Agents of change

Reivew of Lilia D. Monzó, A Revolutionary Subject: Pedagogy of Women of Color and Indigeneity
Lilia D. Monzó, A Revolutionary Subject: Pedagogy of Women of Color and Indigeneity (New York: Peter Lang, 2019). 290pp., £95.59 hb., £36.74 pb., 978 1 43313 407 4 hb., 978 1 43313 406 7 pb. History is usually taught through a white, Eurocentric, male lens, erasing the contributions of women. Women of Colour and Indigenous […]

Ruined resentments

Reivew of Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism
Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). 264pp., £62.00hb., £22.00 pb., 978 0 23155 053 6 hb., 978 0 23119 385 6 pb. Wendy Brown has been one of the foremost critical theorists and political commentators on the left since the […]

The Logic of Critical Theory

Reivew of Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Realm of Shadows
Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Realm of Shadows: Logic as Metaphysics in The Science of Logic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019). 322pp., £34.00 hb., £24.00 pb., 978 0 22658 870 4 hb., 978 0 22670 341 1 pb. In one of Lenin’s most famous lines, he notes that ‘it is impossible to understand Marx’s Capital […]

Discriminatory data

Reivew of Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology
Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019). 172pp., £60.00 hb., £14.99 pb., 978 1 50952 639 0 hb., 978 1 50952 640 4 pb. If you’ve ever listened to Pod Save America, the voice of centrist Democratic politics presented by a crew of former Obama staff, […]

Revolutions of the past and future

Reivew of Rachel Douglas, Making The Black Jacobins
Rachel Douglas, Making The Black Jacobins: C. L. R. James and the Drama of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). 320pp., £83.00 hb., £20.99 pb., 978 1 47800 427 1 hb., 978 1 47800 487 5 pb. In the same way that there are poets’ poets and communists’ communists, Rachel Douglas is a C.L.R. […]

Tools for a political psychiatry

Reivew of Frantz Fanon, Alienation and Freedom
Frantz Fanon, Alienation and Freedom, eds. Jean Khalfa and Robert J. C. Young, trans. Stephen Corcoran (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 816pp., £30.00 hb., 978 1 47425 021 4 It is often taken for granted in the psychiatric field that the time for contestation has passed. Terms like ‘anti-psychiatry’ and ‘institutional therapy’, as well as discussions of […]

Witchcraft and magic among the Marxists

Reivew of Paul Mattick, Theory as Critique; Paul Mattick, Social Knowledge
Paul Mattick, Theory as Critique: Essays on Capital (Leiden: Brill, 2018; Chicago: Haymarket, 2019). 288pp., £110.00 hb., £19.99 pb., 978 9 00436 656 5 hb., 978 1 64259 013 5 pb. Paul Mattick, Social Knowledge: An Essay on the Nature and Limits of Social Science (Leiden: Brill, 2020). 142pp., £86.00 hb, 978 9 00441 480 […]

Cleaning artefacts

Reivew of Dan Kidner and Alex Sainsbury eds., Nightcleaners & ’36 to ’77
Dan Kidner and Alex Sainsbury, eds., Nightcleaners and ’36 to ’77 (London: Raven Row, LUX and Koenig Books, 2018). Box-set containing two books (214pp.) and two DVDs/Blu-Rays. £24.00, 978 3 96098 381 1 From campaign film to experiment in documentary representation, and from exemplary instance of anti-realist and self-reflexive ‘Brechtian’ counter cinema (according to some […]

Human rights in a wrong world

Reivew of Ratna Kapur, Gender, Alterity and Human Rights
Ratna Kapur, Gender, Alterity and Human Rights: Freedom in a Fishbowl (Cheltenham and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018). 307pp., £90.00 hb., £19.95 pb., 978 1 78811 252 9 hb., 978 1 83910 447 3 pb. Over the past few decades, various critical scholars have emphasised the limitations of human rights. Such scholars have, for […]

Racial properties of colonial appropriation

Reivew of Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property
Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). 272pp., £80.00 hb., £20.99 pb., 978 0 82237 139 7 hb., 978 0 82237 146 5 pb. Brenna Bhandar’s Colonial Lives of Property is a significant intervention into contemporary debates on empire, the property relation, imperial […]

From organic subjectivity to internal reality

Reivew of Michel Henry, Marx: An Introduction
Michel Henry, Marx: An Introduction, trans. Kristien Justaert (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). 101pp., £50.00 hb., £12.99 pb., 978 1 47426 942 1 hb., 978 1 47427 778 5 pb. As a phenomenologist who prioritises the ‘appearing’ of life, Michel Henry distinguishes the foundational content of subjectivity from the horizon of pure exteriority and inert appearances. […]

