We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk about a Little Culture

Sylvia Wynter

Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2022

The beginnings of the anti-colonial struggle in Jamaica coincided with the childhood and early adolescence of Sylvia Wynter, providing the motivation for this, the first phase of her important body of work. The essays and articles collected here go beyond making an argument against colonialism, but set out to decolonize the nature of the discourse that legitimated the imperial order.  Influenced by Marx and Black thinkers such as Aimé Césaire, Jean Price-Mars, W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, Wynter’s work has sought, from its beginnings, to find a comprehensive explanatory system able to integrate these knowledges born of struggle.

On Close Reading

John Guillory

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2025

Abstraction & Economy: Myths of Growth

Eva Maria Stadler & Jenni Tischer (Eds.)

Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024

This anthology explores the tension between abstraction and economics from the perspectives of art, art theory, art history, as well as law, sociology, philosophy, and economics. It poses questions about the current challenges of a global capitalist economy with claims to expansive growth in relation to aesthetics, technology, and democracy. The main focus is on the role of art in mediating between the concrete and the abstract, on formalist approaches to art theory, and on the social and economic cues that help us trace the aesthetic regime of capitalism.

Informatics of Domination

Zach Blas, Melody Jue & Jennifer Rhee (Eds.)

Durham: Duke University Press, 2025

Informatics of Domination is an experimental collection addressing formations of power that manifest through technical systems and white capitalist patriarchy in the twenty-first century. The volume takes its name from a chart in Donna J. Haraway’s canonical 1985 essay A Manifesto for Cyborgs. Haraway theorizes the informatics of domination as a feminist, diagrammatic concept for situating power and a world system from which the figure of the cyborg emerges. Informatics of Domination builds on Haraway’s chart as an open structure for thought, inviting fifty scholars, artists, and creative writers to unfold new perspectives.

Making the World Clean: Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment, and Racial Capitalism

Françoise Vergès

London: Goldsmiths Press, 2024

In Making the World Clean, Françoise Vergès examines the racial and gendered politics of wasting lands, bodies, and resources and the organized deprivation of clean water, shelter, and access to health services—in other words, the structural denial, along racial lines, of vital needs. Through 38 short sections, she looks at the social relations that have made cleaning into drudgery and into a racialized, gendered, poorly paid job that is nevertheless necessary for any society to function. She concludes with the proposition of a feminist, decolonial, antiracist, anti-patriarchal, and anti-capitalist politics of cleaning. Or, simply put, of “decolonial cleaning.”

Bliss Against the World: Schelling, Theodicy, and the Crisis of Modernity

Kirill Chepurin

New York: Oxford University Press, 2024

The concept of bliss, in its connotations of beatitude and salvation, may seem of little relevance to so-called secular modernity. Bliss Against the World argues otherwise by advancing a novel framework of the entanglement between modernity, Christianity, and bliss through the thought of German Idealist and Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854).
Bliss Against the World reinterprets Schelling’s philosophical trajectory from the 1790s to the 1840s, showing his metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and natural philosophy to be underwritten by the apocalyptic tension between bliss and theodicy. 

Le sujet amoureux dans la poésie médiévale: Forme lyrique et organisation textuelle chez Cavalcanti, Dante et Pétrarque

Franco Costantini

Berlin: De Gruyter, 2025

Le sujet amoureux dans la poésie médiévale studies the relationship between the textual organization of Cavalcanti’s, Dante’s, and Petrarch’s lyric collections and the construction of the lyric subject in this type of love poetry. Between ruptures and competition, the conflict of subjectivities, i.e. between an active, volitional subject and a passive subject, veils a conflict of temporality, between teleology of the narration and lyric circularity.

Building a Voice: Sound, Surface, Skin

Zeynep Bulut

London: Goldsmiths Press, 2025

How do we build or make a voice together? Can we imagine the voices we make in the form of a skin, a multi-sensory interface that behaves both as a boundary and as a point of connection? What does such a voice capacitate in times of crises and uncertainties?

In Building a Voice: Sound, Surface, Skin, Zeynep Bulut explores these questions. She examines the multi-sensory and collective forms of voice making in experimental music, sound and media art in conversation with the use of voice in creative interventions for environmental crisis, experiences of voice hearing, and digital technologies of artificial and tactile speech.