life Under Capitalism by Miranda Joseph] Review by Morgan Adamson.
  • Volume 94 Contents Purchase This Issue

    Table of Contents, Volume 94

    Editorial Statement
    Articles
    Restating Things, Again by John Mowitt and Cesare Casarino
    Feminism and the Abomination of Violence by Jacqueline Rose
    The Judge as Historian: Knowledge at the Limits of Doubt (A Response to Jacqueline Rose’s “Feminism and the Abomination of Violence”) by Jane Blocker
    Corpsing; or, The Matter of Black Life by David Marriott
    Masking (A Response to David Marriott’s “Corpsing; or, The Matter of Black Life”) by Paula Rabinowitz
    A View from the Side: The Natural History Museum by Jodi Dean
    Sides Views Split (A Response to Jodi Dean’s “A View from the Side”) by Tony C. Brown
    End Notes by Simona Sawhney
    Review Essays
    In the Cold Night of the Day: On Film Noir, Hitchcock, and Identity. Night Passages: Philosophy, Literature, and Film by Elisabeth Bronfen. Review by Markos Hadjioannou.
    The Perils of Comparison in Subaltern Studies and Its Critique. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital by Vivek Chibber. Review by Travis Workman.
    Book Reviews
    The “Know-Show” Function and the Uses of Evidence. Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents by Lisa Gitelman. Review by Benedict Stork.
    New Maps for the Diaspora. Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem edited by Davarian L. Baldwin and Minkah Makalani. Review by Arlene R. Keizer.
  • Volume 93 Contents Purchase This Issue

    Table of Contents, Volume 93

    Editorial
    Editorial Statment.
    Articles
    Spectral Alphabets: Photography, Necropolitics and the Marikana Massacre. Patrick Walter
    Why Does the Law Want Us To Be Normal? Schmitt’s Institutionalism and the Critique of the Liberal Legal Order. Mariano Croce and Andrea Salvatore
    Urban Guerrillas on Film: Mediatization, Guerrilla Filmmaking, and Guerrilla Seeing in Emile de Antonio’s Underground. Matt Applegate
    Hysterical Postsecularism. David Gramling
    “I Don’t Wanna Talk Anymore”: On the Queer Non-Utility of “Telephone Remake”. Robert Alford
    Review Essays
    Beyond the Death Principle: Review Essay on Marc Crépon’s The Thought of Death and the Memory of War. Jan Mieszkowski
    The Machine Is/In Us: Kelly Oliver’s Derridean Ethics: Review Essay on Technologies of Life and Death: From Cloning to Capital Punishment by Kelly Oliver. Jeff Fort
    Book Reviews
    Farred on Athletic Movement and Rest: Review of Grant Farred’s In Motion, At Rest: the Event of the Athletic Body. Kenneth Surin
    After Tragedy, Searching for Liberation: A Review of David Scott’s, Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice. Brian Meeks
    Figuring Enslavement: A Review of Tim Armstrong’s The Logic of Slavery: Debt, Technology and Pain in American Literature. Anita Rupprecht
  • Volume 92 Contents Purchase This Issue

    Table of Contents, Volume 92

    Editorial Statement
    Articles
    Missing Bodies: Disappearances in the Aesthetic. Michael Davidson
    Humanitarianism, Testimony, and the White Savior Industrial Complex: What is the What versus Kony 2012. Sean Bex and Stef Craps
    Compelling Memory: 9/11 and the Work of Mourning in Mike Bender’s Reign over Me. Esther Peeren
    In Praise of Idleness: Aging and the Morality of Inactivity. Amelia DeFalco
    Writing Lines: Agamben contra Nietzsche. Jenny Doussan
    Review Essays
    Beyond the Possible: A Review of Speculate This! Matt May and Alexander Monea
    Side Effects: Review of Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: a Public Feeling and Carol Mavor, Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida, La Jetée, Sans Soleil, and Hiroshima mon amour. Jani Scandura
    Book Reviews
    Tales and the Crypt: A Review of Imaginary Ethnographies: Literature, Culture, and Subjectivity by Gabriele Schwab. Review by Tom Cannavino
    Magic Socialism: A Review of Ángel Rama’s Writing Across Cultures: Narrative Transculturalism in Latin America. Joshua Lund
    The Geometry of Means: Dimitris Vardoulaki’s Sovereignty and Its Other: Toward a Dejustification of Violence. Ingrid Diran
  • Volume 91 Contents Purchase This Issue

