Q&A with Penny M. Von Eschen

Penny M. Von Eschen

Penny M. Von Eschen is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American Studies and Professor of History at the University of Virginia. In her new book, Paradoxes of Nostalgia, Von Eschen offers a sweeping examination of the cold war’s afterlife and the lingering shadows it casts over geopolitics, journalism, and popular culture.

 Your introduction discusses the many ramifications of the dissolution of the Soviet Union on American domestic politics, from the rise of family-values conservatism in the 1990s to the War on Terror to Trump’s appropriation of alt-right nationalism a few years ago. What do you think it was about the American experience of the cold war that created such a lasting impact on American society?

Cold war ideology and practices encouraged an American identity structured around an enemy and a deep sense of an existential threat to the American way of life. With the disappearance of the Soviet bogeyman, prominent politicians set about the construction of new enemies at home and abroad. Looking outward, academics, policymakers, and popular culture (think of Tom Clancy and Hollywood) turned to a clash of civilizations frame where Muslim peoples in particular were seen as constituting a threat to the “West.”

Looking inward, with declining standards of living for the middle class and accelerating inequality in the global economy, many Americans began turning on each other. The conservative rhetoric of “family values” had long been a staple of the New Right but escalated dramatically in the early 1990s. Now that the US government (really New Deal/Great Society liberalism) was no longer held as a superior model to the Soviet state, government itself became the enemy, pitted against the family in the minds of Pat Buchanan and leaders of the Christian right. Since the late 1940s, cold war attacks against “godless communism” mobilized an anti-communist consensus premised on the idea that the US was a Christian nation. Those key conservative tenets of the Reagan era, the Christian right and antigovernment ideology, accelerated after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The roots of a later convergence between American and Russian conservatives can be seen in the early nineties. With the Soviet enemy gone, “family values” conservatives scapegoated Black Americans, immigrants, and LGBTQ people, and discredited government as protecting the lives and livelihoods of these undeserving groups. Rebooting the cold war notion that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, anti-government Americans found new, if unexpected cultural bedfellows from right wing Russians.

And critically, the lasting impact of the cold war on American society lies in the decisions made—and the roads not taken—in the years surrounding the collapse of the Eastern bloc. Widespread calls for political openness, a serious reckoning with the cold war past and proposed reforms to address the social, economic, and environmental costs of cold war policies were largely ignored. Instead, US foreign policy was defined by the projection of unipolar military force and a doubling down on the extractive and ecologically destructive industries that had sustained cold war militarism.

The cold war is commonly understood to be a conflict between American capitalism and Russian communism. Does this obscure the nature of the conflict and its aftermath? What other forces affected the development of the post-cold war world order?

Indeed, that view distorts both the conflict and its aftermath, and in both cases conflates democracy and capitalism in a way that doesn’t hold up under serious scrutiny. Capitalism, the pursuit of profit, entailed control of global resources that was inherently undemocratic, leading to  US overt and covert interventions in countries where the US access to resources was at stake. In terms of the conflict itself, the Reagan administration had justified its support of brutal right-wing dictatorships in Latin America, Asia, and Africa—one example of many is General Augusto Pinochet’s in Chile—arguing that supporting right–wing authoritarian governments was acceptable as long as they were anticommunist. Policymakers justified such anti-democratic policies by claiming that such dictatorships could be reformed from within, whereas left “totalitarian” governments could not.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the eastern bloc, US policy makers began to justify interventions into sovereign nations in the name of “democracy.” But triumphalism’s conflation of capitalism and democracy helped justify radical deregulation of industry and banking, leading to the outsized influence of money in politics and severely undermining democratic institutions. There had been a genuinely utopian aspect to the cold war, with each side promoting universal values and claiming that its system could bring prosperity and happiness to its citizens and the world. After the collapse of the Eastern bloc, instead of viewing government as responsible for protecting the well-being of society, US state policies shifted to deregulation, privatization, and increased incarceration. As economic inequality increased, these shifts led to disinvestment in public infrastructure, underfunded public education, and media consolidation, making daily newspapers and independent media a vanishing resource. In the United States, politicians and journalists saw voter suppression as compatible with the idea of free elections. Economic inequality on a global scale set the stage for anti-democratic resentment in the United States and a global turn to the right. Cold war triumphalism fueled the hubris of American exceptionalism, free trade, and catastrophic wars in the Middle East. Before and after 9/11, anti-immigration policies fueled a politics of blame and xenophobia, distracting many Americans from examining the forces undergirding economic inequality.

You write that the vision of the cold war was and is constantly contested, both by prominent political figures but also by the public. How has one particular vision of this past come to be solidified?

The past is always being rewritten for the aims and perceived needs of the present, so in that sense, the history of the cold war has never solidified; but two dominant threads have profoundly shaped US politics. First, conservatives in the early 1990s declared that with global communism defeated, the “real cold war” has only begun. This time, the targets in what increasingly came to be viewed as a Manichean struggle, were government social programs, and in the right’s “culture wars,” all who did not fit the mold of a white, heteronormative Christian nation.

