In a moment in which anti-migrant rhetoric, exclusionary ethnic nationalisms and the authoritarian populisms they fuel are on the rise, it becomes increasingly important that political theorists do more than offer a moral indictment of racism and xenophobia. This is where this article contends that Frantz Fanon’s sociogenic approach to the critique of ‘race’ and racialisation makes a valuable contribution, even in postcolonial conjunctures that have moved beyond colonialism’s crude Manichean binaries. I read Fanon as a diagnostician of the social pathologies produced by colonialism and white supremacy, showing how he worked from the colonised subject’s experiences of inferiorisation and the coloniser’s experiences of racial superiority and self-mystification to advance a negative critique of racial hierarchies. Crucially, across his oeuvre, Fanon stresses that the fundamental driver of these alienated states that he analyses is the social, not the individual psyche. I conclude by gesturing towards why Fanon’s objects of critique remain not only relevant but increasingly urgent in a postcolonial Britain where racialised ideas of Englishness and anti-migrant moral panics stand in for the more difficult work of building antiracist and social-democratic politics.
This article examines lesser-known works on race produced by members of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, most of them prior to the more widely recognised interventions of Policing the Crisis and The Empire Strikes Back . Despite Stuart Hall’s deep engagement with Black politics during his time as director of the Centre, archival and interview sources suggest that Hall did not take a stance within the CCCS that fostered intellectual and theoretical explorations of race and ethnicity. Nevertheless, a wealth of work by a wide range of students devoted attention to the topic. This article examines these other contributions and situates them within the broader narrative of the emergence of the race agenda in CCCS scholarship. It challenges the conventional view that the Centre’s engagement with race began in the late 1970s, arguing instead that earlier works must be seen as an integral part of the development of cultural studies incursions into the subject. By drawing attention to this body of work, the article complicates hegemonic narratives and demonstrates that the construction of the cultural studies project has been intertwined with the study of race from its inception. These issues should be seen as integral to the history of cultural studies, rather than as peripheral additions that emerged later.
This article examines the unfolding crisis of diversity in Western media and society. Once a benign, even banal, concept, ‘diversity’ is now attacked from both left and right: for the former, as a performative gesture masking structural racism; for the latter, as a threat to meritocracy and national identity. Today, it is the far right that is most forcefully shaping public discourse, reframing diversity as a symbol of cosmopolitan elitism and white marginalisation. Yet media culture remains‘super-diverse’. In the UK, people of colour are more visible on screen than ever before, represented through seemingly complex and varied characterisations. Even as diversity discourse becomes increasingly embattled, this multiracial media form appears largely intact. Focusing on British media, the article traces the unravelling of diversity as a governing logic. It asks how we can make sense of the coexistence of popular superdiversity and the mainstreaming of far-right populism. Its central contention is that understanding the politics of diversity ‐ in all its contradictory forms ‐ is essential to grasping the current conjuncture, and may even point toward how to resist the reactionary forces that define it.
The discourse of racism dominated by a binary logic of white supremacy and black oppression has historically enfeebled resistance to anti-Asian racism. COVID-19 opened up new discourses about the escalating vulnerability of the Chinese community amidst racist ideologies of the ‘yellow peril’ and the ‘Chinese virus’. South Asians are in a unique situation in this conversation about Asians in the USA; they are not even considered Asians. Against this backdrop, this essay turns to another history of anti-Asian racism, marked by ideologies of the ‘brown peril’ of Islamophobia at a specific moment during post-9/11, post-Cold War American hegemony. It engages with the brown Asian in Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist as a historicised analytic for illuminating differential racisms in the USA. Situating this moment against a longer history of resistance to Asian migration in the USA, this article argues for declining hospitality as a frame to perceive transmigration, and theorises racialised transmigration from South Asia to the metropoles as a demand for reparation that the north owes for past and continuing imperial devastation of South Asia. Against the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and its antecedent British and US imperial history in South Asia, the article examines the possibility of reading Hamid’s novel as transnational counterpublics for exploring wider questions about ethnoracial responsibility and relationality in a world strangled by American corporatism and militarism. Rita Felski’s conceptualisation of feminist counterpublics and context as well as Lauren Berlant’s frames of ‘cruel optimism’ and ‘commons’ offer valuable insights for thinking with the postcolonial detritus left by imperial formations that Hamid’s novel portrays. Deploying a revisionary reading of Derrida’s limits of hospitality allows for a radical global south pedagogy of reparative justice. This is also a pedagogy of relationality rather than one of capital ‐ a responsibility that comes with ‘exiting America’ to defy the lures of the American Dream and to refuse to be an agent of empire, as Hamid’s protagonist does. The article finally turns to Stuart Hall’s concepts of ‘conjuncture’ and ‘contingency’ and David Scott’s Irreparable Evil to think about the afterlife of the text in our contemporary moment as it concludes with the tariff war with India and what that means for a ‘postcolonial commons’, American exceptionalism and a theory of reparations.
