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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Congratulations to Marta Figlerowicz! Her translation of The Bad Child: A Maria Janion Reader for the Cultural Critique Book Series was awarded the 2026 Modernist Studies Association Translation Prize! 🎉🎉🎉 www.upress.umn.edu/978151791968...

upress.umn.edu

The Bad Child

Collected writings from a visionary thinker about the perilous edge between patriotism and fascism How do nationalism and patriotism shape our understand...

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

Will Straw reviews Lucas Hilderbrand’s book The Bars Are Ours, concluding, “Hilderbrand succeeds in showing us the variety of ways, often mundane and usually incomplete, in which gay bars have served as places of momentary refuge and precarious community.” Read more: muse.jhu.edu/pub/23/artic...

Book cover of The Bars are Ours by Lucas Hilderbrand, published by Duke University Press

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

In a book review, Robin May Schott writes, “An underlying question is this: How does one tell the history of feminism? Feminist histories are filled with contestations, complexities, and failures.” Find out more in Schott’s review of Rana Jaleel’s book at muse.jhu.edu/pub/23/artic...

Book cover of The Work of Rape by Rana M. Jaleel published by Duke University Press

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

Reading Paul of Tarsus with Herman Melville and Michel Serres, Char Roone Miller claims, “Paul offers a way to think about life as moving through liquid, not just as a fixed object. He offers a way to have a sea-becoming.” It’s in CC130 at: muse.jhu.edu/pub/23/artic...

muse.jhu.edu

Project MUSE -- Verification required!

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

Examining the dystopian novel Never Let Me Go (NLMG) by Kazuo Ishiguro, Kristofer Petersen-Overton writes,“The invisibility of structural injustice is precisely what makes it so difficult to identify and, by extension, to challenge.” Read more in CC130: muse.jhu.edu/pub/23/artic...

muse.jhu.edu

Project MUSE -- Verification required!

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

“Thanatoirs,” asserts Srijani Nag, “undo this shunning of death by opening up a discourse on death, dying, and the dead.” Keep reading at muse.jhu.edu/pub/23/artic...

muse.jhu.edu

Project MUSE -- Verification required!

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

About J. M. Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians, Pratistha Sané Bhattarai asks, “Could it be that what the novel is waiting for is precisely a method of interpretation adequate for totalizing its actions without subsuming them into a temporal whole?” Find out at muse.jhu.edu/pub/23/artic...

muse.jhu.edu

Project MUSE -- Verification required!

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

Andrea Cassatella argues, “Looking at [Frantz] Fanon’s psychiatric writings offers an opportunity to tie together decolonization and translation in a way that is attentive to both epistemic and cultural concerns, as well as political and material ones.” Read more: muse.jhu.edu/pub/23/artic...

muse.jhu.edu

Project MUSE -- Verification required!

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

Thinking with photographs by Alison Ruttan and examining histories of racism and species hierarchization, Shawn Michelle Smith asks, “Can the species responsible for destroying the planet really ‘mourn with’ the other species it is leading to extinction?” Read more at muse.jhu.edu/article/982656

muse.jhu.edu

Project MUSE -- Verification required!

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

CC130 is now LIVE on Project MUSE! Check it out at muse.jhu.edu/issue/56400

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 04/03/2026

Jeremy Meckler writes that the “cinematic iconoclast" Chris Marker “is a filmmaker known both for his achingly personal style of documentary film, yet he remains playfully elusive about his own identity….” Read more in Meckler’s book review in Frame 15! manifold.umn.edu/read/cc-fram...

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 04/03/2026

Hunter Hargraves ponders, “In times of unrelenting crisis, how much should we—as professional queers, as scholars of modern culture, as resistant and critical viewing publics—desire the normal?” Read more in Hargraves’ book review of Karen Tongson’s book Normporn: manifold.umn.edu/read/cc-fram...

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 04/03/2026

Jason Read writes: “Nesbitt’s book takes up what could be considered the central claim, or question of Lire Le Capital: What does it mean to read Marx’s Capital, not as a critique of political economy, but as a philosophical text?” Learn more in Read’s book review: manifold.umn.edu/read/cc-fram...

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 04/03/2026

Frieda Ekotto asks, “What happens to dense political writing when the translator must confront old and tired anxieties of meaning getting lost in translation?” Find out in her review of a new translation of Aimé Césaire’s . . . . . . And the Dogs Were Silent at manifold.umn.edu/read/cc-fram...

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 04/03/2026

Frame 15 is LIVE on Cultural Critique Online, with new reviews from Frieda Ekotto, Jason Read, Hunter Hargraves, and Jeremy Meckler. Check it out at manifold.umn.edu/projects/cc1...

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 05/08/2025

"Readers in the English-speaking world will have much to gain by engaging with [The Prisoner]—not for the foreign history it recounts but for the incisive perspective it offers on global histories we think we may already know.”—find out why in Daniel Y. Kim’s review: manifold.umn.edu/read/cc-fram...

