Response to J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, “A Structure, Not an Event: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity,” published in Lateral 5.1. Gniadek approaches settler colonialism via questions of time—asking When is settler colonialism?—which reveals how narratives of national belonging tend to operate, as narrative confrontations that facilitate violence throughout and across time.
Issues
Thinking with Melissa Gniadek and Beenash Jafri
In “The Times of Settler Colonialism,” Melissa Gniadek urges me to go beyond the formulation of settler colonialism conceived as a problem of space. She pushes to further consider how Wolfe’s theorization of settler colonialism as structure (not an isolated episode) to examine “not only how histories of invasion do not stop, but also how…
Exploring the Promise of New Materialisms
Response to Kyla Wazana Tompkins, “On the Limits and Promise of New Materialist Philosophy,” published in Lateral 5.1. Shomura mediates upon the promise and possibilities that new materialisms affords in its attentiveness to the material.
Rematerializations of Race
Response to Kyla Wazana Tompkins, “On the Limits and Promise of New Materialist Philosophy,” published in Lateral 5.1. Huang reassesses the methodological implications of new materialisms by grappling with renewed attention to form in literary studies to articulate the varying processes by which racial difference becomes elided, rematerialized, and remade.
Response to Michelle N. Huang and Chad Shomura
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…
Critical Disability Studies as Methodology
Response to Julie Avril Minich, “Enabling Whom? Critical Disability Studies Now,” published in Lateral 5.1. Schalk calls for a shift in thinking that directly affects action and discusses creating classroom experiences that help students to critique intersecting social structures in their everyday encounters.
Toward a Crip-of-Color Critique: Thinking with Minich’s “Enabling Whom?”
Response to Julie Avril Minich, “Enabling Whom? Critical Disability Studies Now,” published in Lateral 5.1. Kim elaborates upon a crip-of-color critique, which has possibilities to both criticize structures that inherently devalue humans and to take action to work toward justice. Kim’s final call is to identify and act against the inequalities and harm of academic labor, urging readers to take seriously a “politics of refusal” that might help academics of color survive through alternative collectivities.
Thinking with Jina B. Kim and Sami Schalk
It is an honor and a privilege to read these careful and insightful responses to my provocation by Jina B. Kim and Sami Schalk, two intellectuals whose body of work, in my estimation, demonstrates exactly the kind of critical engagement I had in mind when I proposed the idea of critical disability studies as methodology…
The Contexts of Critique: Para-Institutions & the Multiple Lives of Institutionality in the Neoliberal University
Response to Jodi Melamed, “Proceduralism, Predisposing, Poesis: Forms of Institutionality, In the Making,” published in Lateral 5.1. Tabares invites us to question the role of what he calls ‘para-institutions,’ such as corporations, in shaping and influencing the logics and investments within the university. As a counterpoint to these processes, he ponders the possibilities of seizing upon the elements of proceduralism in mobilizing forms of collectivity that can span across institutional contexts outside the academy.
Neoliberalism, Racial Capitalism, and Liberal Democracy: Challenging an Emergent Critical Analytic
Response to Jodi Melamed, “Proceduralism, Predisposing, Poesis: Forms of Institutionality, In the Making,” published in Lateral 5.1. Aho pointedly argues that studies of institutionality all too often substantiate what she calls neoliberalocentrism, which readily posits neoliberalism as the singular paradigm into narrating a teleological development of history. Instead, she echoes Kim and Schalk to articulate ‘crip-of-color materialism’ as an analytic that thickens understandings about global structures of inequity and fissures within them.
Response to Tanja Aho and Leland Tabares: Madness and Parainstitutionality
Tanja Aho’s response both criticizes a scholarly trend she identifies as “neoliberalcentrist analytics” for presuming neoliberalism’s homogeny, hegemony, and totality and introduces a new critical analytic, “crip of color materialism,” which Aho describes as “the convergence of a historical materialist critical disability studies/crip theory/mad studies with critical race theory and queer of color critique.” This…
Review of Hegemony, Mass Media, and Cultural Studies: Properties of Meaning, Power, and Value in Cultural Production by Sean Johnson Andrews (Rowman & Littlefield)
Sean Johnson Andrews has produced an engaging text of multifaceted value. His work, particularly the opening chapters, provides a concise history of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), the (early) Frankfurt School Critical Theory, and the Political Economy of Communication (PEC). Although the histories and notable figureheads of these schools will be broadly familiar to most scholars working in the realm of cultural studies, these opening chapters would be an excellent introduction to the field for either a general readership or students. Indeed, this would make a good textbook in many contexts.
Review of Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction by André M. Carrington (University of Minnesota Press)
André Carrington’s ‘Speculative Blackness’ is a novel approach to the consumption of race representation in media. Carrington explores how Blackness is manufactured, consumed, and transformed through the speculative fiction genre across multiple 20th and 21st century mediums. Traditional media of comic books and television shows reveal the marginalized status of Black figures however, these media do not exist in a vacuum. The consumption of speculative fiction is a transformative process for the original content, which consequentially produces amateur media due to a long-established history of fan interaction. Black representation is characterized as the exception, not the rule, in traditional production, but fan consumption reconfigures these notions. Ultimately, Carrington’s work is an innovative dialogue regarding a genre that creates worlds speculating on what could be. Speculative fiction breaks down preexisting notions of our reality and creates worlds with entirely new expectations and interactions. With the creative liberty of the genre, Carrington casts Black representation as a consumed media but also an imaginative effort.
Review of Dispossession: The Performative in the Political by Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou (Polity)
“Dispossession: The Performative in the Political” is an interdisciplinary cultural text published from the conversations between Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou. “Dispossession” brings the reader to key questions within philosophical inquiry including: What does it mean to be human? Which bodies are vulnerable as a result of normalizing regimes? How does precarity shift over time? What does occupation mean in regards to discipline and resistance? Which bodies are allowed to have a place and what does demanding a place do to dislocated bodies? Can non-normative people be recognized by the state without incorporation to propriety politics? How is agency complicated by the inter-related nature of life in the everyday?
Review of After Art by David Joselit (Princeton)
David Joselit’s slim volume “After Art” offers multiple intriguing frameworks to analyze art in the present-day globalized art world. After Art backs away from the traditional approach of artist intent and production and looks at what happens to images once they are attached to the networks that circulate them. Instead of proselytizing individual or even original artworks, Joselit champions images that are constantly reproduced and remediated by artists and architects such as Tania Bruguera, Ai Weiwei, Sherrie Levine, Matthew Barney, Le Corbusier, and Rem Koolhaus.