Robert Chapman, Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism, London, Pluto, 2023, 204pp, £14.99 paperback. Nick Walker, Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment and Post-Normal Possibilities, Autonomous Press, 2021, 191pp, £15.99 paperback.
Paul Rekret, Take This Hammer: Work, Song, Crisis, London, Goldsmiths Press, 2024, 200pp, ??36.00 hardback.
In December 2021, the British Ministry for Arts banned the export of a recently sold work of art. Two Women Wearing Cosmetic Patches (c.1650, artist unknown) depicts two women, one white and one Black, seated shoulder to shoulder, wearing the popular beauty patches of the day. The Ministry’s position is that the work of art can offer unique insight on race in seventeenth-century England. This was one of several works ‐ all depicting subjects of colour or a moment of colonial encounter ‐ that have recently been debated and saved from export by the Ministry. How can this national clamour to preserve and own racial difference bring into sharper relief the complexity of the contemporary relationship between race, state institutions and capitalism? To answer this question, these bans ‐ which were enacted against the backdrop of both Brexit and global protests challenging racial violence and, specifically, anti-Blackness ‐ must be understood within the larger context of art world acquisitions and returns, which are experiencing explicit confrontations with their histories of colonial, racial violence. Artefacts looted during colonisation are being returned; museums in the global North are increasingly understood to be sites of ongoing racial violence; conversations about the stark whiteness of ancient sculptures are expanding. Taken together, these art industry developments, are an example of the ways in which nation-states usurp historical narratives in furtherance of a guaranteed futurity, rewriting historical racial formations and its records to shore up their teleology of post-colonial progress, collecting objects of race whilst retrenching their commitment to expulsion, violence, and border policing. Nations’ recreations of historical archives sanitise their legacies to better accommodate the contemporary sociopolitical moment and, importantly, provide a glimpse into the particularities of present-day racial formations and indeed, co-mingling of race and value. These moves, furthermore, reveal the arts industry’s indebtedness to racial capitalism, as institutions within the industry seek repair in a bid to preserve their own sustainability, relying on specific scripts of anti-racist practice that foreground property exchanges, preserving the industry’s colonial models of circulation, visibility and profit.
In this article, I explore how the unequal exposure to death by COVID-19, taking place at the same time as the eruption of a global protest movement for racial justice erupted, can be understood through the interrelated notions of immunity and auto-immunity. 1 Immunity, considered here both as a juridical and a medical concept, and auto-immunity, taken as a core political tendency of democracies, together expose the racial constitution of the British state. Longstanding, structural racial inequities suppressed Black and Asian peoples’ immunity to the COVID-19 virus, at the same time that the state responded to a multi-racial uprising for Black lives with heavy-handed policing and the criminalisation of dissent, attempting to defend the British body politic from demands for racial justice.
Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak, Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity, London, Pluto Press, 2025, 172pp, £14.99 paperback, £9.99 e-book.
This paper returns to the vexed question of the social totality and the apparent tension regarding this issue, between Cultural Studies (and other ‘critical’ formations) on the one hand and intellectual formations such as actor network theory on the other. The main concern of the article is to argue for a more nuanced relationship between the concepts of totality, conjuncture and assemblage. It maintains that a cross-fertilisation or ‘diffraction’ of conjunctural analysis and assemblage theory, of Cultural Studies and currents associated with the ‘nonhuman turn’, such as actor network theory, new materialism or speculative realism, holds significant analytical potential with regard to the complex messiness of the present, promising to update conjunctural analysis vis‐à‐vis the analytical demands and challenges of the Capitalocene. What thus emerges are the contours of a posthumanist conjunctural analysis, which, the paper argues, could be an exceedingly useful tool for contemporary Cultural Studies.
