In Around the Day in Eighty Worlds Martin Savransky calls for a radical politics of the pluriverse amid the ongoing devastation of the present. Responding to an epoch marked by the history of colonialism and ecological devastation, Savransky draws on the pragmatic pluralism of William James to develop what Savransky calls a "pluralistic ......
In Art to Come Terry Smith-who is widely recognized as one of the world's leading historians and theorists of contemporary art-traces the emergence of contemporary art and further develops his concept of contemporaneity. Smith shows that embracing contemporaneity as both a historical concept and a condition of the globalized world allows us to ......
Centering his analysis in the dynamic forces of modern East Asian history, Kuan-Hsing Chen recasts cultural studies as a politically urgent global endeavor. He argues that the intellectual and subjective work of decolonization begun across East Asia after the Second World War was stalled by the cold war. At the same time, the work of ......
Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable
Advances in LGBTQ rights in the recent past-marriage equality, the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and the expansion of hate crimes legislation-have been accompanied by a rise in attacks against trans, queer and/or gender-nonconforming people of color. In Atmospheres of Violence, theorist and organizer Eric A. Stanley shows how this seeming ......
In Authoring Autism M. Remi Yergeau defines neurodivergence as an identity-neuroqueerness-rather than an impairment. Using a queer theory framework, Yergeau notes the stereotypes that deny autistic people their humanity and the chance to define themselves while also challenging cognitive studies scholarship and its reification of the neurological ......
Long awaited after No Future, and making queer theory controversial again, Lee Edelman's Bad Education proposes a queerness without positive identity-a queerness understood as a figural name for the void, itself unnamable, around which the social order takes shape. Like Blackness, woman, incest, and sex, queerness, as Edelman explains it, ......
In Becoming Undone, Elizabeth Grosz addresses three related concepts-life, politics, and art-by exploring the implications of Charles Darwin's account of the evolution of species. Challenging characterizations of Darwin's work as a form of genetic determinism, Grosz shows that his writing reveals an insistence on the difference between natural ......
Between the early 1950s and the accelerated demolition and construction of Beijing's "old city" in preparation for the 2008 Olympics, the residents of Dashalar-one of the capital city's poorest neighborhoods and only a stone's throw from Tian'anmen Square-lived in dilapidated conditions without sanitation. Few had stable employment. Today, most of ......
Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism
In Between Gaia and Ground Elizabeth A. Povinelli theorizes the climatic, environmental, viral, and social catastrophe present as an ancestral catastrophe through which that Indigenous and colonized peoples have been suffering for centuries. In this way, the violence and philosophies the West relies on now threaten the West itself. Engaging with ......
