Search Results

This chapter discusses geopolitical aspects of the modern racial system in the post-World War II era. Antiracist and liberal-capitalist modernity became rampant after World War II in the form of state-recognized U.S. antiracism movements such as racial liberalism, liberal multiculturalism, and neoliberal multiculturalism. These movements influenced the formation of the state, from the period of Cold War expansionism to the period of contemporary neoliberalism by using literature as a tool for Americans to describe, teach, and situate themselves with respect to racial difference. The book stresses the importance of literary studies for producing, transmitting, and describing the violence of race-liberal orders that inspired the antiracism movements.

This chapter is a close analysis of Kracauer’s 1927 essay ‘Photography’. In this essay, Kracauer regards photography as contributing towards the pervasive alienation within modernity, and he contrasts the photographic image with the ‘memory image, which contains substantial value. Nevertheless, the alienating photographic image can also reveal the nature of alienation, so has a positive potential. Kracauer also argues that the film image is less alienating than the photographic image because it can preserve more of the memory image

This chapter demonstrates how Toomer's critique of capitalist modernity comes to the fore in part 2 of Cane. Situated mostly in the nation's capital, the stories and poems here call into question the limitations of metonymic nationalism; if the liberation of the submerged masses is to occur, it will have to be part of a worldwide “heaving upward” of the underground races of the globe. Yet the exchange relation is also shown to dominate each and every human interaction; the very spaces within which modern city dwellers work, live, and revel are confined and constrained by a universal commodification that compels critical commentary. Faced with the task of representing this contradictory modern reality is the figure of the New Negro as artist.

This chapter examines some of Virginia Woolf's writing through its clothes, and then presents the contemporary moment as a fashionably androgyne woman, who is developed into a figure of modern writing. It determines that clothes not only provide access to a history of women as consumers and exhibitionists of capitalist modernity, but also represent a gendered reality.

In response to the three commentaries, this chapter revisits the notion of “flesh” in light of recent work by Jacob Rogozinski on “egocide.” The chapter engages with Honig’s allegorical reading of Melville’s Moby-Dick and offers a personal interpretation of the novel as one concerning the flesh of the Leviathan in capitalist modernity. It argues that Gordon misses the crucial lesson of Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism—the claim that humanity confronts “with sober senses” the “real conditions of life” can itself function as the most refined form of ideology—and it offers a different vision of critique. This response to the previous chapter explains the function of a genealogical argument. By tracking the passage of what is compelling in and about the real, living, and bodily person of the king into a new historical epoch, this chapter argues, we gain a better grasp of the powers by which we are really governed.

The preface introduces the project against the background of recent work on modern mutations of political theology. The assignat pictured in Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat is shown to figure a new gathering point of political economic intensity that will come to bleed ever more profoundly into the fabric of everyday life in capitalist modernity as a persistent demand for business/busy-ness.

This chapter conducts a critical investigation of the civilizational, economic, and power-political encounters between China and Europe in 1500–1800, a story largely untold in the classical English School narrative of the expansion of international society. It provides an analytical account of how China as an idea, an unrivalled economic power, and an imperial polity became integral in the collective European imagination of the world. It seeks to demonstrate that changing European identity and the production of rationalist subjectivity of Europe were manifestly informed by its forged and precarious knowledge of an imperial Other at the opposite end of Eurasia. It contends that such encounters had transformative effects on Europe’s historical, cultural, and social formation and its global visioning of the world, a historically contingent precursor to the global reach of the European sovereign order to East Asia in the nineteenth century.