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 05/08/2025

Wilton Schereka writes in summary of Davis's argument: "the danger in this [so-named culture of empathy] is that it disregards the expanse of life experiences, and replaces it instead with a simulacrum of feeling, like a bad cover song..." manifold.umn.edu/read/cc-fram... more of the book review at

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 05/08/2025

On Gramsci at Sea, “this book is a delight partially due to its unwillingness to deliver on its provocations"—find out why in @peterives.bsky.social's book review at manifold.umn.edu/read/cc-fram...

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 05/08/2025

"...The novel is able to do what dialectical thinking can achieve only in the course of a painstaking critical operation: engage with things and concepts...in their true, historical being...” —writes Timothy Bewes in his review of Jameson’s Inventions of a Present at manifold.umn.edu/read/cc-fram...

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 05/08/2025

Frame 13 is now LIVE on Cultural Critique Online, with new reviews from Timothy Bewes, @peterives.bsky.social, Wilton Schereka, and Daniel Y. Kim. Check it out at manifold.umn.edu/projects/cc1...

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

Adhikari urges that "Bangladesh's liberation must be understood through these coalescing circuits, not as the inevitable outcome of territorial contestation but with an attention to encounters across geographies and temporalities." Read more in CC 127! doi.org/10.1353/cul....

doi.org

Project MUSE - "The After of the Already Too Late": Cinema, Time, and Third World Solidarity in Naeem Mohaiemen's The Young Man Was

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

Per Oveisy, "any leftist folklore that does not contest the cultures of capital lacks historical and strategic specificity and is prone to mediating any inconsequential or not-so-consequential issue through unexamined strategies." Read more in CC 127 at doi.org/10.1353/cul.... !

doi.org

Project MUSE - Toward a Folklore of the Left: Retracting the Strategic Models of Fiction from English Realism to Streaming Television

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

Departing from "Derrida's meditations on Japanese political leaders' national apologies," Kim-Kiteishvili "aims to reimagine the ethical and political possibilities of forgiveness as part of, and apart from, the Abrahamic tradition" in CC 127! doi.org/10.1353/cul....

doi.org

Project MUSE - The Madness of Forgiveness and Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

Amidst tumultuous current events, Doganay aims to "exemplify the co-function of the university and hysteric's discourse in the reproduction of Cartesian dichotomies in the here and now but also in the imagined future." Read more in CC 127, live at doi.org/10.1353/cul.... !

doi.org

Project MUSE - Revisiting Feminist Contentions through a Lacanian Lens: Relapsing into the Cartesian Subject amidst Inclusion and Exclusion Dynamics

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

In CC 127, Jauregui stresses that "one of the core ideas about neoliberalism and contemporary capitalism that the other types of analysis hide: the understanding of the private and privatizing logic of the economic world of individuals." Read more at doi.org/10.1353/cul.... !

doi.org

Project MUSE - Foucault on Becker on Neoliberalism

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

Per Engelking, "both Schmitt's and Kojève's proximity to the circles of power led some researchers to the conclusion that they were "reckless minds""—see if you agree in CC 127, now live at doi.org/10.1353/cul.... !

doi.org

Project MUSE - Alexandre Kojève and Carl Schmitt on New Formulas of Political Unity

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

"To listen, on the other hand, involves an active following of what is heard—or even listening for something despite the fact that there is nothing to hear—in a kind of empty intentionality."—read more on Grüny's distinctions in CC 127! doi.org/10.1353/cul....

doi.org

Project MUSE - Listen! An Old Idea in New Guises

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

CC 127 is now LIVE on Project MUSE! muse.jhu.edu/issue/54600

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

“Form is not an index of the novel's thought but the sensuous presentation of determinate concepts,” notes Turner in his review of Bewes’s FREE INDIRECT, now live in CC 126! doi.org/10.1353/cul....

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

“While Africa is very far from a monolith on queer issues, and the forms of activism being forged there might offer ideas and inspiration to those of us in the West as we face incoming storms of our own”—read more from Munro’s review in CC 126! doi.org/10.1353/cul....

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

In his review, Brown notes that “making a determination of racism where a full determination is not yet (and possibly never will be) available, is to risk "crying wolf" in a context in which no one yet agrees that wolves live or exist.” doi.org/10.1353/cul....

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

“Reminiscent of the dilemmas of intellectuals of the interwar period, our generation must once again learn to "think without banisters””—read more of Gambetti’s prescient review of Toscano in CC 126! doi.org/10.1353/cul....

