The International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs is pleased to announce the publication of the second issue of volume seven of Critical Times, published by Duke University Press at https://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times.
The issue includes contributions by Christian Sorace, Lisa Guenther, Neil Vallelly, and Abdaljawad Omar; a special section titled “Relations Beyond Colonial Borders”; and an artistic intervention by Zheng Bo with an accompanying statement by Chris Cristóbal Chan.
The essays in the issue offer critical frameworks for exploring immunity, collective memory, neoliberalism, and resistance. Christian Sorace undertakes a critical reading of Peter Sloterdijk’s philosophical spherology, thinking with and beyond it to conceptualize new forms of immunity “in the wake of spherical catastrophe.” Sorace’s essay turns to a host of sites across periods and regions, from the thirteenth-century Secret History of the Mongols to Chi Ta-Wei’s speculative fiction, as it considers both the placenta as a figure of nonspherical immunity and the persistence of spheres as infrastructures of survival at the end of the world. Catalyzed by a proposed memorial garden on the grounds of Canada’s first prison for women, Lisa Guenther’s essay theorizes a critical phenomenology of the ontological, social, ethical, and political dimensions of collective memory. Broader than the episodic memory of former prisoners, collective memory belongs, Guenther argues, to a “we” beyond identity. Neil Vallelly considers recent accounts of the “end” of neoliberalism, reflecting on the theoretical framework that informs such pronouncements of finality. Drawing on Frank Kermode’s literary theory, the essay explores the political limitations of the diagnosis of ending and the possibilities of ending as a metatheoretical device. Finally, thinking with Georges Bataille’s notion of the informe (or formless), Abdaljawad Omar considers how the ongoing genocide in Gaza defies existing interpretations. Defining resistance as a formless anticoncept, Omar demonstrates how the current articulation of Palestinian resistance both deforms the existing colonial structure and surpasses the spontaneity of the intifada. Omar argues that the present moment “is marked by a decomposition of the colonial order without decolonization.”
The special section, “Relations Beyond Colonial Borders,” includes interventions by scholars, activists, poets, and artists whose work critically engages the modern border regime as a geopolitical technology indispensable to colonial occupation and imperial management. Edited by Natalia Brizuela, Samera Esmeir, Alyosha Goldstein, and Rebecca Schreiber, the section highlights spaces that have emerged in response to borders, foregrounding Indigenous practices of relation that refuse the logics of settler-colonial sovereignty and white supremacy. In “Border Abolition Is Decolonization: Indigeneity, Border Coloniality, and the Inhuman,” Mark Minch de-Leon argues for border abolition as a necessary component of decolonization. Leti Volpp explores how the criminalization of border crossing in the United States intersects with questions of Indigenous sovereignty, especially in cases of Indigenous nations whose territories span the United States and Mexico. Analyzing a recent case study, she argues that settler colonialism serves as both reason and alibi for Indigenous dispossession. Alexandra Délano Alonso documents the alternative multi-directional linguistic practices that have been developed by migrants and migrant-led organizations to challenge dichotomous notions of migrant and citizen, guest and host, arguing that such transformative practices prefigure alternative horizons. Bernadine Marie Hernández writes as a co-creator of fronteristxs, a collective of artists and writers working to abolish the prison industrial complex and migrant detention complex in New Mexico through art, language, and performance. Dani Zelko documents an ongoing project called Reunión: traveling to cities, towns, borders, and Indigenous lands, he meets with people and communities, transcribing their oral histories by hand and eventually creating books that are collectively edited, printed, and distributed. Finally, the section includes an interview with O’odham scholar and activist Nellie Jo David about the 2020 O’odham uprising against the construction of the Trump administration’s border wall. David describes the geographic imposition of colonial technology in the O’odham community and their history of resistance to colonization.
The issue concludes with stills from China-based artist Zheng Bo’s ongoing video installation, Pteridophilia, accompanied with a statement by Chris Cristóbal Chan. Shot in Taiwan, the images depict lush ferns—dubbed “queer plants” by the artist for their unusual reproductive cycle—and nude male actors in intimate contact with the plants and each other. As Chan notes, the work takes on decolonial and fantastical dimensions in its approach to Taiwan, as multispecies entanglements—and indeed, the fern itself—become symbolic of new possibilities.
Critical Times is a peer-reviewed, open-access online journal that seeks to foreground encounters between canonical critical theory and various traditions of critique emerging from other historical legacies, in an effort to highlight the multiple forms that critical thought takes today. We publish essays from different regions of the world in order to foster new paths for intellectual exchange and reformulate the field by accounting for its regional and linguistic inflections. The journal is published three times a year and invites submissions in the form of essays, interviews, dialogues, dispatches, visual art, and various other platforms for critical reflection, transnational exchange, and political reflection and practice.
Please visit the Critical Times website for more information on the journal and on how to contribute. Inquiries can be sent to criticaltimes@berkeley.edu.