The afterlife of the cold war has shaped foreign policy, as well. Cold war triumphalist narratives—the idea that the United States “won” the cold war through military might, have shaped justifications for war from the earliest post-cold war interventions in Panama and Iraq, through the war on terror, and even to this day in Ukraine. Above all, this idea of  US “victory” though military strength has elevated military responses over diplomatic solutions. This is starkly illustrated in responses to Russia’s criminal invasion of Ukraine. The western response has shifted from the immediate goal of defending Ukraine against the Russian invasion—a strategy where diplomacy could and should have been the centerpiece—to an expansion of war aims approaching the totalizing logic of the cold war.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine seems to bring this discussion out of the realm of memory. How do you see nostalgia for the cold war affecting responses to the invasion?

The war in Ukraine is very much a contest over memory. Putin seeks to mobilize an invented and mythologized history harkening back to sixteenth century Tsarist Russia. He sees Ukraine as an integral part of Russia. Putin rewrites history, asserting a Russian, not a Soviet past. In his view, the Soviet Union betrayed Russia’s legitimate imperial claims by giving too much autonomy to Ukraine and other regions. Needless to say, his self-serving view of the past is perverse and contradictory. Putin attempts to court African countries and the global south more broadly, by claiming the legacy of past Soviet support of anti-colonial and independence movements. At the same time, he rejects the egalitarian values that these movements stood for.

It seems like, even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, tensions between Russia and NATO have been rising over the past decade. What was your experience like in writing this book during these developments?

The experience? Ongoing distress. It was claims about NATO expansion along with the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, that prompted my investigations into triumphalism and nostalgia. Like the justifications for the  US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, calls for the expansion of NATO relied on distortions of history; both exemplify the dangers of  US triumphalism. At every juncture during the expansion of NATO, diplomatic alternatives were available. When George H. W. Bush and Gorbachev declared the end of the cold war in 1989, Gorbachev, like US Secretary of State James Baker, believed that there had been a clear understanding that NATO, viewed by both sides as a cold war creation, would not expand, and certainly not to Russia’s borders.

The expansion of NATO epitomizes the rejection of a vision of a multipolar demilitarized world in favor of the assertion of US unipolar power. Another path not taken was a burgeoning environmentalism. Instead,  US policymakers doubled down on support for fossil fuel industries. In the very same week Germans dismantled the Berlin Wall, the US denounced a global climate agreement by attacking climate scientists. As US policymakers pursued control of oil reserves in the former Soviet sphere, they sought to weaken the United Nations and other multi-national organizations. Indeed, NATO expansion and undermining the UN constituted the two foreign policy pillars of the Republican Party’s Contract With America in 1994. In the victor’s history version of the cold war, diplomacy was suspect by definition, portrayed as appeasement and weakness, leaving militarism as the only solution to conflict.

In 2014, when tensions over Ukraine led to the collapse of the Obama administration’s 2009 reset with Russia, Jack Matlock Jr., the last US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, drew an analogy between the active American role in organizing street protests in Kiev, and the hypothetical prospect of foreigners leading Occupy Wall Street movements. His point was that American policy, in expanding NATO and placing military bases near its borders, had needlessly provoked potential retaliation from Russia. None of this, of course, justifies Putin’s brutal invasion of a sovereign country. But if the United States is to have any constructive role in ending rather than expanding the conflict, it would have to begin with an honest account of its post-1989 role in the region. In addition to the tragedy for the people of Ukraine and Russia, the war highlights the utter failure of the post-cold war global order to wean itself off oil, and the failure to create strong multilateral institutions that could meaningfully address global climate, health and inequality.

Read the introduction to Paradoxes of Nostalgia for free and save 30% on the paperback with coupon E22ESCHN.

New Books in August

Don’t miss all our exciting new releases in August!

In three long-form poems and a lyrical essay, fahima ife speculates in Maroon Choreography on the afterlives of Black fugitivity, unsettling the historic knowledge of it while moving inside the ongoing afterlives of those people who disappeared themselves into rural spaces beyond the reach of slavery.

Rachel Zolf activates the last three lines of a poem by Jewish Nazi Holocaust survivor Paul Celan—“No one / bears witness for the / witness”—to theorize the poetics and im/possibility of witnessing in No One’s Witness.

In Amkoullel, the Fula Boy, Malian writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ—one of the towering figures in the literature of twentieth-century Francophone Africa—tells in striking detail the story of his youth, which was set against inter-ethnic conflict and the arrival and installation of French colonialism.

In The Politics of Decolonial Investigation Walter D. Mignolo provides a sweeping examination of how colonialty has operated around the world in its myriad forms between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries while calling for a decolonial politics that would delink from all forms of Western knowledge.

Laurence Coderre explores the material culture of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in Newborn Socialist Things to show how it paved the way for rampant commodification and consumption in contemporary China.

Carolyn Hardin offers a new way of understanding arbitrage—the trading practice that involves buying assets in one market at a cheap price and immediately selling them in another market for a profit—as a means of showing how its reliance upon taking on risk is fundamental to financial markets in Capturing Finance.

Monica Huerta draws on her experiences growing up in her family’s Mexican restaurants and her life as an academic in Magical Habits to sketch out habits of living that allow us to consider what it means to live with history as we are caught up in it and how those histories bear on our capacities to make sense of our lives.

The contributors to Long Term, edited by Scott Herring and Lee Wallace, use the tension between the popular embrace and legalization of same-sex marriage and the queer critique of homonormativity as an opportunity to examine the myriad forms of queer commitments and their durational aspect.

In Domestic Contradictions Priya Kandaswamy brings together two crucial moments in welfare history—the advent of the Freedmen’s Bureau during Reconstruction and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996—to show how they each targeted Black women through negative stereotyping and normative assumptions about gender, race, and citizenship.

In Policing Protest Paul A. Passavant explores how the policing of protest in the United States has become increasingly hostile since the late 1990s, moving away from strategies that protect protestors toward militaristic practices designed to suppress legal protests.

In A Black Intellectual’s Odyssey Martin Kilson—the first tenured African American professor at Harvard—takes readers on a fascinating journey from his upbringing in a small Pennsylvania mill town to his experiences as an undergraduate to pursuing graduate study at Harvard before spending his entire career there as a faculty member.

In Whiteness Interrupted, Marcus Bell presents a revealing portrait of white teachers in majority Black schools to outline how white racial identity is constructed based on localized interactions and the ways whiteness takes a different form in predominantly Black spaces.

Jennifer C. Nash examines how the figure of the “Black mother” has become a powerful political category synonymous with crisis, showing how they are often rendered into one-dimensional symbols of tragic heroism and the ground zero of Black life in Birthing Black Mothers.

Transnational Feminist Itineraries, edited by Ashwini Tambe and Millie Thayer, demonstrates the key contributions of transnational feminist theory and practice to analyzing and contesting authoritarian nationalism and the extension of global corporate power.

In Reimagining Social Medicine from the South Abigail H. Neely explores social medicine’s possibilities and limitations at one of its most important origin sites: the Pholela Community Health Centre (PCHC) in South Africa.

Q&A with Catherine Besteman, author of “Miltarized Global Apartheid”

Catherine Besteman is Francis F. Bartlett and Ruth K. Bartlett Professor of Anthropology at Colby College. She is the author or editor of many books, including Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine (2016). Her latest book is Militarized Global Apartheid, which is part of the Global Insecurities series, which she co-edits.

As your title makes clear, your book argues that we are living under militarized global apartheid. You explain in your Introduction that your concept is (as might be suspected) modeled after South Africa’s apartheid, which extended officially from 1948 to 1994. How might the term apartheid, and the South African paradigm it references, contribute to an understanding of current global networks? And why might it be preferable to other words like imperialism, globalization, and transnationalism, which, as you mention, have been formerly utilized in your field?

The reason for defining the system I analyze as militarized global apartheid is to highlight the ways in which imperialism, globalization, and transnationalism are race-based projects. Imperialist projects over the past 500 years are projects of racial differentiation and racist domination; projects of capital accumulation enabled by globalization use hierarchies created by racial differentiation as a tool of extraction and domination; and transnationalism presumes nationalism, which, as I show, has become a racially coded identity in most parts of the world. As scholars such as Cedric Robinson, Charles Mills, Deborah Thomas, and Kamari Clarke have shown brilliantly in various ways, globalization has proceeded over the past 500 years through the creation and imposition of race-based hierarchies in ways that reinforce white supremacy and benefit the global north rather than the global south through the control of mobility and labor. Using the term ‘apartheid’ places race at the center of analysis of how power and capitalism work in our contemporary world.

Your project is built around a conceptual division of the world between the global north and the global south. As you yourself remark, the global south is a contested geographical category and not at all homogenous. Why is it important for you, nevertheless, to utilize this concept? What does the category miss, and what does it get right? 

Global north and global south are obviously roughly drawn terms that nevertheless I find useful for making my theoretical argument. I draw on Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s definition of the global north and Jean and John Comaroff’s definition of the global south in recognition of the historical fact that the forces of capital extraction and finance emanate primarily from the global north and that most of the global south experienced colonization and neocolonization of one kind or another by countries in the global north. Of course, these terms carry the danger of reductionism and overgeneralization. Categories like these miss the class interests shared by elites across these divides, which is a critically important component of the contemporary world. These categories also run the risk of reinforcing dangerous assumptions about global north supremacy and global south impoverishment, which the book seeks to deconstruct. But I hope my use of these broad categories to describe the global patterns of militarized structures of control over mobility and labor clarify whose interests are being served and which parts of the world are being harmed.

You argue that our current framework of militarized global apartheid rests heavily on racialization, which is increasingly tied to nationality; long-standing systems of white supremacy, then, encourage heightened policing and militarization to contain people of the global south within geographical borders according to their perceived national belonging. Would you say that mobility, in the face of containment, is a human right? And how can we imagine “belonging,” as you title your first chapter, outside of the boundaries of national borders?

Yes, absolutely, I consider mobility to be a human right. Everyone should have the right to move. As for how to imagine belonging outside the boundaries of national borders, all we have to do is look at how much work has gone into constructing nationalism and national identities over the past century and a half alone. The monumental effort expended to cohere groups of people into accepting national identities as not only legitimate but primary suggests the power of alternative—and competing—sensibilities of mutuality, belonging, and commonality, often rooted in kinship, locality, language, religious affiliation, or other things. The notion of belonging carries a commitment to mutual responsibility, care, and social recognition; a sense of shared basic values; and a willingness to co-participate in problem-solving. We don’t need nation-states to create these things.  

In your introduction, you draw a connection between “security fears about immigrants, and the disproportionate incarceration of Black men in the United States.” Can you say more about this link? How can your concept of militarized global apartheid inform ongoing critiques of policing and incarceration within the US that systemically target Black people, despite their national citizenship?

This issue—the connection between the racialized policing and control of mobile populations and the racialized policing and control of internal populations—is really the crux of the book. Security imperialism—in the form of mobility controls wielded against mobile and potentially mobile populations from the global south by countries of the global north—is tightly and intricately connected to carcerality within nation-states of the global north. Racialized language and militarized security innovations characterize both arenas. The use of mass incarceration as a tool of social control in some parts of the global north, most particularly the US, is reproduced in the carceral forms spreading across the global south as imprisonment and containment become the norm for disciplining political dissent, removing populations whose presence is threatening to capitalist interests, and meeting the demands of the global north for constraining mobility. I call this security carcerality, and argue it is the new form of imperialism of our era.

You acknowledge early on that migrants resist militarized apartheid in diverse and creative ways, but that this resistance is not the focus of your current project. What brought you to the decision to aim your attention at global systems of containment, rather than on sites of contestation? 

There have been so many studies of migrant resistance, strategies, experiences, and tragedies, including by me. Migrants have been in the spotlight for decades, but especially since the so-called migrant ‘crisis’ of 2015 in Europe, and some scholars, like Shahram Khosravi, are calling for scholars to recognize a migrant ‘right to opacity’. The focus on the migrant can be seen as reproducing the perception that migrants are the problem, when in fact they are not. The problem is a global system which unequally apportions capital and the power of some over the livelihoods of others, controls mobility, and determines who has the right to move and whose mobility is blocked. The problem is a global system in which the lives of people in the global south are seen as sacrificable for the benefit of people in the global north. My choice in this book is to focus on the real problem, the global system of militarized apartheid.

Who do you hope reads your book? 

I hope the book will be useful for teaching, which is why it is short. Chapters can be excerpted and taught separately. I hope the book reaches a cross disciplinary audience, speaking to geographers, critical race and globalization theorists, migration scholars and advocates, journalists, and people working in critical security studies. I hope the book stimulates a range of new studies, and especially studies that push forward the discussion about alternative futures opened in the book’s final chapter. My 90-year old stepfather was the first family member to read this book, and he read it in two days and then phoned with a long list of questions. I hope people of all ages read this book and then get in touch with their list of questions.

New JHPPL study finds Republican governors delayed COVID-19 policies by an average of 2 days—a period with potentially devastating repercussions

The party of a state’s governor is the single most important predictor of the early adoption of social distancing policies, with Republican governors taking about two days longer to announce these mandates, finds a new study published in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law.

A two-day delay could result in a 17% to 59% increase in COVID-19 cases, according to prior research.

To investigate why some states were slower to implement social distancing than others beginning in March 2020, the study’s authors compared announcement dates for social distancing measures, controlling for competing explanations such as economic resources and hospital preparedness. All else equal, states led by Republican governors were slower to implement such policies during a critical window of early COVID-19 response. 

The study also found that states may be more likely to adopt social distancing policies when neighboring states act. States with lower population density and states with fewer confirmed cases were both slower to take up policies, and gross state product had no significant effect on timing.

Courtney Berger on Our New Political Science and Political Theory Titles

Our editors look forward to meeting their authors at conferences every year and are sad to be missing out on that this year. The annual meeting of the American Political Science Association would have taken place September 10-13 in San Francisco this year. We know that many of you look forward to stocking up on new books at special discounts at our conferences, so we are pleased to extend a 30% discount on all in-stock books and journal issues with coupon code APSA20.

Instead of greeting Executive Editor Courtney Berger in person this year, check out her recommendations for new titles in the discipline and a great round up of other ways to learn about all the new scholarship that was to be presented at the conference.

I first started attending APSA in 2004, just as I was beginning to build a list in political theory. Over the years it has become a bit of a second home for me, disciplinarily speaking, and I’ve spent many a Labor Day weekend enjoying the camaraderie, intelligence, and wit of the APSA community. (Heck, I spent the night on the Marriott lawn with many of you in 2014, so I feel like we’re pretty close now.)  I am especially sad that we won’t be seeing one another in person this year to celebrate new books, talk about projects in the works, and catch up over coffee or cocktails.

I am grateful, though, that we will still be able to convene through the virtual conference. I typically don’t have a lot of time to attend panels during an in-person conference. But this year my calendar is packed with panels on Indigenous political thought, abolitionism, racial violence and grassroots insurgency, data politics, and climate crisis. Now more than ever we need politically engaged scholarship that will grapple with questions of racial justice, violence directed at trans and queer folks, gender inequities, the ongoing legacies of colonialism and Indigenous dispossession, and the uneven effects that war and climate change have had on human and more-than-human worlds. Scholars at APSA are poised to offer important insight on these urgent issues, and I am eager to hear what you have to say.

And, of course, Duke has plenty of new books that attend to these concerns. One of the real pleasures of the in-person conference is that folks have the opportunity to pick up and handle our books and, perhaps, encounter something unexpected. This year, you will need to admire them virtually, but I hope that you will still find a moment to browse and perhaps purchase some books (at the conference discount, of course).

There will be Author Meets Critics panels on two remarkable new books that address questions of Indigenous dispossession, resource extraction, and the logics of capitalism: Robert Nichols’ Theft Is Property!: Dispossession and Critical Theory and Thea Riofrancos’ Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (both of which are in the Radical Americás series edited by George Ciccariello-Maher and Bruno Bosteels).

Some more must-reads for the theory-minded among you: Jane Bennett’s Influx and Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman, the much-anticipated follow up to Vibrant Matter; Louise Amoore’s Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others; Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics; Cressida Heyes’ Anaesthetics of Existence: Essays on Experience at the Edge; and Hagar Kotef’s forthcoming The Colonizing Self. We also have some innovative new books in Black studies I encourage you to check out, including Ashon Crawley’s The Lonely Letters, and Katherine McKittrick’s forthcoming Dear Science and Other Stories.

Finally, a hearty congratulations to Jairus Grove, whose book Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World received Honorable Mention for the Foundations of Political Theory First Book Award. This is a sharp and timely book (viruses, war, and environmental apocalypse, anyone?) that offers an oddly hopeful pessimism for the future of our planet.

Be well, everyone, and I’ll see you online.

If you were hoping to connect with Courtney or another of our editors about your book project at APSA, please reach out to them by email. See our editors’ specialties and contact information here and our online submissions guidelines here.

In addition to these books, don’t miss valuable new content from the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law that addresses the COVID-19 pandemic, analyzes the Affordable Care Act 10 years on, and offers insight into the politics of the opioid epidemic.

We invite you to peruse our online catalog of political science and political theory titles.

And finally, we really miss one of our favorite conference traditions, the in-booth photos of authors with their recent books. Please check out our album of author selfies instead. We’ll be posting those photos on Twitter this week as well.

Q&A with Jane Bennett

Jane Bennett is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University and author of Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, also published by Duke University Press.

In her newest book, Influx and Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman, she explores the question of human agency amidst a world teeming with powerful nonhuman influences, drawing upon Whitman, Thoreau, Caillois, Whitehead, and other poetic writers to link a non-anthropocentric model of self to a democratic pluralism and a syntax and style of writing appropriate to the entangled world in which we live.

Your book Vibrant Matter introduced so many of us to new materialist theory—the idea that we as humans are deeply engaged with a more-than-human material world. How does Influx and Efflux relate to the questions you took up in that book?

Vibrant Matter honed in on vital forces overlooked by a picture of the world as divided naturally into passive-reactive objects and active-creative subjects, and it figured the human being as one lively element among others within the complex ecology of human-nonhuman assemblages. It trained a cyclops eye on the liveliness of the ordinary nonhuman entities and processes by which we live—think, for example, of the powerful lure of certain objects and possessions, or of the effects of pesticides or pharmaceuticals on health, or of how you follow the lead of your materials as you cook, draw, garden.

In highlighting a more-than-human vitality, and in pitching its analysis at the grand, even cosmic level of “matter,” Vibrant Matter also cast shade on some other important efforts. These efforts include those defending humanism as an indispensable tradition of inquiry in the face of attacks against it as economically useless; or those exposing structures of (gendered, racialized, capitalist) injustice; or those in search of a philosophy of human agency that accounts for both its assemblage-quality and its capacity to add something qualitatively new to the world.

Influx and Efflux speaks to these previously shaded efforts, especially that last one. It returns to the matter of human subjectivity. What models of self and efficacy make sense within a non-anthropocentric ontology? What kinds of “I” and “we” can act effectively, and live well, alongside so many other lively bodies and forces? How to affirm the strange bubbling up of “individuality” within a world of vibrant matter? To pursue these tasks, I use Walt Whitman’s American poetry as my guide. I seek help also from other poetic voices unafraid to name, ride, and “write up” whatever laudable possibilities circulate quietly, even in dark times.

The book’s title references Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” in which the ocean’s flowing in and out refers to everyday movements in which outside influences enter bodies, infuse and confuse their organization, and then exit, themselves having been transformed into something new. Why did you choose to think with the phrase “influx and efflux” for this book?

