Search

The article "Fictions of Capital" by Eli Jelly-Schapiro explores Hernan Diaz's novels, particularly "In the Distance" and "Trust," delving into the intersection of finance and storytelling. Topics include the critique of the myth of America, the narratives shaping the present through the fictions of capital, and an analysis of fictitious capital in the context of financial speculation.

The three books under discussion here evince the dialectic of liberalism and critique, and the imperative of joining critique and self-critique. Rachel Greenwald Smith's On Compromise: Art, Politics, and the Fate of an American Ideal (2021) is a trenchant meditation on the cultural logics of liberalism in the moment of its putative triumph and global generalization. Patricia Stuelke's The Ruse of Repair: US Neoliberal Empire and the Turn from Critique (2021) clarifies the origins and political consequence of reparative thinking and feeling—a cultural and intellectual tendency that has, Stuelke submits, permitted or encouraged artists, activists, and scholars to reconcile themselves to recent iterations of "US neoliberal empire" and the longer histories of racial capitalism and settler-colonial dispossession. The affinity that Stuelke reveals, between the language of imperial power and the language of its imagined transcendence, is anatomized by Erica Edwards, in The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of US Empire (2021)—a cogent examination of the reciprocal relationship between the making of race and the making of war, and the complex positionality of Black women within the contemporary US imperium. The co-belonging of liberalism and critique often appears, to the critic or cultural producer, like complicity. There is an unsettling affinity... between the language we use to critique capital and the state, and the ideological lexicon of the forces that rule us. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of primitive accumulation, and Marx's treatment of it, has in recent decades acquired a heightened critical resonance. Postcolonial thinkers have called attention to the persistence of colonial relations and processes in the moment of their supposed negation. Theorists of contemporary capitalism, meanwhile, have accented the reenactment, in the present, of putatively primordial modes of depredation. Primitive accumulation has likewise become a core concern of "world literature", a cultural form – and hermeneutic orientation – that apprehends something of the world in its totality, the planetary shape or local articulation of the global capitalist order brought into being by empire and its afterlives. A unique strand of contemporary world literature, the novel of primitive accumulation traces the routes of continuity between original and latter-day histories of dispossession – the history of the present, and the presence of the past. The two novels I consider in this essay, Hernán Diaz's In the Distance (2017) and Fiston Mwanza Mujila's Tram 83 (2015), realize this two-fold ambit with a distinctive cogency. They represent, in particular, the advent and contemporary expression of what I want to call extractive modernity at large. Read together, these two novels reveal how the time–space of extraction is diffuse and perpetually reprised – even as they register its located origins and impacts. In so doing, these novels help clarify the particular languages of critique and struggle that emerge within, and begin to imagine a way beyond, both acute sites or instances of dispossession and the deeper, enduring history of primitive accumulation, its extractive forms in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the unique resonance of Roberto Bolaño's fiction in the moment of the War on Terror: the questions his work poses for the project of literature in a time of interminable global war, the genealogies of empire and capital his work brings into view, and the dialectic of civilization and barbarism his work reveals and critiques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This articles undertakes a genealogy of security: its integral place in the philosophic justification of settler-colonial processes, its constitutive role in the genesis of the modern state and capitalist mode of production, its intellectual and political history in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century United States. I contend that the current-day expressions of security governance – neoliberal technologies of accumulation by dispossession; the prosecution of a boundless and interminable War on Terror – reveal with a particular clarity the essential tensions and contradictions of the security project over the longue durée. And inversely, I argue, reflecting upon the longer history of the modern security project deepens our insight into the contemporary manifestation of security discourse and practice. My analysis of security is divided into three parts: security and property, security and race, and security and emergency. Property is the principal object of security governance, race delimits and structures the security state, and emergency is one governmental tactic through which a multifarious politics of security is legitimated and enforced. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]