Political Media Review

If white supremacy was an illness afflicting America, Black disenfranchisement would be that cough that never goes away. Resonant, persistent, rattling to the bones and always that with which the sufferer writes off with excuses of other causes.

As I prepared to read Cary Wolfe’s latest book, What is Posthumanism?, I wondered how much hermeneutic effort would be required to answer the titular question. To my pleasure, Wolfe gives a clear definition of what he means by “posthumanism,” and how it contrasts with others’ usage, in the first few pages.

The Beast and the Sovereign can be located at the heart of dominant themes in Derrida’s later work including, but not limited to, a democracy to come, conditional and unconditional hospitality, calculability and incalculability, and the relation shared between state sovereignty, terrorism, and rogue states.

Why do we go to war? Adam Berinsky says that it is because elites that we trust cue us to the worthiness of the cause of war. Public opinion regarding the decision to go to war and support for war follows the same domestic partisan cues that lead the public to support or oppose quotidian issues such as tax hikes and whether to tinker with Social Security.

The gradual creep of the gay liberation movement toward assimilation dates back to the mid-1970’s. Yet, so does the critique of the process. Debate about the limitations of a gay agenda organized around marriage, military service and increasingly punitive hate crimes laws dominated the SexPanic! meetings in the late 1990’s in New York.

Tim Wise opens his compelling and formidable book with words from Barack Obama’s famous 2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention: “There’s not a black America, and a white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.”

Hollywood’s Exploited is an interdisciplinary collection designed to analyze the cultural narratives and political economy of Hollywood through Henry Giroux’s work on public pedagogy. In the foreword, renowned cultural studies scholar Lawrence Grossberg describes the book as a “critical pedagogy of Hollywood”