Contributors

"Words are Things": The Settler Colonial Politics of Post-Humanist Materialism in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian by W. Oliver Baker

Via a reading of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and a critical appraisal of Foucault’s break with historical materialism, W. Oliver Baker finds, at the limits of the new materialisms, space for a new post-humanist critical materialism that sees utopia not in post-human assemblages, but in the abolition of colonial and capitalist structures that condition those assemblages in the first place.

Westworld: Ideology, Simulation, Spectacle by Larry Alan Busk

Is ideology critique equipped to handle the hyperreal? Larry Alan Busk analyzes Michael Crichton’s 1973 film Westworld as a symptom of the ideological complexity of the current political and cultural conjuncture.

On Raymond Williams: Complexity, Immanence, and the Long Revolution by Daniel Hartley

Daniel Hartley argues for the relevance of Raymond Williams’s work to the contemporary moment by reconstructing the systemic unity that runs through Williams’s thought. This ground-clearing exercise, Hartley argues, is necessary not only to restoring the urgency of Williams’s work, but to intervening critically in a moment of contemporary crisis.

The Makings of a Heroic Mistake: Richard Wright’s “Bright and Morning Star,” Communism, and the Contradictions of Emergent Subjectivity by Joseph G. Ramsey

Joseph G. Ramsey argues that Richard Wright’s 1940 novella “Bright and Morning Star” has been consistently misunderstood. What has been almost universally read as a narrative of communist heroism stages instead a heroic mistake. “Bright and Morning Star” is not a story primarily about heroic individual sacrifice, but about the ways collective struggle can fail.

Book Reviews

The Task of the Inheritor by Matthew Gannon

What does it mean to inherit the work of Walter Benjamin? Matthew Gannon reviews Gerhard Richter’s Inheriting Walter Benjamin.

Review of Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature by Ruth Jennison

Ruth Jennison reviews ambitious work from the Warwick Research Collective.

Did Critique Become a Thing? by George Porter Thomas

George Porter Thomas reviews Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique.