Campus Book Sale October 17

We are very excited to host our very first campus book sale next Thursday, October 17. We will be set up on the Bryan Center Plaza on Duke University’s West Campus from 10 am until 4 pm.

Books will be deeply discounted, as low as $1 each! The sale is open to the public. We will be accepting credit and debit cards only, no cash.

You can find information about parking on campus here. In case of rain, we will relocate the sale to our offices at Brightleaf Square’s North Building at 905 W. Main Street, Suite 18B in Durham.

We’re excited to meet our North Carolina customers in person and hope to see you next week!

2025 Met Gala and Exhibition Inspired by Monica L. Miller’s Slaves to Fashion

The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced today that the Costume Institute’s spring 2025 exhibition will present a cultural and historical examination of the Black dandy, from the figure’s emergence in Enlightenment Europe during the 18th century to today’s incarnations in cities around the world. Entitled Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, the exhibition is inspired by Monica L. Miller’s 2009 book Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity. Miller, Professor of Africana Studies at Barnard University, will serve as guest curator for the exhibition. She will be the first Black curator of a Costume Institute exhibition.

Superfine is also Met’s first fashion exhibition to focus solely on the work of designers of color, as well as the first in more than two decades to focus explicitly on men’s wear. Miller told the Washington Post, “It’s a big moment for the country. For acknowledging where we are and where we want to be. … We’re at a crossroads as we think through what it means for all of us to be here together. I’m happy that we can talk about complicated history, about slavery, and revolution.” She told the New York Times that the show is “an opportunity for everyone on the curatorial team to really understand how many Black designers, historically and contemporarily, are out there.”

Slaves to Fashion is a pioneering cultural history of the black dandy, from his emergence in Enlightenment England to his contemporary incarnations in the cosmopolitan art worlds of London and New York. Interpreting performances and representations of black dandyism in particular cultural settings and literary and visual texts, Monica L. Miller emphasizes the importance of sartorial style to black identity formation in the Atlantic diaspora. It was widely praised when it was published by general interest and scholarly publications alike. The beautiful cover image is a detail from “Yellow Book” by Iké Udé from Yellow Book and Savoy Covers: Make Life Beautiful! An informal introduction to the Dandy in Photography, 2003. It was used courtesy of Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, England, and Stux Gallery, New York.

The annual Met Gala, held the first Monday in May, will also highlight the Superfine theme of Black dandyism and will be co-chaired by Colman Domingo, Lewis Hamilton, A$AP Rocky, Pharrell Williams, and Anna Wintour, along with honorary co-chair LeBron James. Perhaps they’d like to carry copies of Slaves to Fashion down the red carpet?

Soldier’s Paradise: The Weekly Read

The Weekly Read is Soldier’s Paradise: Militarism in Africa after Empire by Samuel Fury Childs Daly. The book tell the history of how Africa’s postcolonial military regimes tried and ultimately failed to transform their societies into martial utopias. Luise White, author of Fighting and Writing: The Rhodesian Army at War and Postwar, writes, “Samuel Fury Childs Daly’s keen eye and steady hand push aside the conventional wisdom about military coups in Africa to show how military rule relied on courts to enforce the discipline that soldiers believed Nigeria needed. The rule of law and the rule of guns were not always an easy fit, but the space between them allowed for debate and dissent, most powerfully in the (literal) show trial of Fela Kuti.” Samuel Fury Childs Daly is Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago and author of A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War. This title is made open-access due to funding from the University of Chicago.

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.

New Titles for Hispanic Heritage Month

Hispanic Heritage Month takes place from September 15th to October 15th, and celebrates the generations of Hispanic Americans who have positively influenced and enriched our nation and society. As the month comes to a close, we present some of our new and upcoming titles in Latinx studies to celebrate!

Offering a poetic-theoretical inquiry into the entwinement of study and mourning, Left Turns in Brown Study by Sandra Ruiz proposes “brown study” as key for understanding how Brownness fundamentally harbors loss, mourning, and suffering and the potential for emancipatory living.

In Made in NuYoRico, Marisol Negrón tells the cultural history of salsa over a fifty-year period that begins in 1964, showing how salsa became embedded in Nuyorican identity among New York City’s poor and working-class diasporic Puerto Rican population.

Fitness Fiesta! by Petra R. Rivera-Rideau analyzes how Zumba Fitness—an exercise program that draws from Latin music and dance—creates and sells a vision of Latinness that’s tropical, hypersexual, and party-loving.

Iván Chaar López argues that the United States uses a combination of drone, surveillance, and informational technologies to protect the US-Mexico border in ways that mark border crossers as racialized others that must be policed in The Cybernetic Border.

Barbara Andrea Sostaita looks closely at the Sonoran Desert along the U.S.-Mexico border in Sanctuary Everywhere, reconceptualizing sanctuary not as a particular place such as a church but as a fugitive practice.

In Excited Delirium, Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús examines the emergence of “excited delirium syndrome” in the 1980s, a fabricated medical diagnosis used to justify and erase police violence against Black and Brown communities in the United States.

Jennifer R. Nájera explores the intersections of education and activism among undocumented college students in Learning to Lead, showing how they build political consciousness and learn to become leaders.

Check out all our great titles in Chicanx and Latinx studies here!

Congratulations to the 2024 MacArthur Fellows

Congratulations to the 2024 MacArthur “Genius” Fellows. We are thrilled that author Jennifer L. Morgan, editor Ruha Benjamin, and contributors Dorothy Roberts, Shailaja Paik, Ebony G. Patterson, and Juan Felipe Herrera were selected for the honor.

Jennifer L. Morgan is the author of Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (2021), which draws on the lived experiences of enslaved African women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to reveal the contours of early modern notions of trade, race, and commodification in the Black Atlantic. Read the introduction to the book for free here. The Journal of Early American History said the book “sets a new bar for historians of the early modern era and of Western modernity” and The MacArthur Foundation writes, “Morgan has established gender as pivotal to slavery’s institutionalization in colonial America, and her attention to the full ramifications of slavery for Black women sheds light on the origins of harmful stereotypes about Black kinship and families that endure to this day.

Watch Jennifer Morgan speak about her work:

Ruha Benjamin is editor of Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life (2019), a collection that examines how carceral technologies such as electronic ankle monitors and predictive-policing algorithms are being deployed to classify and coerce specific populations and whether these innovations can be resisted and reimagined for more liberatory ends. Read her introduction to the collection here. The MacArthur Foundation says, “Benjamin deepens our understanding of the dangers that technological advancements pose to vulnerable populations while reimagining what counts as innovation and who gets to shape our collective future.”

Watch Benjamin speak about her work:

Several other awardees have contributed to our books and journals, and to honor their achievement and allow everyone to become more familiar with their work, we’ve made their chapters and articles free through October 31, 2024.

Dorothy Roberts is the co-author of several book chapters: “Taking Race Out of Human Genetics Engaging a Century-Long Debate about the Role of Race in Science” in The Social Medicine Reader, Volume II, Third Edition: Differences and Inequalities (2019); “Feminism, Race, and Adoption Policy” in  Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology (2016); and “Margaret Sanger and the Racial Origins of the Birth Control Movement” in Racially Writing the Republic (2009).

Artist Ebony G. Patterson contributed a chapter entitled “the Of 72 Project,” to the journal Small Axe. We also used her work on the covers of Krista A. Thompson’s book Shine (2015) and Citizenship from Below by Mimi Sheller (2012).

Juan Felipe Herrera contributed a poem entitled “187 Reasons Why Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border (Remix)” to the book Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology (2019).

Shailaja Paik is the author of the chapter “Bhimsen Gaikwad: Singer of Justice” in Bombay Brokers (2021) and a book review of “To Be Cared For: The Power of Conversion and Foreignness of Belonging in an Indian Slum” in the Journal of Asian Studies (2020).

The MacArthur Fellowship aims to identify extraordinarily creative individuals with a track record of excellence in a field of scholarship or area of practice, who demonstrate the ability to impact society in significant and beneficial ways through their pioneering work or the rigor of their contributions. We are thrilled to have published the work of such dynamic scholars and send them all our heartfelt congratulations.

New Books in October

As the fall season is rolls in, curl up with a new book! Check out all of our October new releases.

In Five Banners, legendary sports journalist John Feinstein tells the inside history of Duke’s five NCAA championships set against the arc of Coach Mike Krzyzewski’s forty-two-year Duke career.

Drawing on Western and Chinese social theory and practice, The Book of Politics by Michael Dutton, offers an affective theorization of the political and a political theorization of affect that rethinks politics in the contemporary world.

In Visual Disobedience, Kency Cornejo traces the emergence of new artistic strategies for Indigenous feminist resistance in the wake of torture, disappearance, killings, and US-funded civil wars in Central America.

The critics, scholars, curators, artists, and filmmakers in Your History With Me, edited by Sarah Nuttall, examine the films of Penny Siopis, showing how they remake the possibility of film as a mode of experimentation and intervention.

Eating Is an English Word by Annemarie Mol explores ways of appreciating eating, with the authors using lessons from their first language, even when writing in English—thus mixing us and them.

In All of Us or None, Monisha Das Gupta tells the story of contemporary antideportation organizing in the United States by migrants and refugees labeled as criminal aliens who conceptualize immigrant rights as an abolitionist vision of migration justice that rejects the settler state and encompasses all those who are disavowed.

Focusing on the art of Renée Stout, Radcliffe Bailey, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Grime, Glitter, and Glass by Nikki A. Greene examines how Black visual artists use sonic elements to refigure the formal and philosophical developments of Black art and culture.

In The Suicide Archive, Doyle D. Calhoun charts a long history of suicidal resistance to French colonialism and postcolonialism through African and Afro-Caribbean literature, film, and oral histories.

Daughter, Mother, Grandmother, and Whore, translated by Meg Weeks, is the fascinating memoir of Brazilian sex worker and activist Gabriela Leite, who was a pioneering figure in organizing for sex workers’ rights, HIV/AIDS prevention, and grassroots feminism.

In Six Paintings from Papunya, anthropologist Fred R. Myers and art critic Terry Smith discuss six Papunya paintings displayed at a 2022 exhibition in New York, drawing on several discourses that have developed around First Nations art, notably anthropology, art history, and curating as practiced by Indigenous and non-Indigenous interpreters.

On The Way To Theory by Lawrence Grossberg introduces the major theories that have animated contemporary Western theory, from those of Kant, Marx, and Heidegger to Foucault, Deleuze, and Hall, explaining their key concepts and defining the possibilities of their thought.

In Soldier’s Paradise, Samuel Fury Childs Daly tell the history of how Africa’s postcolonial military regimes tried and ultimately failed to transform their societies into martial utopias.

The Essential Jill Johnston Reader, edited by Clare Croft, collects the writing of cultural critic and lesbian feminist activist Jill Johnston, best known for her dance columns in the Village Voice.

In Jill Johnston in Motion, Clare Croft tracks the entwined innovations and contributions to dance criticism and feminist activism of performer, writer, and activist Jill Johnston.

Gloria Jane Bell explores the relationship between Indigenous cultures around the world and the Vatican in Eternal Sovereigns, examining how the Vatican holds thousands of works by Indigenous scholars and refuses to return them.

In Indie Porn, Zahra Stardust examines the motivations and interventions of independent porn producers as they navigate criminal laws, risk-averse platforms, discriminatory algorithms, and rampant piracy.

Jennifer R. Nájera explores the intersections of education and activism among undocumented college students in Learning to Lead, showing how they build political consciousness and learn to become leaders.

Dominican Crossroads by Christina Cecelia Davidson explores the extraordinary and complicated life and career of H. C. C. Astwood, who was a preacher, politician, and the first Black man named US consul to the Dominican Republic in the nineteenth century.

Scholar, songwriter, and dramatist Masi Asare explores the singing practice of Black women singers in US musical theatre between 1900 and 1970 in Blues Mamas and Broadway Belters, showing how singers such as Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, and Lena Horne possessed highly trained voices who fell in a lineage of singers and teachers.

In The Promise of Beauty, Mimi Thi Nguyen explores the relationship between the concept of beauty and narratives of crisis and catastrophe to show how the possibility of beauty can remake social arrangements and political structures.

Miller Oberman’s new collection of poetry, Impossible Things, offers an intimate account of fatherhood, loss, grief, and family.

Max Ritts traces how sound’s integration into environmental politics Canada’s North Coast have paved the way for massive industrial expansion in Resonant Ecology.

Never miss a new book! Sign up for our e-mail newsletters, and get notifications of new titles in your preferred disciplines as well as discounts and other news.

Author Events in October

Fall is a great time to get out and catch our authors at events!

October 1, 6 pm EDT: Margaret Dorsey and Miguel Diaz-Barriga, authors of Fencing in Democracy, give an in-person book talk at the University of Richmond, Modlin Center for the Arts.  453 Westhampton Way, Richmond, Virginia

October 2, 12 pm EDT: Dr. Asli Zengin, author of Violent Intimacies, gives an in-person book talk, sponsored by GSS Princeton University. Corwin Hall 130, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

October 2, 1:30 pm: Harry Harootunian, author of Archaism and Actuality, joins an in-person guided discussion of his book at Duke University. Friedl 225, 1316 Campus Drive, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

October 4, 9 am EDT: Stanley Fish, former Director of Duke University Press and author of Doing What Comes Naturally, joins Jane Tompkins for an in-person discussion honoring the 25th anniversary of Duke’s Franklin Humanities Institute. Smith Warehouse, Ahmadieh Family Lecture Hall, Bay 4, C105, Durham, North Carolina

October 5, 7:30 pm PDT: Erin McElroy, author of Silicon Valley Imperialism, is joined by Manissa Maharawal and Daniela Rosner for an in-person conversation sponsored by Town Hall Seattle. The Mehdi Reading Room, 1119 8th Ave, Seattle

October 7, 4:15 pm CEST: Thea Riofrancos, author of Resource Radicals, gives an in-person talk at the University of Vienna, entitled “Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism.” Aleksandra Wojewska, Erika Faigen, and Sebastian Felten will respond. Centrum für Internationale Entwicklung, Sensengasse 3, 1090 Vienna

October 8, 4:30 pm EDT: The Association for Queer Anthropology and CLAGS present an online discussion of the recent book Unsettling Queer Anthropology edited by Margot Weiss, featuring Brian Horton, Scott Morgensen, Anne Spice, and Margot Weiss. Registration required.

October 10, 9:30 am EDT: Margaret Price, author of Crip Spacetime, is joined by Hannah Taylor for a hybrid conversation sponsored by the Duke Disability Inclusion and Community Empowerment Affinity Group and the Duke University Department of English. Registration is required. Rubenstein Library 153, 411 Chapel Drive, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

October 18: Susan Stryker, author of When Monsters Speak, appears in person at the Feminist Autonomous Centre for Research, Athens, Greece

October 18, 1 pm EDT: Rivke Jaffe, author of The Rule of Dons, gives an in-person book talk at the Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies.  LSC Conference Room, Lucy Stone Hall, Rutgers Livingston Campus, 54 Joyce Kilmer Ave, Piscataway, New Jersey

October 18, 11 am EDT: Nivedita Menon, author of Secularism As Misdirection, takes part in an online discussion as part of the Secularism on the Move series.

October 13, 3 pm PDT: Keiko Lane, author of Blood Loss, is in conversation with Lidia Yuknavitch at an in-person event at Powell’s Books. 1005 w. Burnside St., Portland, Oregon

October 19, 2 pm EDT: John Feinstein, author of Five Banners, joins Coach Mike Krzyzewski for an in-person conversation. This event is sold out, but there may be some standing room or day-of tickets available due to cancellations. The book is also for sale from Duke Stores. Griffith Film Theater, Bryan Center, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

October 20, 12:45 pm PDT: Lucas Hilderbrand, author of The Bars Are Ours, appears in person at Pride on the Page in Palm Springs. Palm Springs Cultural Center, 2300 E. Baristo Road, Palm Springs, California

October 20, 10 am EDT: Workshops for Gaza continues a four-week online reading group centered on Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance. Bela Shayevich will lead the discussion.

October 21, 3 pm EDT: Margaret Price, author of Crip Spacetime, delivers a hybrid keynote address for Clemson University’s National Disability Employment Awareness Month events. Hendrix Student Center Almeda R. Jacks Ballroom A, 720 McMillan Rd, Clemson, South Carolina

October 24, 5:30 pm EDT: Miller Oberman, author of Impossible Things, appears in-person at Barnes & Noble at the University of Connecticut, in conversation with Dakota Jackson. 1 Royce Cir, Storrs Center, Connecticut

October 26, 2:45 pm EDT: Thulani Davis, author of The Emancipation Circuit appears on a panel entitled “Black Resistance and Leadership” at the Boston Book Festival. Boston Public Library, Rabb Hall, 700 Boylston St, Boston, Massachusetts

October 26, 5 pm EDT: Miller Oberman, author of Impossible Things, celebrates with an outdoor release party featuring Omotara James, Ricky Maldonado, and Wendy Xu. Unnameable Books, 516 Vanderbilt Ave., Brooklyn, New York

October 27, 3 pm EST: Keiko Lane, author of Blood Loss, appears in person at the Bureau of General Services Queer Division in a joint event with Hugh Ryan, author of Telling Queer Secrets. Joshua Gutterman Tranen will moderate. 208 West 13th Street, Room 210, New York City

October 28, 6 pm EDT, heath pearson, author of Life beside Bars, is joined by Naomi Murakawa for an in-person conversation at Labyrinth Books. 122 Nassau St, Princeton, New Jersey

October 28, 6:30 pm: Susan Stryker and McKenzie Wark, author and editor of When Monsters Speak, discuss the book in an online event sponsored by Intellectual Publics.

October 28, 7 pm EDT: Miller Oberman, author of Impossible Things, is joined by Joan Kwon Glass, Jason B. Crawford, and I.S. Jones for a hybrid conversation at Books Are Magic.

October 30, 4 pm PDT: Susan Stryker, author of When Monsters Speak, joins  Ava Kim and Christoph Hanssmann for an in-person conversation sponsored by UC Davis Trans Advocacy Network. Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, 254 Old Davis Rd, Davis, California

Revisiting Postmodernism: An Interview with Fredric Jameson | The Weekly Read

The Weekly Read for September 28, 2024, is “Revisiting Postmodernism: An Interview with Fredric Jameson” with Nico Baumbach, Damon R. Young, and Genevieve Yue. The interview, conducted on March 13, 2014, appears in “The Cultural Logic of Contemporary Capitalism” a special issue of Social Text (127).

Jameson died on September 22, 2024. Read our farewell posted earlier this week.

Read this article for free through December 31, 2024.
Buy this special issue of Social Text here.

Editors’ Note: “This interview was conducted with Fredric Jameson on 13 March 2014 in New York City and has been lightly edited for clarity. On the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of ‘Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ in the New Left Review, Jameson looks back at the essay and considers the current state of capitalism, theory, art, and culture in relation to the concepts he adopted in 1984. Jameson is Knut Schmidt-Nielsen Professor of Comparative Literature, professor of romance studies (French), and director of the Institute for Critical Theory at Duke University. He is the author of many books, including The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981), Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (2002), and, most recently, The Ancients and the Postmoderns: On the Historicity of Forms (2015).”

Social Text is a peer-reviewed journal that covers a broad spectrum of social and cultural phenomena, applying the latest interpretive methods to the world at large. A daring and controversial leader in the field of cultural studies, the journal consistently focuses attention on questions of gender, sexuality, race, and the environment, publishing key works by the most influential social and cultural theorists. As a journal at the forefront of cultural theory, Social Text seeks provocative interviews and challenging articles from emerging critical voices. Each issue breaks new ground in the debates about postcolonialism, postmodernism, and popular culture.

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.

Farewell to Fredric Jameson

We are deeply saddened to learn of the death of literary critic Fredric Jameson on September 22, 2024. Jameson was Knut Schmidt Nielsen Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. He is survived by his children and his partner, Susan Willis, Emerita Professor of English at Duke University.

Jameson’s influence on Duke University Press cannot be overstated. Senior Executive Editor Ken Wissoker says, “For many years I referred to the Press as ‘the house that Fred built’ the way Yankee Stadium was called ‘the house that Ruth built.’ It’s hard to imagine Duke University or Duke University Press without Fred’s intellectual leadership, his global reach, and his scholarly genius.  He brought many authors to the Press, and many scholars to Duke, changing criticism and the humanities here and around the world.  It’s an incomparable legacy.”

In 1991 we published Jameson’s book Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, which remains our all-time bestseller and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. It received the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association. In 1989, Jameson and Stanley Fish, then a colleague of Jameson’s in Duke’s English department, started the series Post-Contemporary Interventions, which came to include over 120 influential books, including The Cultures of Globalization (1998), which Jameson edited with Masao Miyoshi, and Jameson on Jameson, a book of interviews with Jameson edited by Ian Buchanan.

Jameson also served on the Editorial Board for our journal South Atlantic Quarterly (SAQ) and published articles in that journal and in our journals Modern Language Quarterly and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. We have made his articles freely available on our content site through October 31, 2024.

Jameson received the 2008 Holberg Prize and the 2011 MLA Lifetime Achievement Award for his scholarship. The Holberg Prize committee wrote, “Jameson’s most lasting contribution to cultural analysis may be his account of postmodernism and postmodernity. His epochal book Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) established the concept of postmodernity as a distinct period with its own specific social and cultural forms.”

Jameson’s influence has continued in the twenty-first century. A collection of his essays, Inventions of A Present (Verso), was published this year and a number of publications have been considering the lasting impact of his work. Writing in the September 2024 edition of Harper’s Magazine, Mark Grief comments, “It is characteristic of literature departments to see waves come and go. Fredric Jameson represents something like the lapping at the shoreline, which doesn’t go away and never ceases to turn up interesting things: shells, coins, and specimens of marine life heretofore unseen. Not only has Jameson been ceaselessly productive—he has often come bearing news, for more than fifty years.”

Jameson was much beloved as a teacher as well as honored as a scholar. A number of our authors studied under him. Nicholas Brown, author of Autonomy, says, “Intellectually, I came of age in Fredric Jameson’s classroom. In my first semester of graduate school, I thought I was—and perhaps was, if one is anything at twenty-two years old—a kind of Foucauldian. It is not only that Fred’s writings, seminars, talks, and even gestures have remained touchstones for me. Fred has always been for me—and always will be—a kind of superego. Everything I write gets a half-conscious gut-check. Would Fred think this was serious work?”

Jennifer Doyle, author of Shadow of My Shadow, was also a student of Jameson’s. She remembers, “I learned from Fred to push myself as a writer, to reach for the thing that turns common sense inside out, and to hang with difficulty. Actually, I should not use the past tense for this, because his writing will keep doing that for all of us. His work generates lasting, profound insight. Beyond the world of ideas, Fred and Susan modeled a way of living out the principles and ideas embedded in their writing and their teaching. They were both so accessible—so open to us. I was transformed by my time in the Literature Program, and left Duke with some wild ideas about what’s possible in one’s professional life! Fred really, really loved the work.”

Even in his final years, Jameson continued to work with our acquiring editors, recommending other scholars, and writing cover endorsements and peer review reports. He was truly a friend of the press who worked with many staff members and whose scholarship influenced many of our authors and editors. Truly one of the great thinkers of our time, he will be missed but his scholarship will endure.

Xyloid Sexuality: Dismantling the Human in Wangechi Mutu’s Arboreal Collages | The Weekly Read

The Weekly Read for September 21, 2024, is “Xyloid Sexuality: Dismantling the Human in Wangechi Mutu’s Arboreal Collages” by Caroline Edwards. The article appears in Volume 20, Issue 2 of Cultural Politics.

Read this article for free through October 15, 2024.

Abstract
The Kenyan-born, US-based artist Wangechi Mutu is fascinated by the human body and its nonhuman possibilities. In Mutu’s collaged works, human forms are repeatedly ripped apart and reassembled within fantasy landscapes that speak of decomposition and regrowth. This article analyzes the significance of trees to Mutu’s project of dismantling the human. Drawing from critical plant studies, forest ecology, cultural anthropology, and the mycological turn, it argues that Mutu’s artworks forcefully reclaim the nonhuman as a site of Black expressive culture. These artworks blur ontological distinctions between the human and the arboreal through xyloid sexuality, a weirding of human eroticism and reproduction that pushes desire, procreation, and sexual fulfillment beyond species boundaries. Mutu’s use of xyloid sexuality can be understood as a radical utopian gesture to supplant the violence of the colonial gaze with a powerfully more-than-human Black gaze.

Moving beyond the boundaries of race, gender, and class, Cultural Politics examines the political ramifications of global cultural productions across artistic and academic disciplines. The journal explores precisely what is cultural about politics and what is political about culture by bringing together text and visual art that offer diverse modes of engagement with theory, cultural production, and politics.

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.