The Space-Time Continuum in Ayokunle Falomo’s “African, American”
by Aris Kian “Falomo gives us living, breathing memories that stretch and kick and try on new clothes through such a genuine and vulnerable speaker willing to guide us through.”
An Irish Immigrant and Her Quests for Survival: An Interview with Novelist Lee Hutch
by Andrew Joseph Pegoda “This novel shows sides of the past often ignored or forgotten and shows us about the gaps between the United States’ proclaimed ideals and realities have long existed, especially for those not privileged by society. It also speaks to a shared human struggle for survival.”
The Black Oceanic Imagination in Rivers Solomon’s “The Deep”
by Aris Kian “In their ambitious second novella, Solomon explores questions of remembrance and well-being and considers answers that could only be found within a fictional landscape.”
Review: “Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art”
by Joseph Richards “Thus, the biggest contribution of this book is to put economic and aesthetic theory together, to see what happens when the aesthetic is subjected to a Marxist analysis.”
“Expertise” as Systematized Historical Amnesia: Springborg’s Egypt as a Case Study
by Zeyad el Nabolsy “Overall, one can say that this book rests on key distortions of recent Egyptian history, and it is primarily valuable as a case study in how expertise in the service of imperialism is constituted.”
Review: The United States of War” by David Vine
by Fabrizio Martino “Vine’s book allows the reader to have a full understanding of the evolution of American imperialism…”
Review: Reflections on Postcolonialism
By Bryant Scott “Above all, postcolonialism remains a heterogenous and eclectic body of thought that has proven widely adaptable in providing new angles on all sorts of phenomena, from the origins of modernity to neoliberalism and globalization.”
In Vitro: Narrative Essay
By Tamara Al-Qaisi-Coleman “This film is a surrealist dream, the way it plays with time and memory. Trauma stays in the body, always there tucked between your stomach and your ribs.”
Review: “The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price” by Rae Linda Brown
by A. Kori Hill “The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price is a much needed addition to scholarship on Black composers, American music history, Black women’s creative lives, and Florence Price herself.”
Sabotage, Survival, and SUVs: An Interview with Andreas Malm
On January 22, I met with Andreas Malm over Zoom to discuss his book, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, which was recently made available in the US by Verso books. We discussed the unique challenges faced by the movement against climate change, the history and power of strategic violence, and what the future might…
Roberto Lovato’s Epic Memoir “Unforgetting” Bends the Space Time Continuum
by Freddy Jesse Izaguirre “Lovato’s fresh voice, which some may erroneously categorize as ‘new,’ is that of a longtime revolutionary who’s lived a life as colorful as the ones he’s depicted through masterful storytelling.”
Pre-Marxism in the Last Instance: A Review of Chantal Mouffe’s “For a Left Populism”
by Brant Roberts “The current political order is riddled with obstacles along legal and economic lines, not to mention the concrete structure of the state, making social democratic reforms appear more utopian than communism.”
History from the Non-Region: A Review of Kristen Ghodsee’s Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women’s Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War
by Brant Roberts “Undoubtedly this book will ruffle the feathers of many western liberal feminists who feel that they, and they alone, brought equal rights for women to the rest of the world and felt themselves to be the shining beacon of freedom for all women to follow.
Jusqu’ici Tout Va Bien: La Haine 25 Years Later
by Brant Roberts “Amid rebellions throughout the US after the police-murder of George Floyd and the popular calls for abolishing the police, the messages of La Haine continue to be urgent, relevant, and important.”
Review: Houston Bound – Culture and Color in a Jim Crow City by Tyina Steptoe
by Ahmed H. Sharma “Employing vivid scholarship and strategic sources on race and ethnicity in Houston through sound, Steptoe successfully proves her vigor as an historian and scholar while simultaneously displaying her skills as a writer.”
Review of: The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood
By Amir Jaima “As a Black man, this text is a vindication; and as an academic, it is an invitation to engage in impactful scholarship that has real-world, anti-racist implications.”
Defiance in the Face of Imperialism: A Review of Bacurau
by Brant Roberts “An explicit allegory to antifascist resistance and anticapitalist values, Bacurau illustrates what it means for poor Brazilians to fight against a national comprador ruling class whose politics and interests are aligned with American hegemony.”
Contemporary Capitalism and Temporal Control in Sarah Sharma’s In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics
by Duy Lap Nguyen “The same extension occurs in Sharma’s chronography of flexible capitalism. In her critique of Marx’s quantitative conception of temporal control, the ontology of value determined by labor is never called into question.”
Review of “Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy: Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism” by Kohei Saito
by Adam Benden “The book is of interest for Marxist scholarship but also clearly seeks to catalyze a shift in politics in ecology and environmental politics as well. An ecosocialist Marx is being excavated to return to the necessity of his analysis to challenge capitalism’s destruction of the environment.”
Review of “Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands” by Stuart Hall
by Brant Roberts “Stuart Hall is arguably one of the most important Marxist intellectuals of the past century. That Familiar Stranger ends in 1964 is one of its weaknesses, but it provides a glimpse into the early life of one of Britain’s most important theorists.”
A Futurism without a Future: A Review of Aaron Bastani’s “Fully Automated Luxury Communism”
by Brant Roberts “For Bastani, it is easier to imagine mining asteroids and a work-free utopia than to imagine unalienated labor and socialism.”
Review of Kristen Ghodsee’s “Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism”
by Brant Roberts “In short, the author walks a fine line between conservative criticism of socialism and uncritically embracing the system, all while asking the readers to take into account what could work for everyone in a democratic-socialist future.”
Review of Joshua Moufawad-Paul’s “Demarcation and Demystification: Philosophy and Its Limits”
by Adam Benden “For Moufawad-Paul, philosophy as it appears to operate in the book would eventually remove the veil of ideology and class distortion to allow us to see reality, bare and naked, as it really exists. It implies that philosophical errors will no longer exist once the communist revolution is successful because the terrain…
Review of Nick Estes’ “Our History is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance”
by Brant Roberts “The radical kernel of the book is that today’s Indigenous political struggles are reflections of past struggles both in resistance to settler-colonialism and the violence imposed against them.”
Alain Badiou’s Hypothesis and the Arab Left as Contemporaries of May 68
by Dabya “What united them was not the vocabulary of classes or proletarian leadership, but the vocabulary of revolution and change in the broadest sense. For those who incorporated their bodies, thoughts, affects, and potentialities into a certain political truth procedure, and who became ‘militant[s] of this truth,’ the change had to look a certain…
“Whose Identity is Mistaken?” A Review of Asad Haider’s “Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump”
by Brant Roberts “Asad Haider’s Mistaken Identity takes the reader down a different path, one bent on collective liberation through what he terms ‘insurgent universality’.”
Review of Massimiliano Tomba’s “Insurgent Universality: An Alternative Legacy of Modernity”
by Brant Roberts “The book is rich in potential for rethinking what kind of future we would like to strive towards and deals with lost moments in history that have often been overlooked by both historians and socialists alike.”
Rupture in the Crime Heist Genre: Review of “La Casa de Papel”
by Brant Roberts “The use of cultural symbols in protests is far from new but in an era where one cannot leave any ground open for the far-right to capitalize on anything in the world, the need to utilize them when appropriate is more than it seems.”
Houston Review Of Books 