    Table of Contents, Volume 91

    Special Issue: Comparative Radios
    Introduction to “Comparative Radios.” Martin Harries and Lecia Rosenthal
    Magic on the Air: Attempt at a Radio Grotesque, translated by Lisa Harries Schumann,with an Introduction by Lecia Rosenthal. Hans Flesch
    Radio/Puppets; or, The Institutionalization of a (Media) Revolution and the Afterlife of a Mexican Avant-Garde. Sarah J. Townsend
    No Transmitter: Clandestine Radio Listening Communities in Ricardo Piglia’s The Absent City. Tom McEnaney
    Voicing the Prevocal: Nathalie Sarraute’s Foray into Radio Drama. Carrie C. Landfried
    From Interiority to Intimacy: Psychoanalysis and Radio in Twentieth-Century France. Judith G. Coffin
    Radio Silence; or, On the Fritz. John Mowitt
    “Be it Resolved…” Referenda on Recent Scholarship in the Israel–Palestine Conflict. Barbara Harlow
    Through the Looking Glass. Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship by Sarah Franklin. Jessica Lee Mathiason
    Review Essays
    Hollywood, Hitler, and Historiography: Film History as Cultural Critique. Johannes von Moltke
    Book Reviews
    The Afterlives of Photography. The Echo of Things: The Lives of Photographs in the Solomon Islands by Christopher Wright. Review by Peter Kilroy
  • Volume 90 Contents Purchase This Issue

    Table of Contents, Volume 90

    A Living Man, a Clay Man: Violence, the Zombie, and the Messianic in H. Leivick’s The Golem. Simchi Cohen
    Philosophy of the Living Dead: At the Origin of the Zombie-Image. James McFarland
    Intellect and Activism: The Secular Authority of Left Behind. David Morris
    Is Modernism Really Transnational? Ulysses, New Cosmopolitanism, and the Celtic Tiger. Michael Spiegel
    Michael Brown, Ferguson, and the Ghosts of Pruitt-Igoe. Roderick Ferguson
    Street/Crime: From Rodney King’s Beating to Michael Brown’s Shooting. Paula Rabinowitz
    In the Wake. Paul Youngquist.
    Unbearable Blackness. Jared Sexton
    In the Conjuncture: For Michael Brown
    From Plessy to Ferguson. George Lipsitz
    Review Essay
    The Place of Animals in Politics: The Difficulty of Derrida’s “Political” Legacy. Nathan Snaza
    Book Reviews
    Relocating Affect in Continental Thought: Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience by Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou. Christophe Wall-Romana
  • Volume 89 Contents Purchase This Issue

    Table of Contents, Volume 89

    Editorial Statement
    Articles
    Seeding Debt: Alchemy, Death, and the Precarious Farming of Life-Finance in the Global South. Geeta Patel
    Slumdog Millionare and the Knowledge-Based Economy: Poverty as Ontology. Georgia Christinidis
    “From the Prostitute to the King”: The Corporate Form, Subsumption, and Periodization. Brynnar Swenson
    Myth and Mediation: Toward a Multitude of Pure Means. Ingrid Diran
    In the Conjuncture
    Meeting in the Hall
    From the Last Dancer. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
    “Marxism, without Guarantees”: What I Learned from Stuart Hall. Kenneth Surin
    He Made It Possible. Grant Farred
    Architectures of Imagination. Houston A. Baker Jr.
    Review Essay
    The Uneven Citizenry of Photography: Reading the “Political Ontology” of Photography from Southern Africa. Patricia Hayes
    Book Reviews
    Love and Theft at 20. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class by Eric Lott. Review by David Roediger
    For the Love of Lost Sovereignty: Egypt and Postcolonial Thought Disarming Words: Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt by Shaden M. Tageldin. Review by Sunil Agnani
    Deconstruction Beyond Itself Posthumously: For Jacques Derrida by Zsuzsa Baross. Review by Kir Kuiken
    Manifesting Globalism. After Globalization by Eric Cazdyn and Imre Szeman. Review by Graeme Stout
  • Volume 88 Contents Purchase This Issue

    Table of Contents, Volume 88

    Editorial Statement
    Messenger Bug: Ishmael Reed’s Media Virus. Madeleine Monson-Rosen
    Totality and the Common: Henri Lefebvre and Maurice Blanchot on Everyday Life. Jen Hui Bon Hoa
    Eichmann and His Ghosts: Affective States and the Unstable Status of the Human. Cynthia G. Franklin
    The Animal Anthropology of Linda Schele’s Spirits. Matthew C. Watson
    Killing Yourself to Live: Foucault, Neoliberalism, and the Autoimmunity Paradigm. Jason Maxwell
    The Impersistence of Life and Variations of Time: Prognosis, Dialectics, Mutation. The Already Dead by Eric Cazdyn. Angela Mitropoulos
    Possible Futures: Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular by Bishnupriya Ghosh. Parama Roy
    Articles
    Missing Paul Robeson in East Berlin: The Spirituals and the Empty Archive. Todd Carmody
    Book Reviews
    Reading the Sick Critic: Death, Disease, and Revolution. The Already Dead by Eric Cazdyn. Andrea Gyenge
  • Volume 87 Contents Purchase This Issue

