Solarity: An Issue of South Atlantic Quarterly

Imre Szeman and Darin Barney

Durham: Duke University Press, 2021

In the shadow of climate change, it is common to presume that solar energy is the big solution to our energy problems. It is a fuel source of infinite supply, resistant to commodification and speculation, and collectible and expendable without the destructive consequences of fossil fuels and nuclear energy. What remains to be understood is not the amount of energy solar power can produce, or whether it is truly an adequate replacement for fossil fuels, but the conditions of social and political possibility solar might generate. The contributors to this special issue address the overlapping relationships, strategies, and conflicts that will attend this latest and perhaps last energy transition under the term “solarity.”

See From Solar Futures to Future Solidarity, Symposium, ICI Berlin

Pier Paolo Pasolini: Framed and Unframed. A Thinker for the Twenty-First Century

Luca Peretti and Karen T. Raizen (Eds.)

New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020

This cross-disciplinary volume explores and complicates our understanding of Pasolini today, probing notions of otherness in his works, his media image, and his legacy. Today his films stand as lampposts of Italian cinematic production, his cinematic theories resonate broadly through academic circles, and his philosophical, essayistic, and journalistic writings-albeit relatively sparsely translated into other languages-are still widely influential. The collected essays push us to consider and reconsider Pasolini, a thinker for the twenty-first century.

See Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Unstable Geographies, Discussion, ICI Berlin

Atlas of Spatial Figures: Exploring Spaces of the Contemporary

Ignacio Farías et al (Eds.)

Berlin: JOVIS Verlag, 2025

Globalization, as it is conceptualized in the early twenty-first century, is undergoing significant transformations. Traditional theories of globalization are insufficient to fully analyze these shifts. Drawing on empirical research from the Re-Figuration of Spaces Collaborative Research Center, the book tests the interplay between analytical, narrative, and visual thinking, translating theoretical figures of thought into spatial stories.

See Spatial Figures in the Anthropocene, Symposium, ICI Berlin

Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism

Leif Weatherby

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2025

Looking at the emergence of generative AI, Language Machines presents a new theory of meaning in language and computation, arguing that humanistic scholarship misconstrues how large language models (LLMs) function. Seeing LLMs as a convergence of computation and language, Leif Weatherby contends that AI does not simulate cognition, as widely believed, but rather creates culture. To determine the consequences of using AI for language generation, Weatherby reads linguistic theory in conjunction with the algorithmic architecture of LLMs. Locating the output of LLMs on a spectrum from poetry to ideology, Language Machines concludes that literary theory must be the backbone of a new rhetorical training for our linguistic-computational culture.

Planetary Realism: Art Against Apocalypse

Josephine Berry

London: Sternberg Press, 2025

The devastation left in the wake of modernity and globalization is revealing a fragile and unfamiliar planet, and humanity has awakened to a new real. If the old “realist” tools of objectivism have contributed to capitalist society’s divorce from the natural world, how are artists finding new ways to make us really see—and feel—the planet? Surveying a body of planet-facing art, communal practices, and activism, Josephine Berry investigates art’s power to break with capitalist realism and decarbonize the imagination. With chapters on feeling as world-making, the rupture of petroleum landscapes, artists’ urban exodus, and migration as survival, Planetary Realism delves deeply into art’s necessary reimagining of life on Earth.

Geologic Life: Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race

Kathryn Yusoff

Durham: Duke University Press, 2025

In Geologic Life, Kathryn Yusoff theorizes the processes by which race and racialization emerged geologically. Examining both the history of geology as a discipline and ongoing mineral and resource extraction, Yusoff locates forms of imperial geology embedded in Western and Enlightenment thought and highlights how it creates anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, and anti-Brown environmental and racial injustices. Tracing the conceptualization of the inhuman as political, geophysical, and paleontological, Yusoff unearths an apartheid of materiality as distinct geospatial forms. This colonial practice of geology organized and underpinned racialized accounts of space and time in ways that materially made Anthropocene Earth.

The Global Spatial Revolution: Space, Power, Communication in the Air Age

Matteo Vegetti

New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2025

Developing Carl Schmitt’s reflection on the power of the elements, Vegetti identifies in the advent of aerial spatiality the onset of a true spatial revolution, which through aviation, electromagnetic waves, satellite telecommunication systems, space travel and internet has shaped our global world and its great spatial issues. The author studies the effects attributable to this profound historical transition from a genealogical point of view. These effects are of a political and social order, but also an anthropological one, since the metamorphosis of space demands an overall reorientation of the relationship between the subject and the world to which it belongs.

Critical Essays: Volume 1: 1944–1948

Georges Bataille

Chicago: Seagull Books, 2023

In the aftermath of the Second World War, French thinker and writer Georges Bataille forged a singular path through the moral and political impasses of his age. In 1946, animated by “a need to live events in an increasingly conscious way,” and to reject any compartmentalization of intellectual life, Bataille founded the journal Critique. Adopting the format of the review essay, he surveyed the post-war cultural landscape while advancing his reflections on excess, non-knowledge, and the general economy.
This is the first of three volumes collecting Bataille’s post-war essays. These texts make available for the first time in English the systematic diversity of Bataille’s post-war thought.

Critical Essays: Volume 2: 1949–1951

George Batallie

Chicago: Seagull Books, 2024

Continuing the publication of George Bataille's postwar writings, this second volume in collects his essays and reviews from the years 1949 to 1951. In this period of intellectual isolation and intense reflection, Bataille developed and refined his genealogy of morality through a sustained reflection on the fate of the sacred in the modern world. He offered a critique of the limits of existing morality, especially in its denial of excess, while sketching the lineaments of a new hyper-morality. The connecting thread in these diverse essays remains Bataille’s concern with the extremes of human experience and the possibilities of transcending the limits of societies founded on utility and restraint.

Affective Activisms and the RIght to Have Rights in Turkey

Eirini Avramopoulou

Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024

This book presents a novel approach to the study of contemporary social movements and activism. Based on extensive ethnographic research of the life and politics of feminist, LGBTQI+, and women’s religious groups in Istanbul from 2007 to 2015, it explores the affects, meanings, and interpretations these groups express in their activism — in particular, their strategic use of human rights’ language to claim institutional and social legitimacy and their reinterpretation of gender/queer theory across politics of difference to make sense of global dynamics that affect their everyday lives.