This article aims to contribute to the development of a critical approach to peasant representations, particularly in films. It does so by analysing two peasant reels which rose to international fame by casting ‘real’ peasants: Li Ruijun’s Return to Dust (2022) and Ermanno Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978). The research develops in three stages. First, it extrapolates some of the recurrent stereotypes which have been haunting the peasant film genre and which, together, compose a schemata for how peasants appear on the big screen. Second, it criticises the so-called ‘pledge to authenticity’ that these films make. The fact that they are, more or less, realistic does not make them accurate, but simply more difficult to recognise as artistic pieces. By contrasting these creative representations with historical data, this work debunks a claim which often misleads critics and audiences alike. Third, the article explores the historical conditions which led to the genesis of these films in different cultural and temporal contexts, i.e. 1970s Italy and contemporary China. At the time of production of the two reels, these societies, however different, were undergoing similar liminal periods. In this way, romantic imageries of peasants served as an intellectual anchor to provide Italian and Chinese societies with a sense of stability in the face of a disorienting modernity.
This essay examines the concept of ‘late landscapes’ and the aesthetics of occlusion in contemporary art and cultural theory. Rooted in the tension between visibility and concealment, it explores how occlusion ‐ whether subjective or objective ‐ shapes our understanding of landscapes and the people tied to them. The analysis situates lateness as a temporal genre interwoven with spatial obstructions, invoking loss, delay and disconnection. It highlights how landscape art can reckon with ecological and cultural catastrophes, transforming occlusion into a tool for witnessing. Through an exploration of Jungjin Lee’s landscape photography, alongside Eugène Atget and Japanese fûkeiron theorists, the study investigates how artistic strategies expose the concealed. Ultimately, it argues for art’s critical role in documenting and responding to the fragility of landscapes and their displaced peoples, emphasising connections between environment, identity, politics and history.
In this article we undertake a reading of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe, a collection of five films produced for the BBC and Amazon in 2020. Focused on a series of events and figures central to the making of modern Black British consciousness over the 1970s and 1980s, we suggest that Small Axe is preoccupied by a set of narrative questions concerning leade+rship, authority and individuation, combined with an aesthetics of suspension, the interval and the look. Speaking to the contemporary moment in Black Britain, as much as a sense of historical verisimilitude, we frame our reading of Small Axe through the rebellions which followed the police shooting to death of Mark Duggan on 4 August 2011.
This article approaches the UK asylum system as a system of linguistic bordering, in relation to literary and activist reimaginings of language exemplified by the Refugee Tales project.1 It examines Home Office practices of language and translation, and the weaponisation of English as a ‘detention language’, as elements of a border regime that reaches its apotheosis, as Refugee Tales makes clear, in indefinite immigration detention, in which people are removed from access to communication altogether. In response, I argue, this activist project seeks to reckon with the language practices of the state that are enacted in the name of British citizens, while looking for ways to re-establish ‘the possibility of trust / in language’.2 Refugee Tales seeks to remake English as a welcoming medium, imagining it in ways that are divested from borders and bordering. It does this partly in order to reclaim it as a tool of intervention in the institutional structures the project critiques. At the same time, as we see in the case of the recent Walking Inquiry into Immigration Detention,3 Refugee Tales also takes the imperatives, possibilities and contingencies of communication across linguistic difference as a model for a different kind of practice in policymaking.
How does one position oneself in a world that threatens constantly to destroy one’s ability to live peaceably? To explore this and related issues, the current essay focuses on works by women artists in which guns are pivotal or prominently featured. Yet it is not so much the guns themselves that are of interest here, but the way that in the hands of women artists they allow us to perceive the frequently unacknowledged multiplicity, obscurity and aleatory workings of violence. Why, when one is in a position to pull the trigger, would one not do so? In tackling these questions, the essay considers how the artists Milica Tomić, Olivia Plender, Maria Kulikovska and Rita Duffy use guns to raise questions about the radically conflicting modalities of violence that are routinely folded into a single term. In such art, the gun ‐ that which so often is used to situate women as passive possessions in need of defence ‐ is now paradoxically positioned. On the one hand ‐ and less often the focus of analysis ‐ these artists’ guns are symbolic of the delegation to some and not to others of the right to self-preservation. On the other, they are the very means by which political, sexual and bodily integrity and agency can be restored; the means by which art can strike out at violence with violences of its own. Drawing in particular on Elsa Dorlin’s work, as well as on classical philosophies of violence, the essay thus considers the question of violent self-defence as an aesthetic, political and somatic counteroffensive. It shows how, in the hands of women artists, art emerges not as a routine, representational response to (gun) violence, but as that which has the capacity to generate, to act within and upon a variety of violence(s) in ways that reveal and transform their conditions.
Gillian Rose, Marxist Modernism: Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory, Robert Lucas Scott and James Gordon Finlayson (eds), London and New York, Verso, 2024, 152pp, £16.99 paperback