    Table of Contents, Volume 87

    Articles
    Claude McKay and Dissident Internationalism, by Joel Nickels
    “The independence so hardly won has been maintained:” C.L.R. James and the U.S. Occupation of Haiti, by Raphael Dalleo
    Professional Intimacies: Human Rights and Specialized Bodies in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, by David Babcock
    At the Intersection of Apology and Sovereignty: The Arctic Exile Monument Project, by Pauline Wakeham
    Gaudí Gehry Barcelona, by Edgar Illas
    The Cricket’s Leap: Post-Oedipal Populism and Neoliberal Democracy in Contemporary Italy, by Ida Dominijanni
    Gangster Liberalism: The Italian Case, by Franco Berardi (Bifo)
    Italy from Berlusconi to Grillo: Kingdom Come, By Giuliano Santoro
    Indignation, Today, by Carlo Galli
    Writing Toward a Book on Proust. The Weather in Proust by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Review by Nicholas de Villiers
    In the Conjuncture
    A Specter is Haunting the World—The Specter of Populism: The Italian Case
    Book Reviews
    Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition by Yasemin Yildiz. Review by Margaret Littler
  • Volume 86 Contents Purchase This Issue

    Table of Contents, Volume 86

    Articles
    Fractured Life and the Ambiguity of Historical Time: Biopolitics in Agamben and Arendt. Anthony Curtis Adler
    Arendt, Preference and the Revolutionary Spectator. Erin Trapp
    The Breath of Life and Death. Katarina Jaworski
    Jus Sanguinis, Jus Soli: West German Citizenship Law and the Melodrama of the Guest-Worker in Fassbinder’s Angst Essen Seele Auf. Avery Slater
    No Place Like Ideology (On Slavoj Zizek): Is There a Difference Between the Theory of Ideology and the Theory of Interpretation? Petar Ramadanovic
    Outrage and the Question of minor Marxism: Eugene Holland’s Nomad Citizenship: Free Market Communism and the Slow Motion General Strike. Hans Skott-Myhre
    Book Reviews
    By Way of China. Yun Peng
  • Volume 85 Contents Purchase This Issue

    Table of Contents, Volume 85

    Articles
    Asian Performance on the Stage of American Empire in Flower Drum Song by Chang-Hee Kim
    Hospitality for Sale, or Dirty Pretty Things by Shital Pravinchandra
    Diane Gamboa’s Invasion of the Snatch: The Politics and Aesthetics of Representing Gendered Violence by Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano
    American Germ Culture: Richard Matheson, Octavia Butler, and the (Political) Science of Individuality by Laura Diehl
    Animal Frontiers: A Tale of Three Zoos in Israel/Palestine by Irus Braverman
    Rhythm and Knowledge. African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson, and the Idea of Negritude by Souleymane Bachir Diagne. Review by Frieda Ekotto
    Review Essay
    Biopolitics: From Supplement to Immanence—In Dialogue with Roberto Esposito’s Trilogy: Communitas, Immunitas, Bíos by A. Kiarina Kordela
    Book Reviews
    The Nightingale. Neither God nor Master: Robert Bresson and Radical Politics by Brian Price. Review by Matthew Stoddard
  • Volume 84 Contents Purchase This Issue

    Table of Contents, Volume 84

    Articles
    Do Not Be Afraid, Join Us, Come Back? On the "Idea of Communism" in Our Time by Nicholas Thoburn
    Ab-Using Enlightenment: Structural Adjustment, Storytelling, and the Public Use of Reason by Bishupal Limbu
    Atomic Schizophrenia: Indian Reception of the Atom Bomb Attacks in Japan, 1945 by Raminder Kaur
    Conceptualizing Christianity and Christian Nazis after the Nuremberg Trials by Michael Lackey
    Chance and Certainty: John Cage’s Politics of Nature by Benjamin Piekut
    Reverse Anthropomorphism: The Sex-Image and Ethics in Contemporary Art by Alan Singer
    Arranged Marriage: Cultural Regeneration in Transnational South Asian Popular Culture by Marian Aguiar
    Book Review
    Cruel Queer Optimism: If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past by Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed. Review by Tom Roach
  • Volume 83 Contents Purchase This Issue

