{"title":"\"Statues Made of Sugar\": Martí, Monuments, and Hemispheric Ventriloquism","authors":"Juliet Hooker","doi":"10.1353/tae.2024.a925043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2024.a925043","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Monuments speak; they shape citizens' political imaginations. Drawing on an essay by the Cuban intellectual José Martí about Confederate commemoration, I argue that his Confederate solidarities were the result of hemispheric ventriloquism. Widely lauded as an anti-imperial and anti-racist thinker, Martí's hemispheric ventriloquism was driven by: 1) fears of US imperial expansion; 2) a need to rebut critiques of republics as inherently unstable forms of government in light of post-independence civil strife in Latin America; and 3) his hopes for Cuban national unity post-independence. Martí's hemispheric ventriloquism illustrates the dangers of downplaying racist commemoration in the name of liberal pluralism or national unity.","PeriodicalId":176857,"journal":{"name":"Theory & Event","volume":"56 8","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140759322","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rethinking Utopia as Form: Failure, Time, and the Political Subject of Anti-Capitalism","authors":"Kelly E. Happe","doi":"10.1353/tae.2024.a925042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2024.a925042","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This essay theorizes utopianism as distinct from radical or revolutionary action and so capable of instantiating a desire for a world so different it cannot be represented. Asking whether \"failure\" is in fact a productive condition of possibility for utopianism, the essay considers a number of theoretical interventions including those of Fredric Jameson and Kathi Weeks. Drawing out the benefits and limits of these perspectives, the essay articulates utopianism's features and offers the demand for prison abolition as an example. Not only does this demand confront the impossibility of a different world, but it draws on the potentiality of past political agency and so posits what occupying the \"no place\" of utopia can be for those who have historically been denied the very temporalities upon which utopia has traditionally relied.","PeriodicalId":176857,"journal":{"name":"Theory & Event","volume":"216 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140781709","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Misbegotten Critique of the Model Minority Myth","authors":"Claire Kim","doi":"10.1353/tae.2024.a925045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2024.a925045","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: I argue in this article that Asian Americanists' standard critique of the \"model minority myth\" does more harm than good and should therefore be abandoned. I show that the critique misses the forest for the trees, disavowing structural anti-Blackness and the differentiated positioning of Asian Americans and Black people that it produces, thereby misconceiving the stakes and function of model minority discourse. What I offer here, then, is a critique of the critique of model minority discourse—as well as suggestions for how to re-assess such discourse in relation to anti-Blackness.","PeriodicalId":176857,"journal":{"name":"Theory & Event","volume":"65 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140794255","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Genealogy of Species as a Limit-Concept","authors":"Ingrid Diran","doi":"10.1353/tae.2024.a925041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2024.a925041","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This essay problematizes \"species\" at a moment when this concept has become ubiquitous in and indispensable to ecological thought. Through a reading of Dipesh Chakrabarty and Alexandre Kojève—who, I argue, is a key precursor of Chakrabarty's thought—I show how \"species\" sits in dialectical tension with the category of the \"human,\" and argue that while the latter has been thoroughly problematized across fields, its dialectical relation to \"species\" has not. I thus attend to \"species\" as an anthropological \"limit-concept,\" illuminating how this term has been constructed as an antithesis to the historical human that is itself constitutively without history and without speech. I not only question this assumption, but, via genealogy, also trace it back to a colonial matrix that makes clear the ways in which anti-Blackness modulates this dialectic between \"human\" and \"species,\" consigning Black subjects to the position of the specimen. In genealogical perspective, moreover, one sees that the \"species\" limit-concept also includes a decolonial counter-analytic, which I locate in the work of Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter. Both thinkers trouble \"species\" as a category of racialized experience, proposing, in turn, that those forced to inhabit \"species\" might also interrupt its production of the human as Man. When the movement of the anthropological dialectic is stalled, I claim, it appears now as a material image, an insurgent visuality. Ultimately, then, I contend that critical attention to the history of the (de-historicized and de-historicizing) concept of \"species\" and to the role of race within it enables us to see our ecological conjuncture otherwise. Deepening our engagement with this history can help us understand what this category has done to the myriad others-to-Man to whom it is addressed, and what they have done in response.","PeriodicalId":176857,"journal":{"name":"Theory & Event","volume":"429 24","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140780489","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Owning the Libs: The Contemporary Politics of Envy","authors":"Paul Johnson","doi":"10.1353/tae.2024.a925044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2024.a925044","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This essay defines Owning the Libs (OTL), a logic of envy, characterized by a subject's need to both deny another enjoyment and to frustrate the capacity of these political opponents to live. My case studies focus on reactions to progressive protests in the post-Ferguson environment. OTL is not downstream of some cultural war nor an exotic right-wing, illiberal phenomenon. Situating personhood in the tradition of violent dispossession, I illuminate the practice's liberal roots, before concluding OTL will be (if it is not already) US conservatism's policy agenda, and an existential threat to progressive agitation.","PeriodicalId":176857,"journal":{"name":"Theory & Event","volume":"58 43","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140795678","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Deleuze and Guattari on the French Revolution: Problems, Universal Minority, and the Bourgeoisie","authors":"Alex Underwood","doi":"10.1353/tae.2024.a925046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2024.a925046","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This article explores Deleuze and Guattari's theory of revolution in light of their comments on the French Revolution and intersection with the work of Marx. I argue that Deleuze associates revolution with a reformulation of the \"problems\" that condition experience, something Deleuze and Guattari then complicate through their insistence that institutional practice remain subject to the unfolding of an \"indeterminate\" yet collective revolutionary identity. I argue that the most important aspect of their theory for contemporary political thought is its argument for the necessity of uniting disparate forms of political experimentation without introducing institutions grounded in general conceptions of the subject, and conclude by discussing the emphasis they place on overcoming the \"cogito of communication,\" a discursive \"subject in general\" essential to contemporary capitalist democracies.","PeriodicalId":176857,"journal":{"name":"Theory & Event","volume":"137 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140791979","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"What is the good of the avant-garde?\": On Grant Kester's Beyond the Sovereign Self","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/tae.2024.a925049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2024.a925049","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":176857,"journal":{"name":"Theory & Event","volume":"104 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140768021","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Essaying Collective Life: Review of Benjamin P. Davis's Simone Weil's Political Philosophy","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/tae.2024.a925047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2024.a925047","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":176857,"journal":{"name":"Theory & Event","volume":"180 20","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140793852","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Warts and All: Exploring Imperfect Politics with Carolyn Eichner's Feminism's Empire","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/tae.2024.a925048","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2024.a925048","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":176857,"journal":{"name":"Theory & Event","volume":"55 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140766225","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The 2022 Neal A. Maxwell Lecture in Political Theory and Contemporary Politics","authors":"Steven Johnston","doi":"10.1353/tae.2024.a917794","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.2024.a917794","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":176857,"journal":{"name":"Theory & Event","volume":"105 9","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139538305","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}