Perry Anderson: The House of Zion
The fate of the Palestinians and the fortunes of Israel, after fifty years of occupation, and American and European collusion with it. Realities behind the official tropes decorating a ‘two-state solution’, and hesitations of nascent debate over a single state in the territory once ruled as a mandate by Britain.
Iván Szelényi: Capitalisms After Communism
A leading Hungarian sociologist revises Weber’s notion of prebendal and patrimonial regimes to classify the new capitalist orders of the former Second World. Are governments from Budapest to Beijing now converging on the same models of politicized economy?
Walter Benjamin: By the Fireside
The solitary reader devours the novel, and the lives of its protagonists, as fire consumes the logs in a hearth; big business casts its shadow over a fading world: a life’s meaning is grasped by reflection on its end. In a hitherto untranslated 1933 review of Arnold Bennett’s Old Wives’ Tale, Benjamin reflects on the nature of storytelling and the novel.
Verónica Schild: Feminism and Neoliberalism in Latin America
Verónica Schild tests Nancy Fraser’s hypothesis of an elective affinity between feminism and neoliberalism against the material and cultural realities of Latin America. Shifting meanings of liberationist strategies for women’s autonomy and popular pedagogy in an epoch of free-market economics and NGOization.
Carlos Spoerhase: Seminar versus MOOC
Origins of the modern academic seminar in Germany’s university system, and its contrasts with the Massive Open Online Courses that have entranced the world of commercialized higher learning.
Sven Lütticken: Personafication
The shift of artistic and activist practice towards the performance of personae. Sven Lütticken tracks the fraying limits of subjecthood through post-war action painting, Marcel Mariën’s surrealist-Blanquist parti imaginaire, the 1960s Dutch neo-avant-garde, the Invisible Committee, Rojava and artistic experiments with the political party-form.
Marco D'Eramo: Dock Life
The history of global capitalism as inscribed in the changing face of the port city, from the teeming harbours of sail-era Amsterdam via the industrial hoards of the Cokeport to the great abstract desert of contemporary Rotterdam’s container terminals.
Francis Mulhern: Afterlives of the Commune
Francis Mulhern on Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury. Political imaginary and afterlives of the Paris Commune.
Jeffery Webber: Green Development?
Jeffery Webber on Thomas Miller Klubock, La Frontera. Social and environmental history of enclosure and resistance in southern Chile.
John Newsinger: The Famished Raj
John Newsinger on Janam Mukherjee, Hungry Bengal. Pathbreaking study of a forgotten colonial catastrophe that claimed millions of lives.