Category Politics and Culture
Thoughts on ‘Readings of Dreams from My Father’, Five Years Later
The publication history of Barack Obama’s Literary Legacy: Readings of Dreams from my Father began ten years ago. Its becoming deserves explanation. Why? Because it was nearly aborted due to lack of interest. The book itself was five years in the making. Now, five years after its publication, and 10 years after its inception, I […]
Amateurs and Experts
I’ve come to be regarded as an “expert” in some “fields.” One of those is the study of modern American Literatures. In recent years, I’ve written a lot about Don DeLillo, a writer who I have read and enjoyed for decades. I’ve written a book about his career, I’ve served as advisory editor to publications, […]
Manuel DeLanda’s Assemblage Theory published — Progressive Geographies
I’m re-posting this welcome bit of news regarding the new book by Manuel DeLanda, with whom I studied and whose writings continue to inspire, innovate and delight. Manuel DeLanda’s Assemblage Theory has been published in the Speculative Realism series at Edinburgh University Press. Clarifies and systematises the concepts and presuppositions behind the influential new field […]
Nick Levey on Post-Press Literature
In this new piece, Australian critic Nicholas Levey engages what he terms post-press literature, offering analysis of self-publishing as it strains the economic and aesthetic parameters of contemporary writing. His writing about “value” in this piece is of interest to my own thinking about literary commodities, which can be found over in the “Bibliotaphy” section […]
“Still Ahead Somehow:” Paul Amar’s The Security Archipelago
Here is a new book review by Neel Ahuja, which I edited in my work as advisory editor for the journal boundary 2 (the review’s title, from a poem by Langston Hughes, was my doing). It is posted to my “Literature/Politics” section of the journal website. Neel’s piece engages Amar’s book on bio-politics in a […]
Adjunct Professors and the Myth of Prestige (from Pacific Standard, 2015)
Here is the link to an essay I wrote in the spring of 2015 when I was asked to offer some perspective on the national discussion over the exploitation of contingent faculty in American higher education. Dispirited by the rancor I had witnessed at the MLA in Chicago the previous year, and in particular the […]
Rare Books & De Luxe Editions 