The International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs is pleased to announce the publication of the first issue of volume eight of Critical Times, published by Duke University Press at https://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-times.
The issue includes scholarly contributions by Ussama Makdisi, Ajay Skaria, Hengameh Ziai, Adil Hasan Khan, and Leire Urricelqui. It also features an artistic intervention by Senzeni Marasela, whose remarks in the issue are drawn from an interview with Zamansele Nsele.
This issue of Critical Times is the first to be edited by the journal’s new Senior Editor, Ramsey McGlazer. A literary critic and a scholar of twentieth-century European and Latin American literature, film, and critical theory, McGlazer is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches courses on poetry and poetics, politics and aesthetics, critical carceral studies, and feminist, queer, and psychoanalytic theory. He is the author of Old Schools: Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress (Fordham UP, 2020), which won the American Association for Italian Studies First Book Prize in 2021, and he is working on a book about aesthetics and radical psychiatry, especially in Italy and Brazil. McGlazer’s public writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, n+1, Parapraxis, and Post45 Contemporaries, and his translations from the Spanish include, most recently, Rita Segato’s The War Against Women (Polity, 2025).
The journal is also pleased to announce several other recent changes to our masthead. We gratefully welcome two new Art Editors, Al-An deSouza and Rasha Salti; two new Associate Editors, Michelle Rada and Kyra Sutton; an Assistant Editor, Sylvie Thode; and a new member of the Critical Times Editorial Team, Basit Iqbal. The indispensable work of these new editors has made the publication of our latest issue possible.
The scholarly essays in this issue work across historical, political, and theoretical contradictions—from understanding how institutions ostensibly dedicated to free speech can foster censorship and violent repression during an ongoing genocide, to working out how nonsense permeates ordinary language and radically reconstitutes the very meaning of meaning. Historicizing the Palestine exception as a phenomenon that persists “out of its racist colonial time,” Ussama Makdisi examines its structuring contradiction: even as liberal Western universities publicize their commitment to free speech and anti-racism, however belatedly, they also vocally and violently enforce their commitment to the denial of Palestinian humanity and history. While our moment has all too clearly shown the violent means through which institutions pursue the systematic denial of Palestinian reality, ongoing student and faculty resistance continues to expose and critique the racist fault lines that run through the Western academy.
Drawing on the 2024 case of Raz Segal, from whom the University of Minnesota withdrew an appointment offer to head the university’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Ajay Skaria focuses on two elements of academic freedom vital to understanding higher education today. First, that it is the institutional manifestation and implementation of the modern university itself and, second, that academic freedom embodies a form of equality different from that of free speech. Offering a conceptual and philosophical history of academic freedom in US universities, Skaria traces conflicting ideologies across the university that rely on the principle of academic freedom to radically divergent ends. In her essay “Nonsense: Talal Asad, Wittgenstein, and Religion” Hengameh Ziai stages a meeting between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Talal Asad to reconsider Wittgenstein’s encounters with non-western religion. Ziai thinks through the paradoxical absence of religion from the Philosophical Investigations alongside Asad’s scholarship, emphasizing how religion illuminates the forms of “nonsense” that permeate and structure ordinary language as we seek—and often find—significance in incongruity.
The issue includes an artistic intervention in which the South African multimedia artist Senzeni Marasela develops an “art of waiting” to convey the minoritized experiences of a range of Black South African women, including Winnie Mandela and Marasela’s own mother, Theodora. In comments derived from an interview with Zamansele Nsele, Marasela discusses two of her projects: iXesha, a set of calico-stitched fabric artworks depicting Theodora’s persistence through a “floating time-space of melancholia,” and Waiting for Gebane, a traveling exhibition that was the culmination of a six-year durational performance in which Marasela wore a version of her mother’s traditional dress every day to challenge Western art institutions including the Venice Biennale. Adil Hasan Khan’s essay offers imperial genealogies of two recent legal measures in India organized around Hindutva ideology—the National Register of Citizens and the Citizenship Amendment Act—that have jeopardized the citizenship of religious minorities. The basis of these prejudicial acts, Khan argues, can be found in two nineteenth-century imperial modes of exercising authority, indirect rule and capitulary jurisdiction, which ultimately suggest that abandoning the category of citizenship itself may be a more appropriate reaction to the current crisis than endlessly trying to secure it. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of grievability, Leire Urricelqui argues in the final piece of the issue, “Can the Terrorist Be Grieved?,” that perpetrators of violence deemed to be terroristic, including those resisting the ongoing Israeli attack on Gaza, are excluded from the category of the human and thus subject to a total eradication for which there can be no grief.
Critical Times is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal committed to the intellectual and political project of critical theory. Recognizing the many forms that theory takes today, the journal works to call attention to the ongoing, collective reinvention of critique. Critical Times features work from various regions, with particular interests in theory from the southern hemisphere and other places beyond Europe and the United States, and in practices of cross-regional intellectual exchange and struggle. We publish scholarly essays, interviews, dialogues, dispatches, visual art, and various other forms of critical reflection and response, and we welcome submissions that engage with social and political theory, literature, philosophy, art, anthropology, and other fields in the humanities and critical social sciences.
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