The Specter of Materialism

The Specter of Materialism PDF

Author: Petrus Liu

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2022-12-09

Total Pages: 129

ISBN-13: 1478024054

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In recent years, queer theory appears to have made a materialist turn away from questions of representation and performativity to those of dispossession, precarity, and the differential distribution of life chances. Despite this shift, queer theory finds itself constantly reabsorbed into the liberal project of diversity management. This theoretical and political weakness, Petrus Liu argues, stems from an incomplete understanding of capitalism’s contemporary transformations, of which China has been at the center. In The Specter of Materialism Liu challenges key premises of classic queer theory and Marxism, turning to an analysis of the Beijing Consensus—global capitalism’s latest mutation—to develop a new theory of the political economy of sexuality. Liu explores how relations of gender and sexuality get reconfigured to meet the needs of capital in new regimes of accumulation and dispossession, demonstrating that evolving US-Asian economic relations shape the emergence of new queer identities and academic theories. In so doing, he offers a new history of collective struggles that provides a transnational framework for understanding the nexus between queerness and material life.

Queer Marxism in Two Chinas

Queer Marxism in Two Chinas PDF

Author: Petrus Liu

Publisher:

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780822359722

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In Queer Marxism in Two Chinas Petrus Liu demonstrates how queer Marxist critics in China use queer theory as a non-liberal alternative to Western models of queer emancipation, and in doing so, he revises current understandings of what queer theory is, does, and can be.

Bad Education

Bad Education PDF

Author: Lee Edelman

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2022-12-05

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1478023228

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Long awaited after No Future, and making queer theory controversial again, Lee Edelman’s Bad Education proposes a queerness without positive identity—a queerness understood as a figural name for the void, itself unnamable, around which the social order takes shape. Like Blackness, woman, incest, and sex, queerness, as Edelman explains it, designates the antagonism, the structuring negativity, preventing that order from achieving coherence. But when certain types of persons get read as literalizing queerness, the negation of their negativity can seem to resolve the social antagonism and totalize community. By translating the nothing of queerness into the something of “the queer,” the order of meaning defends against the senselessness that undoes it, thus mirroring, Edelman argues, education’s response to queerness: its sublimation of irony into the meaningfulness of a world. Putting queerness in relation to Lacan’s “ab-sens” and in dialogue with feminist and Afropessimist thought, Edelman reads works by Shakespeare, Jacobs, Almodóvar, Lemmons, and Haneke, among others, to show why queer theory’s engagement with queerness necessarily results in a bad education that is destined to teach us nothing.

Left of Queer

Left of Queer PDF

Author: David L. Eng

Publisher:

Published: 2020-11-25

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 9781478011521

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The contributors to Left of Queer offer a detailed examination of queerness and its nearly three-decade academic institutionalization. They interrogate contemporary material conditions that create socially and politically acceptable queer subjects and identities; trace the development of queer studies as a brand of US area studies predicated on American culture and exceptionalism; and bring together queer theory and Marxism to reject claims that the two fields are incompatible. In examining these themes, the contributors explore how emergent debates in three key areas--debility, indigeneity, and trans--connect queer studies to a host of urgent sociopolitical issues. Taking a position that is politically left of the current academic and political mainstreaming of queerness, the essays in this issue examine what is left of queer--what remains outside of the political, economic, and cultural mandates of the state and the liberal individual as its prized subject. Contributors. Neel Ahuja, Aren Z. Aizura, Paul Amar, Toby Beauchamp, Marquis Bey, Jodi A. Byrd, Christina Crosby, Aniruddha Dutta, Treva Ellison, Fatima El-Tayeb, David L. Eng, Jules Gill-Peterson, Cristina B. Hanhardt, Kwame Holmes, Janet R. Jakobsen, Eng-Beng Lim, Petrus Liu, Tavia Nyong'o, Jasbir K. Puar, Sherene Seikaly, Eliza Steinbock

The Theological Dickens

The Theological Dickens PDF

Author: Brenda Ayres

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-11-18

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 1000469387

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This is the first collection to investigate Charles Dickens on his vast and various opinions about the uses and abuses of the tenets of Christian faith that imbue English Victorian culture. Although previous studies have looked at his well-known antipathies toward Dissenters, Evangelicals, Catholics, and Jews, they have also disagreed about Dickens’ thoughts on Unitarianism and speculated on doctrines of Protestantism that he endorsed or rejected. Besides addressing his depiction of these religious groups, the volume’s contributors locate gaps in scholarship and unresolved illations about poverty and charity, representations of children, graveyards, labor, scientific controversy, and other social issues through an investigation of Dickens’ theological concerns. In addition, given that Dickens’ texts continue to influence every generation around the globe, a timely inclusion in the collection is a consideration of the neo-Victorian multi-media representations of Dickens’ work and his ideas on theological questions pitched to a postmodern society.

Specters of Marx

Specters of Marx PDF

Author: Jacques Derrida

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-10-12

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1136758607

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Prodigiously influential, Jacques Derrida gave rise to a comprehensive rethinking of the basic concepts and categories of Western philosophy in the latter part of the twentieth century, with writings central to our understanding of language, meaning, identity, ethics and values. In 1993, a conference was organized around the question, 'Whither Marxism?’, and Derrida was invited to open the proceedings. His plenary address, 'Specters of Marx', delivered in two parts, forms the basis of this book. Hotly debated when it was first published, a rapidly changing world and world politics have scarcely dented the relevance of this book.

The Speculative Turn

The Speculative Turn PDF

Author: Levi Bryant

Publisher: re.press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 442

ISBN-13: 0980668344

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Continental philosophy has entered a new period of ferment. The long deconstructionist era was followed with a period dominated by Deleuze, which has in turn evolved into a new situation still difficult to define. However, one common thread running through the new brand of continental positions is a renewed attention to materialist and realist options in philosophy. Among the current giants of this generation, this new focus takes numerous different and opposed forms. It might be hard to find many shared positions in the writings of Badiou, DeLanda, Laruelle, Latour, Stengers, and Zizek, but what is missing from their positions is an obsession with the critique of written texts. All of them elaborate a positive ontology, despite the incompatibility of their results. Meanwhile, the new generation of continental thinkers is pushing these trends still further, as seen in currents ranging from transcendental materialism to the London-based speculative realism movement to new revivals of Derrida. As indicated by the title The Speculative Turn, the new currents of continental philosophy depart from the text-centered hermeneutic models of the past and engage in daring speculations about the nature of reality itself. This anthology assembles authors, of several generations and numerous nationalities, who will be at the center of debate in continental philosophy for decades to come.

Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital

Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital PDF

Author: Vivek Chibber

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2013-03-12

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1844679764

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Postcolonial theory has become enormously influential as a framework for understanding the Global South. It is also a school of thought popular because of its rejection of the supposedly universalizing categories of the Enlightenment. In this devastating critique, mounted on behalf of the radical Enlightenment tradition, Vivek Chibber offers the most comprehensive response yet to postcolonial theory. Focusing on the hugely popular Subaltern Studies project, Chibber shows that its foundational arguments are based on a series of analytical and historical misapprehensions. He demonstrates that it is possible to affirm a universalizing theory without succumbing to Eurocentrism or reductionism. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital promises to be a historical milestone in contemporary social theory.

The Class Matrix

The Class Matrix PDF

Author: Vivek Chibber

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2022-02-08

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 067424513X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Class structure -- Class formation -- Consent, coercion, and resignation -- Agency, contingency, and all that -- How capitalism endures.