This issue is fundamentally concerned with transitions — predominantly those in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Appropriately, we begin with a moment of contextualization through Andy Liu’s keynote address to the Marxist Literary Group’s 2022 Institute on Culture and Society. Liu’s address, entitled “A Commodity-Form Theory of Transition: On Reading Capital, Asia, and the Capitalist Epoch in the Rest of the World,” argues against an Anglocentric understanding of the origins of capitalism in favor of a more nuanced and global story. Liu writes that there are two transitions: the first being the more typical understanding of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and then a second which is “distinct” and “crucially” not a transition to but rather a transition “from within capitalism” itself. Through this lens, Liu examines both Western and global historical phenomena as they relate to the development and crisis of capitalism.

From here, the issue expands to examine further the concept of globalization itself and the historical and economic changes that the idea embodies. Anna Zalokostas traces a history of the term “globalization” from Robert Brenner’s early conceptualization of global production in the mid to late 20th century, to the term’s widespread acceptance and use around the turn of the 20th century. While the phrase itself has often come to be associated with consumerism, the Americanization of the world, and institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, its ideological origins remain in Brenner’s conception of globalized production. Accordingly, Zalokostas speaks to the influence of the economic lexicon on culture in its nascent and maturing understanding of its global position.

With this context in mind, the issue turns toward the historical novel in the era of globalization. Benjamin Crais reads Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers as a novel that takes on the “relationship of form and history as its constitutive problem.” As the historical novel itself originates from the transition into modernity, Crais is concerned with the form of the historical novel as we transition into a world after the 2008 financial crisis. Accordingly, Crais looks toward how the historical novel “stages the crisis of an inherited transitional imaginary and revolutionary horizon.”

In harmony with the proceeding articles, Josué Chávez turns to the novel’s position in an increasingly globalized world. Chávez reads Gloria Guardia’s El último juego as a novel that orients itself around the “moment of radical transformation of both American empire and the global financial order.” With this in mind, Chávez is able to read the novel not only as a critique of Panamanian society and class antagonism, but also as an aesthetic form that is made possible by developing neocolonial structures.

The issue concludes with two reviews. The first is Chris Gortmaker and Jake Burchard’s review of Totality Inside Out: Rethinking Crisis and Conflict under Capital, a collection of essays that aim to transition the concept of totality away from being about class alone, edited by Kevin Floyd, Jen Hedler Phillis, and Sarika Chandra. Gortmaker and Burchard note that the essays within Totality Inside Out aim to identify class as a “social identity” insofar as it is “an affiliative relation that, for emancipatory politics, does not have a structural primacy — and therefore a strategic priority — over ascriptive identity categories like race or gender.” The issue concludes with Davis Smith-Brecheisen’s review of Todd Cronan’s Red Aesthetics: Rodchenko, Brecht, Eisenstein. Smith-Brecheisen begins his review where Cronan does: by invoking Brecht’s “assertion that the aim of art is to provide a ‘correct representation of the world.’” It is relation to this statement, that the socialist artists whose work Cronan takes up in his book, aim to “represent” without “reproducing social relations under capital.” Smith-Brecheisen’s review encompasses, in turn, each artist as Cronan’s work does — Brecht, Rodchenko, and Eisenstein — to note the aesthetic throughline between representing the world as it is and representing the world as it might be.

Taken together, these articles and reviews constitute a significant exploration into the state of the work of art as the world transitions into a globalized economic mode. Through the engagement of economic change — and the language surrounding our ability to understand it — this issue engages with arguments concerning the formal commitment of the work of art under capital from the late 20th century to today.

Erich von Klosst–Dohna, for the Mediations Editorial Board