I am drawn to pictures of the world that emphasize the role of becoming while also thinking about how entities (knots and clots) form in the process. One of the ways to do the latter is to acknowledge the configuring power of metamorphosis—to include within one’s “structural analysis” the arrangements made by rhythms of self-alteration (“influx and efflux”). It is notable also that Whitman’s phrase describes a process operative both in the ocean and in the “I.” The self that emerges in Leaves of Grass is the product of a process that repeats across human-nonhuman borders:

Sea of stretch’d groundswells,
Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths,
Sea of the brine of life and of unshovell’d yet always-ready graves,
Howler and scooper of storms, capricious and dainty sea,
I am integral with you, I too am of one phase and of all phases.
Partaker of influx and efflux I.

—Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” (Section 22)

You write about Whitman’s approach to the power of sympathy as a physical force: he saw his poetry as generating a cloud of possibility for abolitionist thought by highlighting the linked value of every body-soul, rather than directly engaging with the racialized violence of slavery in a way that might make people defensive. What might poetry have to offer for us in the polarized and tense political moment we are in right now?

There are loud voices in American politics today avowing hate, racism, guns, patriarchy, xenophobia, greed, extreme inequality, and authoritarian rule. For them, sympathy and empathy are but expressions of weakness. They deny not only their entanglements with other people but also their profound susceptibility to nonhuman forces—preferring to believe that climate change or a viral pandemic is a hoax propagated on behalf of the weak.

Such views have faced a direct, forceful, and high-intensity counter-response—by a militantly pro-democratic opposition to entrenched structures of privilege and domination. I applaud the Left’s use of outrage, revulsion, and militancy in the effort to counter right-wing attitudes, judgments, and actions. Influx & Efflux, however, takes another tactic—it leans into other moods and it relies more upon indirect powers, including wonder at the vitality of matter and a protean attraction to the bodies and things one regularly encounters. It seeks to harness the power of wonder and those vague, ahuman affections (“sympathies”) on behalf of a decent, egalitarian, and ecological public culture. I think that neglect of the energy of protean sympathies has made its own contribution to the rise of the cruel, authoritarian, and earth-destroying politics we currently endure.

It’s not that positive moods and indirect influences should replace the critical orientations and more express forms of opposition practiced by the Left; they are offered instead as a political supplement to them. The rhetorical groove of the book is less calling out and more calling toward, but I don’t think that renders it de–politicized, especially if “political” denotes that which is capable of inducing societal transformation. There is a form of political efficacy that relies upon direct action and intense affect, but there is also a form proceeding by subtle influence and gentler sensitivities—by a force that is only apparently “weak.”

Your own doodles appear on the book’s cover as well as throughout the manuscript. How should readers approach these doodles? What is their relationship to the written text?

People exist and subsist on many planes or registers at once—the conceptual and the spatial, the shaped and the vague, the static and the vibratory, the everyday and the cosmic. Each plane intersects with the others in experience, such that “experience” is itself an overrich mix of impressions, tempos, feelings, and moods. In short, life is complicated. Or, as Paul Klee put it, “It is not easy to orient yourself in a whole that is made up of parts belonging to different dimensions.”

The doodles—as lines and shapes on their way to elsewhere (Klee says they are “out for a walk”)—express, perhaps, one of the many non-linguistic registers of experience. The peculiar experience of agency that comes to the fore while doodling—an “I” that is carried along by a creative process that would not be the same without me and yet carries on whether I am there or not—is one theme of the book. The doodles speak without words to what the process-forward philosophy of the book also tries to pronounce.

One of the questions you explore in your work is what it looks like to write in a non-anthropocentric way. How do you include the more-than-human in your writing practice?

Simply naming and describing the presence of the not-quite human in any given field of perception, conception, reception, or deception is a start. Work to undo the learned tendency to overlook those aspects of one’s encounters that are not apparently useful for pragmatic action. Another tactic is to pay close attention to the verbs you speak—do they insinuate that the humans on the scene have more power or control of the action than they really do? The book experiments with using “middle-voiced” verbs as a way to “write up” a multi-specied kind of agency. Even though the “middle voice” is not marked formally in English (as it is in classical Greek and Sanskrit), it is still present in certain ways of speaking. It designates performances undertaken within an ongoing field of activities, rather than decisions of subjects who enter a field either to do something (the active voice) or to be acted upon (the passive voice). For example, the verbs “to partake,” “to inaugurate,” “to inflect,” and “to attest to” express an efficacy that both receives and twists, an efficacy that no singlet could own.

One of your chapters takes up Thoreau’s attempt to filter the influence of humans out of his life, but maximize the influx of the not-quite-human sparks of the Wild. Is there anything Thoreau might offer for those of us who are spending this springtime physically isolated from other humans?

Yes, lots. Get outside, even around the block. Make good advantage of the official (coronavirus pandemic) directive to avoid people, to eschew anthropocentrism. Now you can notice the intensive swarms of otherwise insignificant things in your immediate vicinity. This practice of attention may slowly expand (even cosmic-ize!) your perspective. You too are, when all is said and done, a minuscule bundle of energies in a cosmic swirl. The news, social media, the internet, and your conventional frame of mind/body all focus relentlessly on the social, political, economic, human-historical dimensions of your existence. But your being is also elsewhere, in excess of those planes or dimensions. You are other-than-human and more than conventional too: you live via and are impressed by a virtual realm that is real even if not expressly overt. Inhabit that more fully.