    Table of Contents, Volume 83

    In Memoriam: Jochen Schulte-Sasse
    Editorial Statement
    Stalin’s Boots and the March of History (Post-Communist Memories)
    Storming the EU Fortress: Communities of Disagreement in Dubravka Ugrešić
    Sartre as Silent Partner: Reading Bhabha’s Existential Turn
    Romanticism, Culture, Collaboration: Raymond Williams beyond the Avant-Garde
    Cinema and the Drive in the Digital Age: Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema by Todd McGowan
    Articles
    A Totality of Ruins: Adorno on Kierkegaard
    Book Reviews
    Rancière’s Lost Object: Althusser’s Lesson by Jacques Rancière
  • Volume 82 Contents Purchase This Issue

    Table of Contents, Volume 82

    Articles
    The University in Crisis: Teaching, Tenure, and Transference in David Mamet’s Oleanna by Naomi Morgenstern
    Is a Financial Crisis a Trauma? by Paul Crosthwaite
    Neoliberalism and Allegory by Betty Joseph
    The Event of Cinema: Alain Badiou and Media Studies by James Tweedie
    The Worker and The Southerner: The Invention of Laziness and the Representation of Southern Europe in the Age of the Industrious Revolutions by Emanuel Rota
    Love in a Hopeless Place: Cruel Optimism by Lauren Berlant. Review by Nicholas de Villiers
    Tracking Modernity: India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility by Marian Aguiar, University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Review by Lindsey Green-Simms
    Books Received
    Book Reviews
    The Other Emerson, edited by Branka Arsić and Cary Wolfe University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Review by Laura Zebuhr.
  • Volume 81 Contents Purchase This Issue

    Table of Contents, Volume 81

    Editorial Statement
    Editorial Statement
    Articles
    José Carlos Mariátegui and the Time of Myth
    “Created in Words”: Theorizing (Postmodern) Native American Survival through Story in James Welch’s Fools Crow
    Secular Interventions/Hinduized Sovereignty: (Anti) Conversion and Religious Pluralism in Jodhaa Akbar
    Anna: the Image of India?
    The Movement against Politics
    Towards a Post-Fordist Theory of Financialization. The Violence of Financial Capitalism, new ed., by Christian Marazzi
    In the Conjuncture: The Anna Hazare Movement in India
    Anna Hazare and the Battle against Corruption
    Book Reviews
    Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking by Tim Dean
  • Volume 80 Contents Purchase This Issue

    Table of Contents, Volume 80

    Editorial Statement
    An Epoch of Rest: Roland Barthes’s “Neutral” and the Utopia of Weariness
    Noir Analysis: How Kristeva’s Detective Novels Renew Psychoanalysis
    Consider the Squirrel: Freaks, Vermin, and Value in the Ruin(s) of Nature
    Introduction
    Monster
    Human Machines and the Pains of Penmanship in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We
    From the Technique for Creating Humans to the Art of Reprogramming Hearts: Scientists, Writers, and the Genesis of China’s Modern Literary Vision
    The Human-Machine Continuum in Maoism: The Intersection of Soviet Socialist Realism, Japanese Theoretical Physics, and Chinese Revolutionary Theory
    Atomic Pop! Astro Boy, the Dialectic of Enlightenment, and Machinic Modes of Being
    Global Biotech and the Asian Nation: A Review of Asian Biotech: Ethics and Communities of Fate , Aihwa Ong and Nancy N. Chen, Eds.
    Special Section
    Desiring Human-Machines in the Soviet Union, East Asia, and the United States
    Book Reviews
    Spivak Lessons: A Review of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: In Other Words by Sangeeta Ray
  • Volume 79 Contents Purchase This Issue

    Table of Contents, Volume 79

    Race, Periphery, Reification: Speculations on “Hybridity” in Light of Gilberto Freyre’s Casa-grande & senzala
    Recentering Political Theory: The Promise of Mobile Locality
    The Novel of Universal Peace
    Rejecting Friendship: Toward a Radical Reading of Derrida’s Politics of Friendship for Today
    Foxhounds, Curs, and the Dawn of Breeding: The Discourse of Modern Human–Canine Relations
    Book Review
    Disruptive Spectatorship: A Review of The Emancipated Spectator by Jacques Rancière
  • Volume 78 Contents Purchase This Issue

    Table of Contents, Volume 78

    Editorial Statement
    Editorial Statement
    Articles
    Aesthetics and the Political: An Essay on Francis Alys’s Green Line
    Bartleyby’s Autism: Wandering along Incommunicability
    Are Your Children Old Enough to Learn about May ‘68? Recalling the Radical Event, Refracting Utopia, and Commoning Memory
    Ridiculous Trauma: Comic Representations of the Nazi Past in Contemporary German Visual Culture
    To Conquer Anonymous: Authorship and Myth in the Wu Ming Foundation
    The Signifying Professor: The Arrest of Textuality