Degenerative Realism: Novel and Nation in Twenty-First-Century France

Christy Wampole

New York: Columbia University Press, 2020

A new strain of realism has emerged in France. The novels that embody it represent diverse fears—immigration and demographic change, radical Islam, feminism, new technologies, globalization, American capitalism, and the European Union—but these books, often best-sellers, share crucial affinities. In their dystopian visions, the collapse of France, Europe, and Western civilization is portrayed as all but certain and the literary mode of realism begins to break down. Above all, they depict a degenerative force whose effects on the nation and on reality itself can be felt.

See Forms of Radicality, Lecture, ICI Berlin

Worlding Global Art Histories through Teaching

Eva Bentcheva et al. (Eds.)

Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2026

Worlding Global Art Histories through Teaching positions art history education as a tool for world-making and democratic engagement in a time of division. It is a vital resource for educators and students that considers global art histories not as a top-down structure, but as a dynamic and evolving process. Bringing together essays, conversations, and reflections on syllabi, the contributors consider how pedagogy cultivates critical thinking and decolonial awareness. Drawing from teaching experiences in Canada, China, Germany, Singapore, the United States, and other countries, this collection advocates for relationality and pluriversal knowledge as a way to challenge a Eurocentric canon.

Queer Apocalypse: An Issue of GLQ

Curran Nault et al. (Eds.)

Durham: Duke University Press, 2026

Queer Apocalypse explores the subcultural limits and pleasures of creating queer art, scholarship, and community across hostile terrains and turbulent times. This issue’s imaginative and engaged mix of approaches to the apocalyptic includes conversations, brief essays, and full-length articles–all of which reflect and mobilize the embodied stakes of queer studies today. Spanning disciplines, geographies, and temporalities, Queer Apocalypse surveys strategies for living trans, crip, and queer lives within ongoing structures of violence and crisis, offering not just critique, but radical possibilities.

The Literary Workshop: The Chaotic Space Where Books Are Made

Monique Wittig

London: Verso, 2026

The Literary Workshop takes readers inside Monique Wittig’s creative process, unlocking the practice of writing both in material and political terms. Wittig provides her most com­plete account of how literature and politics work together. Part of the generation that revolutionized French literature, Wittig reveals the secret of her craft: that the work a writer does with language is itself a form of resistance. Born and raised in France, Monique Wittig (1935–2003) was a driving force in second-wave feminism and one of the most brilliant authors of her generation. A provocative thinker, she famously declared that lesbians are not women and in­troduced women into a materialist framework by treating them as a class.

Auto: Self-Representation and Digital Photography

Hans Hedberg et al. (Eds.)

Göteburg: Art and Theory Publishing, 2014

Today we are all photographers. Self-portraits are everywhere and snapshots of our lives are circulated and shared frenetically on various social media networks. This calls for increased knowledge about the performative characteristics of digitized and networked visual communication. What are the limits of automation and what is the potential of virtuality? When is visuality empowering and when is self-monitoring out of control? Auto investigates how the everyday digital photography of our times challenges notions of autobiography, interactivity, and democracy.

Riotous Deathscapes

Hugo Ka Canham

Durham: Duke University Press, 2023

In Riotous Deathscapes, Hugo ka Canham presents an understanding of life and death based on indigenous and black ways of knowing that he terms Mpondo theory. Focusing on amaMpondo people from rural Mpondoland, in South Africa's Eastern Cape, Canham outlines the methodologies that have enabled the community's resilience and survival. He assembles historical events and a cast of ancestral and living characters, following the tenor of village life, to offer a portrait of how Mpondo people live and die in the face of centuries of abandonment, trauma, antiblackness, and death. By charting a course of black life in Mpondoland, Canham tells a story of blackness on the African continent and beyond.

Rootedness: The Ramifications of a Metaphor

Christy Wampole

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016

People have long imagined themselves as rooted creatures, bound to the earth—and nations—from which they came. In Rootedness, Christy Wampole looks toward philosophy, ecology, literature, history, and politics to demonstrate how the metaphor of the root—surfacing often in an unexpected variety of places, from the family tree to folk etymology to the language of exile—developed in twentieth-century Europe. Exploring the works of Martin Heidegger, Simone Weil, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Celan, and many more, Rootedness is a groundbreaking study of a figure of speech that has had wide-reaching—and at times dire—political and social consequences. 

Manual para desarmar la memoria: Poesía documental latinoamericana / Handbook for Dismantling Memory: Documentary Poetry from Latin America

Ana Rocío Jouli & Camilo Baquero Burgos (Eds.)

Berlin: Trashumantes, 2025

In Manual para desarmar la memoria / Handbook for Dismantling Memory, eleven voices from the Latin American diaspora in Berlin rewrite materials like election records, migration forms, and advertisements. By reframing the verbal and visual matters of these documents, their poetics explore the archive as a political territory of resistance, belonging, and imagination.

Queer Ancient Ways: A Decolonial Exploration

Zairong Xiang

punctum books, 2018

Queer Ancient Ways advocates a profound unlearning of colonial/modern categories as a pathway to the discovery of new forms and theories of queerness in the most ancient of sources. In this radically unconventional work, Zairong Xiang investigates scholarly receptions of mythological figures in Babylonian and Nahua creation myths, exposing the ways they have consistently been gendered as feminine in a manner that is not supported, and in some cases actively discouraged, by the texts themselves. An exercise in decolonial learning-to-learn from non-Western and non-modern cosmologies, Xiang’s work uncovers a rich queer imaginary that had been all-but-lost to modern thought.