Theory of the workaround

Reivew of Amit S. Rai, Jugaad Time
Amit S. Rai, Jugaad Time: Ecologies of Everyday Hacking in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). 208pp., £79.00 hb., £18.99 pb., 978 1 47800 110 2 hb., 978 1 47800 146 1 pb. In Amit S. Rai’s Jugaad Time, the Delhi-based freelance music manager Renu tells her interviewer proudly that jugaad is ‘our [i.e. […]

Unstable histories

Reivew of Lucas Richert, Break on Through: Radical Psychiatry and the American Counterculture
Lucas Richert, Break on Through: Radical Psychiatry and the American Counterculture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019). 224pp., £22.00 hb., 978 0 26204 282 6 In May 1969, in the plush surroundings of Miami’s Americana Hotel, the ordinarily staid annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) became the flashpoint for a standoff which had been […]

Ontology for edgelords

Reivew of Andrea Long Chu, Females
Andrea Long Chu, Females (London: Verso, 2019), 112pp., £7.99 pb., 978 1 78877 737 1 In a dialogue published in the Transgender Studies Quarterly last year, Andrea Long Chu declared the death of trans studies. In her words, the discipline produces nothing but ‘warmed over pieties’ about sex and gender, devoid of any ‘true disagreement’ […]

Symbols and spirits

Reivew of Erich Hörl, Sacred Channels
Erich Hörl, Sacred Channels: The Archaic Illusion of Communication, trans. Nils F. Schott (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018). 344pp., € 52,95 pb., 978 90 8964 770 2 Originally published in German in 2004, Sacred Channels: The Archaic Illusion of Communication, Erich Hörl’s unorthodox genealogy of thinking about thinking, is now available to readers in English. […]

Reformist radicalism

Reivew of Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism
Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (London: Verso, 2018). 112pp., £10.99 hb., £9.99 pb., 978 1 78663 755 0 hb., 978 1 78663 756 7 pb. Despite its present ubiquity, the term ‘populism’ remains ambiguous. Does populism describe a set of radically democratic demands, or the appeal to an exclusive society predicated on sameness? Can […]
Occupy Wall Street protestors

Decolonisation and deconstruction

Reivew of Abdelkebir Khatibi, Plural Maghreb
Abdelkebir Khatibi, Plural Maghreb: Writings on Postcolonialism, trans. P. Burcu Yalim (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). 197pp., £24.29 pb. 978 1 35005 395 3 Abdelkebir Khatibi’s collection of essays was first published in French in 1983 as Maghreb Pluriel. It comprises six essays originally published between (roughly) 1970 and 1982 in various venues. The first three essays […]

Fully automated luxury barbarism

Reivew of Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism
Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto (London: Verso, 2019). 288pp., £16.99 hb., 978 1 78663 262 3 ‘This is not a book about the future but about a present that goes unacknowledged’, Aaron Bastani writes in Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Bastani does not set out to describe what an ideal communist society would […]
Orange Julep, Route 9, Plattsburgh, New York

Critical universalism

Reivew of Franziska Dubgen and Stefan Skupien, Paulin Hountondji: African Philosophy as Critical Universalism
Franziska Dubgen and Stefan Skupien, Paulin Hountondji: African Philosophy as Critical Universalism (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). 192pp., €67,62 hb., 978 3 03001 994 5 During the extraordinarily intense debates on the future trajectory of modern African philosophy at the dawn of African independence, Paulin J. Hountondji, along with the likes of Kwasi Wiredu in […]

Border crossings

Reivew of Brigitta Kuster, Grenze filmen
Brigitta Kuster, Grenze filmen. Eine kulturwissenschaftliche Analyse audiovisueller Produktionen an der Grenze Europas (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2018). 344pp., € 29,99, 978 3 83763 981 0 ‘We did not cross the border, the border crossed us’. So say the migrant activists at the Mexican-US-American border. The categorisation of migration and the individual migrant does not exist […]

The presence of the past

Reivew of Chris Moffat, India's Revolutionary Inheritance
Chris Moffat, India’s Revolutionary Inheritance: Politics and the Promise of Bhagat Singh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 238pp., £75.00 hb., 978 1 10849 690 2 The twin defeats marked by the disappearance of the dreams of the late 1960s and the demise of the Soviet Union unanchored the Left from much of the certainty that […]