A selection of responses occasioned by the overarching thematic – Marx, Asia, and the History of the Present. Marx here would not be situated simply at the level of a master signifier, but as the beginning of an open question: what possibilities are there in our moment for a reflection on Marx?
latest pieces
Thomas Burnham, The Analogy Between the Cultural Revolution and “Cancel Culture:” A Historical Perspective
Thomas Burnham, The Analogy between the Cultural Revolution and “Cancel Culture”: A Historical Perspective Kaiser Kuo’s ironic tweet responding to the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. On...
Aminda Smith: Donald Trump, Mao Zedong, and the Audacity of the Masses
Donald Trump’s political career has invited all kinds of analogies, some useful, most not. Among the most facile have been the attempts to portray the US president as a Mao-Zedong-like...
re-building rubble
Historian Tristan E. Revells “rebuilds” a biofuel factory from Republican era China through a digital renovation in this virtual museum.
special issue: critical reflections on "comfort women" 75 years on
august 2020
re-building rubble
Historian Tristan E. Revells “rebuilds” a biofuel factory from Republican era China through a digital renovation in this virtual museum....
Mae Nak: The Close-up and the Invisible
Yongyu Chen provides a new lens on the well-known Thai ghost Nak in his video essay, “Mae Nak: The Close-Up...
Singing the Revolution: India’s Anti-CAA Protests and Faiz’s “Hum Dekhenge”
Jennifer Dubrow On December 17, 2019, a student protest at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur was held in...
Oceans, Waters, Aquifers
The following series is a visual experiment in the comparative movement of fluids across different spatial visualizations. From celestial currents...
october 2020
special issue: critical reflections on "comfort women" 75 years on
august 2020
may 2020
january 2020
Thomas Burnham, The Analogy Between the Cultural Revolution and “Cancel Culture:” A Historical Perspective
Thomas Burnham, The Analogy between the Cultural Revolution and “Cancel Culture”: A Historical Perspective Kaiser Kuo’s ironic tweet responding to...
Aminda Smith: Donald Trump, Mao Zedong, and the Audacity of the Masses
Donald Trump’s political career has invited all kinds of analogies, some useful, most not. Among the most facile have been...
Chenshu Zhou, “76 Days: Can the Dead Speak?”
76 Days, a feature-length documentary film focusing on the initial coronavirus outbreak in the Chinese city Wuhan, has been making...
Poems by Kim Nam-ju (translations by Kevin Michael Smith)
Kim Nam-ju (1945-1994), born in Haenam, South Cholla Province, was a leading leftist poet associated with South Korea’s minjung or...
Critical China Scholars, Open Letter to Monthly Review
Dear friends at Monthly Review, As scholars and activists committed to charting a course for an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist left...
Emily Jungmin Yoon, Comfort
From a piercing collection of poems, A Cruelty Special to Our Species, poet Emily Jungmin Yoon explores gender, race, and...
Thomas Burnham reviews Julia Lovell, Maoism: A Global History
In the West, as popular trust in liberal institutions is eroded, an increasingly unapologetic left is confronting an ascendant right. ...
Minju Bae, Demilitarization in the Time of Police Abolition: Korean A-bomb Survivors Demand Justice
August 6 and 9, 2020 mark seventy-five years since the US dropped atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Despite how...
Kamran Baradaran, Ground Zero, or Why Do We Need Antonio Gramsci in the Times of COVID-19
“Politics is a protracted war. Do not be in a hurry. Try to see things far in advance and know...
Kun Huang, “Anti-Blackness” in Chinese Racial-Nationalism: Sex/Gender, Reproduction, and Metaphors of Pathology
Author: Kun Huang Translators: Roy Chan, Shui-yin Sharon Yam Notes on English edition: This essay was originally published in Chinese...
Federico Marcon,Theses on Theory and Intellectual Production
“das Höchste wäre zu begreifen, dass alles Faktische schon Theorie ist.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhem Meisters Wanderjahre I scribbled...
The proletariat are all those who are denied the collective faculty of imagination: an interview with Divya Dwivedi
Divya Dwivedi is a philosopher and author based in India. She is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Humanities...
Jean-Luc Nancy and Shaj Mohan, Our Mysterious Being
The English translation of these texts first appeared in “The Philosophical Salon” at the LA Review of Books on April...
Cao Zhi (192-232 CE), The Plague Airs
Cao Zhi, son of Cao Cao and one of the best known poets of the late Han/Three Kingdoms period, wrote this...
Jeremy Fernando, On living in the age of pandemic
Giorgio Agamben tries to never let us forget that keeping alive is not quite the same as living. [1] And...
Shaj Mohan, What Carries Us On
This is Shaj Mohan’s contributions to the debate on Coronavirus and the state of exception sparkled by Agamben’s contribution. It...