I am very grateful to Michelle N. Huang and Chad Shomura for their extensive engagement with my short and rather off-the-cuff thoughts on the limits and possibilities of new materialism. Their detailed and thoughtful responses extend and flesh out the work that I started to do in my original essay, taking my bullet-pointed aggravation with…
Articles by Kyla Wazana Tompkins
Kyla Wazana Tompkins is Associate Professor of English and Gender and Women's studies at Pomona College. She is the author of Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century (NYU Press, 2012) which won the Lora Romero prize for best first book in American Studies and the Best Book Award from the Association for the Study of Food and Society.
On the Limits and Promise of New Materialist Philosophy
Kyla Wazana Tompkins questions the structures informing claims of newness posed by discussions of “New Materialism.” She discusses the troubling ways in which these discourses, in turning toward the post- or non-human, can ironically reinforce assumptions about a universal human subject and elide considerations of gender, race, and power.