Read the introduction to Influx and Efflux free online and save 30% when you use coupon code E20BNNTT.

Preview our Fall 2020 Catalog

We’re excited to unveil our Fall 2020 catalog. Check out some highlights from the season below and then download a copy for a closer read. These titles will be published between July 2020 and January 2021.

On the cover we’re featuring an image from artist Lorraine O’Grady’s Writing in Space, 1973–2019, which gathers her statements, scripts, and previously unpublished notes charting the development of her performance work and conceptual photography. The book is edited by Aruna D’Souza.

We lead off with Diary of a Detour by Lesley Stern, a memoir of living with cancer and the unexpected detours illness can produce. Poet Eileen Myles calls it “the most pleasurable cancer book imaginable.” It’s illustrated with delightful drawings of Stern’s chickens, who brought solace during her journey.

The next pages feature a couple of queer studies superstars: Jack Halberstam and the late José Esteban Muñoz. Muñoz was working on The Sense of Brown when he died in 2013. Scholars Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong′o have edited his unfinished manuscript and added an introduction. The book is a treatise on brownness and being as well as Muñoz’s most direct address to queer Latinx studies. Jack Halberstam’s new book Wild Things offers an alternative history of sexuality by tracing the ways in which wildness has been associated with queerness and queer bodies throughout the twentieth century. It’s sure to please fans of his bestselling previous books Female Masculinity and The Queer Art of Failure. LGBTQ studies scholars will also want to check out Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies by Cait McKinney and Sexual Hegemony, in which Christopher Chitty traces the 500-year history of capitalist sexual relations by excavating the class dynamics of the bourgeoisie’s attempts to regulate homosexuality. And Left of Queer, an issue of Social Text edited by David L. Eng and Jasbir K. Puar, offers a detailed examination of queerness and its nearly three-decade academic and political mainstreaming and institutionalization.

Two books on the fall list will be helpful to recent PhDs as they navigate the job market and the complicated world of academe. Putting the Humanities PhD to Work by Katina L. Rogers grounds practical career advice in a nuanced consideration of the current landscape of the academic workforce. And we announce a fourth edition of The Academic’s Handbook. This edition of the popular guide is edited by Lori A. Flores and Jocelyn H. Olcott and is completely revised and expanded. Over fifty contributors from a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds offer practical advice for academics at every career stage, whether they are first entering the job market or negotiating post-tenure challenges of accepting leadership and administrative roles.

Black studies continues to be a strong part of our list. This winter we publish a new book by Katherine McKittrick. In Dear Science and Other Stories she presents a creative and rigorous study of black and anticolonial methodologies, exploring how narratives of imprecision and relationality interrupt knowledge systems that seek to observe, index, know, and discipline blackness. Dear Science is the first book in the new Errantries series, edited by McKittrick, Simone Browne, and Deborah Cowen. In Sentient Flesh R. A. Judy offers an extended meditation on questions of blackness, the human, epistemology, and the historical ways in which the black being is understood. And we’re also looking forward to La Marr Jurelle Bruce’s How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind, an urgent provocation and poignant meditation on madness in black radical art.

Fall brings some great new art and art history titles, including Latinx Art by Arlene Dávila, who draws on numerous interviews with artists, dealers, and curators to provide an inside and critical look of the global contemporary art market. Looking at Latinx aesthetics from a popular culture perspective, Jillian Hernandez’s Aesthetics of Excess analyzes the personal clothing, makeup, and hairstyles of working-class Black and Latina girl to show how cultural discourses of aesthetic value racialize the bodies of women and girls of color. And in ¡Presente!, Diana Taylor offers the theory of presente as a model of standing by and with victims of structural and endemic violence by being physically and politically present in situations where it seems that nothing can be done. In Liquor Store Theater, Maya Stovall uses her conceptual art project—in which she danced near her Detroit neighborhood’s liquor stores as a way to start conversations with her neighbors—as a point of departure for understanding everyday life in Detroit and the possibilities for ethnographic research, art, and knowledge creation. In Beyond the World’s End, T. J. Demos explores a range of artistic, activist, and cultural practices that provide compelling and radical propositions for building a just, decolonial, and environmentally sustainable future. And in Keith Haring’s Line, Ricardo Montez traces the drawn and painted line that was at the center of Keith Haring’s artistic practice, engaging with Haring’s messy relationships to race-making and racial imaginaries.

If you love music books, you’re in luck this fall. We offer Black Diamond Queens by Maureen Mahon, which documents the major contributions African American women vocalists such as Big Mama Thornton, Betty Davis, Tina Turner, and Merry Clayton have made to rock and roll throughout its history. And in The Meaning of Soul, Emily J. Lordi examines the work of Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Solange Knowles, Flying Lotus, and others in order to propose a new understanding of soul, showing how it came to signify a belief in black resilience enacted through musical practices.

