Turning to Walter Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana (1596) and The History of the World (1614), I reframe such biopolitical factors as Ralegh’s “dissability” around a concept that has less to do with human world-making and more to do with the “states of exception” (Giorgio Agamben) under which inhuman agencies come to matter for world history (of…[Read more]

Though the verbal icon has a long and robust multisensory history extending beyond Milton, my goal here is to challenge ableist readings of Milton’s poetry by linking his poetic ekphrasis to the politics and aesthetics of disability.

This essay offers a critique of the vitalist turn in queer and ecological theory, here represented by the work of Karen Barad. Whereas Barad advances an image of life geared towards meaningful connection with others, human and nonhuman, Deleuze advances an a-signifying ontology of self-dismissal. The point of this essay isn’t to separate their t…[Read more]

The author proposes fairy-tale logic as a mode of magical thinking typified by the belief that certain functions, fulfilled correctly and in the right order, lead to predictable outcomes. Mapping similarities in implicit reasoning within “Beauty and the Beast,” the reality television program Beauty and the Geek (2005-08), and the misogynistic nar…[Read more]

Este ensayo tiene como objetivo pensar la relación entre feminismo e infrapolítica situándola en la interrogación, desde escalas impensadas, de variantes específicas del feminismo contemporáneo en Latinoamérica. Para tal fin, se ponen en perspectiva histórico-filosófica algunas de las premisas e implicaciones de la “descolonización” feminista y s…[Read more]

This essay argues that the tension in Coetzee’s reading of Robinson Crusoe springs from the exposure of the Christian secret in both the colonial enterprises of the characters and the authorial presences of Defoe and Coetzee. My argument draws on Jacques Derrida’s The Gift of Death, which outlines how Christianity tacitly incorporates (but doe…[Read more]

Many of the feminist readings of the Dinah story in Genesis 34 in recent years have focused on the question of whether Dinah is raped. The interpretations that perhaps Dinah was not “raped” span the spectrum from a teenage love affair between Dinah and Shechem, to a case of statutory rape, to a marriage by abduction. Guilty of exploring this que…[Read more]

Extending Audre Lorde’s intuition around the polysemy of the term recreation, I put forward this concept as an organizational principle. Via the framework of recreation, I want to think about some of the main political stakes of the forms used by collectivities able to act politically in the present. I transpose the double binding that Lorde a…[Read more]

Call for Proposals

Media, Lingualisms, Translations: Technologies of Language and Power

Conference to be held November 13-14, 2020; hosted by the School of International Letters and Cultures, Arizona State University, Tempe.

Keynote speakers: Jean-Noël Robert (Collège de France, Paris)
Lourdes Ortega (Georgetown University, W…[Read more]

This course is a study of Latinx literatures and cultures produced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will concentrate our attention on works by Chicanos, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, and Dominican Americans. We will consider how these works represent and participate in the upheavals that characterize the…[Read more]

Over the past decade, the idea of the commune has again become increasingly important to political theorists and philosophers thinking about communism. Within their debates, the anarchist-communist line of thought and practice of the commune is not much reflected. This is a mistake.
Within this chapter I reconstruct the collectively shared…[Read more]

Social organizations, institutions, governments, and bureaucracies are all manifestations of power distribution. Many contemporary theories on power are at least partly informed by notions that were introduced in General Systems Theory. Public libraries are open systems. In an average organization, a hierarchy divides tasks, sets rules, and…[Read more]

This special issue of the Journal of Creative Writing Studies centers on how creative writing changes when writers actively engage computers as nonhuman collaborators in “creative making.” Using examples from McGurl’s The Program Era, Emily Dickinson, and the crowdsourced “translation” of Melville’s classic into Emoji Dick, Berens suggests th…[Read more]

This article seeks to explore into the impact of 9/11 tragedy on the private lives of ordinary people and individuals and into the associated theme of identity crisis, as reflected in four important post-9/11 poems – “Someone Says They Looked Like Cartwheeling Birds” by Lyn Lifshin, “Making Love After September 11, 2001” by Aliki Barnstone…[Read more]

There is a traditional narrative within information studies regarding precision and recall measures. Precision and recall have been the most commonly used retrieval metrics and are the basis for more complicated and accurate information retrieval evaluations. Relevance, which is the criterion by which both recall and precision are judged, is…[Read more]