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

In CC 126, Koc offers a theory of "memetic aesthetics, referring to an exponentially proliferating multiplicity of emergent stylistic categories circulating via memes and other forms of digital communication." Read more at doi.org/10.1353/cul.... !

doi.org

Project MUSE - "Is The Scene Still Alive?": Post-Hipster Affect, Memetic Aesthetics, and the Crisis of Subcultural Authenticity

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

"Featuring news segments, conversation pieces, cabaret performances, and onsite reports... The Emerald City adopted... a mode enabling it to cover an expansive set of queer concerns through a constantly morphing structure." More from Mills in CC 126! doi.org/10.1353/cul....

doi.org

Project MUSE - In Pursuit of The Emerald City: Cable-Access Television and the Gay 1970S

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

Per Goldberg, "sociability has engendered a contemporary proliferation of what we might think of as gender types, in contrast to gender categories." Read more from his article now live in CC 126! doi.org/10.1353/cul....

doi.org

Project MUSE - The 400 Genders

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

“There are movements that bring unexpected meetings,” writes DeMay, “and this is good.” More on radical walking and the avant-garde encounter in CC 126! doi.org/10.1353/cul....

doi.org

Project MUSE - Radical Walking and the Avant-Garde Encounter

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

In CC 126, Mahler shows how “LADLA sought to forge an alternative relation among peoples across national, linguistic, and racial borders and to denaturalize the commodification of territories and resources”—read more at doi.org/10.1353/cul.... !

doi.org

Project MUSE - A Photography of Relation: Indigeneity, Anti-Imperialism, and Tina Modotti's Visual Language of Liberation

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

CC 126 is now live on Project MUSE! muse.jhu.edu/issue/54230

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

"We operate in a strange academic world in which we scorn “the music itself,”" writes McClary, "thereby leaving it to interdisciplinary scholars like Said who have the skills necessary to grapple with how this medium produces its effects." Now live at manifold.umn.edu/read/cc-fram... !

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

"Ideology emerges within the boundaries and coordinates of theory itself, is itself a problem of theory," writes Samuel J.R. Mercer in his review of Fardy's IDEOLOGY AND INTERPELLATION. Read more in Frame 12 at manifold.umn.edu/read/cc-fram... !

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

"When confronted with radically distinct ways of living and very different social formations, it was commonplace for Europeans to draft long lists of all things that the Amerindians lived without," writes Mihkelsaar in his review of Brown's STATELESSNESS manifold.umn.edu/read/cc-fram...

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

"the stylistic and narrative features of Eisner’s own writing and self-presentation placed her outside the mainstream of film theory and historiography," articulates Weinstein from Naomi DeCelles' RECOLLECTING LOTTE EISNER, live now in Frame 12 at manifold.umn.edu/read/cc-fram... !

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

Frame 12 of Cultural Critique Online is now LIVE at manifold.umn.edu/projects/cc1..., featuring writing from Valerie Weinstein, Janar Mihkelsaar, Samuel J.R. Mercer, and Susan McClary! manifold.umn.edu/projects/cc1...

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

"Reading [Achille Mbembe's] BRUTALISM occasionally feels like scrolling through some sort of academic darknet," offers Frieda Ekotto—find out why in her review of Mbembe in Frame 11! manifold.umn.edu/read/cc-fram...

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

"the 'Persianate' elucidates certain modes of circulation and cultural exchange, and as such, it carries with it methodologies for understanding and analyzing the many cultural offsprings produced in Persianate premodernity."—read more from Fani at manifold.umn.edu/read/cc-fram... !

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

Per John Kendall, Christophers warns that "green capitalists... will no doubt drive down costs under the compulsion of market competition, but they will do so only insofar as they believe it will allow them to reap a greater rate of profit."—read more at manifold.umn.edu/read/cc-fram... !

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

"inconvenience corresponds to relation’s affront to the subject’s autonomy insofar as it imposes a demand [for reaction] that the subject is unable to refuse"—so writes Lee Edelman of the work of the late Lauren Berlant, now live in Frame 11 at manifold.umn.edu/read/cc-fram... !

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

Frame 11 is now LIVE on Cultural Critique Online, with new reviews from Lee Edelman, John Kendall, Aria Fani, and senior editor Frieda Ekotto. Check it out at manifold.umn.edu/projects/cc1... !

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 20/01/2025

“We document the process of turning a collective of frustrated humor studies scholars into the Critical Humor Studies Association: a vast and growing network of international scholars...” Read more from our Frame 10 contributors, live on Cultural Critique Online! manifold.umn.edu/projects/cc1...

manifold.umn.edu

Cultural Critique Online | Manifold @uminnpress

Welcome to *Cultural Critique Online,* the open-access online section of *Cultural Critique*. This journal provides a forum for creative and provocative scholarship in the theoretical humanities and h...

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Cultural Critique @culturalcritique.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

Trying to keep in contact with family in Gaza, Taher Herzallah describes how “seeing students on campuses across the country locking arms and singing freedom songs...was a sight that gave me—and my relatives in Gaza—hope.” Read his whole dispatch in Frame 9 at manifold.umn.edu/read/cc-fram...

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