We’re featuring a great group of Latin American studies titles this fall. In The Cuban Hustle, Sujatha Fernandes explores the many ways artists, activists, and ordinary Cubans have sought to hustle, survive, and express themselves in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse. We also welcome back returning authors Brett Gustafson with Bolivia in the Age of Gas and Joanne Rappaport with Cowards Don’t Make History.

We welcome back a number of other returning authors as well. In History 4° Celsius Ian Baucom continues his inquiries into the place of the Black Atlantic in the making of the modern and postmodern world. Catherine Besteman offers a sweeping theorization of the ways in which countries from the global North are reproducing South Africa’s apartheid system on a worldwide scale in her new book Militarized Global Apartheid. Erin Manning’s latest book For a Pragmatics of the Useless explores the links between neurotypicality, whiteness, and black life. Joseph Masco returns with The Future of Fallout, and Other Episodes in Radioactive World-Making, which examines the psychosocial, material, and affective consequences of the advent of nuclear weapons, the Cold War security state, climate change on contemporary US democratic practices and public imaginaries. And in The Wombs of Women, Françoise Vergès traces the long history of colonial state intervention in black women’s wombs during the slave trade and postslavery imperialism as well as in current birth control politics.

Fall also brings essential new journal issues in political science and political history. In “Fascism and Anti-Fascism since 1945,” an issue of Radical History Review, contributors show how fascist ideology continues to circulate and be opposed transnationally despite its supposed death at the end of World War II. And “The ACA at 10,” a two-part issue of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, marks the tenth anniversary of the Affordable Care Act with essays from prominent analysts of US health policy and politics that explore critical issues and themes in the ACA’s evolution.

There’s so much more! We invite you to download the entire catalog and check out all the great books and journals inside. And be sure to sign up for our email alerts so you’ll know when titles you’re interested in are available.

Economic Knowledge in Socialism, 1945–1989

“Economic Knowledge in Socialism, 1945–1989” edited by Till Düppe and Ivan Boldyrev, a supplement to volume 51 of History of Political Economy, is now available.

While the development of economics in the U.S. during the Cold War has been subject to many studies, scholars from various disciplines have only recently begun exploring the other kind of economics during the same period: the economics in the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, this research has benefited not only from the newly open archives, but also from a more open environment for the sharing of memories and reminiscences. “Economic Knowledge in Socialism, 1945–1989” represents an exemplary cross-disciplinary effort for better understanding various domains of economic knowledge and, more broadly, the social sciences in the Eastern bloc.

“How does a socialist economy function and how can it best be managed? The essays in this rich and fascinating volume excavate how economists throughout the socialist world worked to create the conceptual and institutional tools they needed to approach these questions. By uncovering the diverse legacies of economic thought under socialism, the authors in this collection not only contribute to our understanding of the socialist past, but encourage us to question contemporary economic orthodoxies.” —Melissa Feinberg, Rutgers University

“This volume explodes the protective shield that has long kept the history of socialist experts a world apart, seemingly unrelated to anything outside it. The articles collected in this excellent volume draw upon exciting advances in science studies and intellectual history to demonstrate that the forms of economic knowledge seemingly peculiar to socialist governance were, in fact, strongly influenced by the pre-socialist tradition of economic expertise in Eastern Europe, as well as by reciprocal exchanges with Western capitalist experts. In the process, the volume also paints a fascinating gallery of flesh-and-blood socialist experts, neither subservient mouthpieces of official dogma nor courageous dissidents, but ordinary individuals caught up in an extraordinary ideological machinery.” —Gil Eyal, Columbia University

Read the issue’s free introduction and its table of contents, or purchase the issue.

Militarism and Capitalism

“Militarism and Capitalism: The Work and Wages of Violence,” the latest issue of Radical History Review, edited by Simeon Man, A. Naomi Paik, and Melina Pappademos, is out now.

This special issue examines the historical intersections of militarism and capitalism, investigating the co-constitutions of military infrastructure, logistics, labor, and violence with capital’s emergence and ever-expanding need for growth.

Contributors study the emergence of private military corporations and their collusions with imperial military states; the relationship between transactional sex and black-market economies for US military goods during the Korean War; past struggles of the Kanaka Maoli as a guide for present-day efforts to demilitarize and decolonize Hawai‘i; and much more.

Read the introduction to “Militarism and Capitalism,” freely available, and browse the table of contents.

The End of Area

The newest special issue of positions: asia critique, “The End of Area: Biopolitics, Geopolitics, History,” edited by Gavin Walker and Naoki Sakai, is now available.

As the two universal forms of capitalism—the commodity and the nation-state—expand globally, and as technological innovation and cultural exchange challenge borders and national identities, traditional ideas of what constitutes “area” and “area studies” have become increasingly irrelevant. Yet despite critiques, area studies persists today, even as history renders it more and more obsolete.

Contributors to “The End of Area” explore what area studies can do when its object, “area,” detaches from the realm of geopolitics and enters also into the realm of biopolitics. This issue centers translation and the biopolitical as new theoretical mechanisms for area studies to order, combine, separate, and classify life.

Read the introduction, freely available, and browse the table of contents.