Description Through a range of vivid examples drawn from scientific research (from social amoebas to lightening), Barad lays out how nature itself is queer, how it models queer communication through a performative rather than representative […]
Tag Archives: materialism
From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine: Animal Soul in French Letters from Descartes to La Mettrie
Description An indispensible account of the transition from the Cartesian view of animals as mere biological machines to La Mettrie’s view that human beings are also just such machines. Rosenfield’s work is especially important for […]
“No Whale, No Music” Iñupiat drumming and global warming
Description Sakakibara describes her work with Iñupiat peoples in the arctic who are facing climate change issues related to their food harvesting and cultural practices. The communities have a strong connection to whaling, expressed linguistically, […]
The Republic of Letters
Description A ground-breaking consideration of the social history of gender in the Enlightenment. As well as an invaluable source on the social history of the Enlightenment overll, this study gave rise to a meaningful and […]
Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things
Description Quickly becoming a classic, Bennett’s book asks (among other things) how the term “materialism” came to be synonymous with Marx’s notion of materiality, “as economic structures and exchanges that provoke many other events.” She […]
Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments
Description Perhaps the most canonical work of Marxist critical theory in the twentieth century, Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment investigates how the project of the Enlightenment transforms into a logic of domination and instrumentalization […]
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
Description Less a single coherent argument than a series of meditations, this book introduces many of the concepts that would become foundational to Marxist thought and critical theory, more generally, including alienation, exploitation, and dialectical […]
Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Meaning
Description Barad builds on the insights of Niels Bohr’s quantum physics to develop a new queer and feminist ontology and epistemology that radically reframes questions of being, individualism, relationality, representation, agency, and identity. Her notion […]
Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics
Description Allewaert uncovers the enmeshment of persons in places– and the imbrication of the nonhuman and the human– in eighteenth-century American plantations (and the literature, culture, and thought circulating around and through them). Her book […]
Catching Nature in the Act: Réaumur and the Practice of Natural History in the Eighteenth Century
Description Terrall’s investigation of the eighteenth-century French scientist Réaumur and his circle represents both a fascinating account of the techniques and practices of eighteenth-century naturalists and a stimulating analysis of the production of scientific knowledge […]