This review is divided into three sections that, taken together, map the state and shape of the year’s work in posthumanism. The first section, ‘Surveys, Elaborations, and Trajectories’, considers works that explore multiple dimensions of posthumanism, with some choosing to focus on specific thematics, antecedents, or connections. This sections maps the sustained interest in genealogies of the posthuman, particularly its intersections with older intellectual debates and current concepts of personhood. Section 2, ‘Pedagogy and Research’, turns to work at the intersections of posthumanism and the field of education and pedagogy comprising, aside from the surveys, the most voluminous body of work in posthumanism over the course of 2024. Curriculum, pedagogy, and posthumanist thought have together produced a challenging and interesting shift in the field of education, and works in this field surveyed here offer a glimpse into a rapidly expanding domain. The final section, ‘Posthumanism in Literature and Culture’, demonstrates that literary and cultural texts remain at the forefront of enunciations of the posthuman.
The first two sections of this review consider two anthologies on source study, specifically Shakespeare’s and Beckett’s Italian sources. These works bring together ideas of filiation and affiliation, a useful distinction made by Edward Said in The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983). By filiation is meant a biological or natural connection, while affiliation describes the conscious, chosen connections that are formed through shared ideas. These anthologies offer new kinds of affiliation, which are complex, overdetermined, and break with the ideas both of source study and of traditional dramaturgy. Ideas of origins and inheritance, both in the study of source materials and in the idea of performance, are at stake in these texts. The next two sections are concerned with two books on performance studies that offer new ways of thinking about theatre, in relation to environment and gender. In a break from traditional dramaturgy, these texts argue for the transformative power of theatre. Following an introductory overview, the essay is divided into five sections: 1. Shakespeare and His Italian Sources; 2. Samuel Beckett and His Italian Sources; 3. Performing the Nonhuman; 4. Performance, Resistance, Tragedy; Conclusion.
This article reviews the year’s work in film theory publications from the perspective of ‘film theory without theory’, especially considering the so-called ‘material’ or ‘cinephiliac’ turns in film studies. It specifically reviews five recent publications and is thus divided into five sections. The first section covers Jiří Anger’s monograph Film Theory from Below, which analyses the digital archive of Czech early cinema pioneer Jan Kříženecký and argues for a film theory based on the materiality of the image. The second section considers Timothy Corrigan’s Describing Cinema, which argues for a commitment to ‘close reading’ of films based on detailed written description. In the third section, mood and suspense are considered in Rick Warner’s The Rebirth of Suspense, which argues that the ‘atmospheric turn’ of slow cinema offers its own form of suspense contra what is often termed traditional ‘Hitchcockian’ suspense. Section 4 reviews Marina Hassapopoulou’s Interactive Cinema, which considers the formal and ethical implications of films that involve more than just the senses of sight and sound. Finally, Section 5 covers Textiles on Film, Becky Peterson’s look at the material turn through its exploration of literal fabric.
The following is a four-part article. The first part contains reviews of selected shortform works published in relation to postcolonial theory across various leading journals. Academic work on Palestine, best exemplified by Rabea Eghbariah’s ‘Towards Nakba as a Legal Concept’, is a notable feature. In the second part, I focus on evolving methods in postcolonial critique, consulting both substantial review essays as well as new work that grapples with the controversy surrounding colonial monuments. The latter, I argue, reflects an emergent intersection between postcolonialism and affect studies. In the third part, I look at a critical transitional issue of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, which this year changed its name to Literature, Critique, and Empire Today. I reflect on former editors’ Claire Chambers and Rachael Gilmour’s article, and that of their successors, Rehana Ahmed and Shital Pravinchandra, alongside a selection from the rest. In the fourth and final part I survey work from The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial and Decolonial Literature, edited by Praseeda Gopinath and Laura Brueck, in which many influential voices on the subject of postcolonial theory have reprised their commentaries.
The year 2024 was marked by intensifying global crises, including armed conflicts, escalating global trade wars, and disruptions caused by an increasing focus on AI technologies across various areas, from the job market to the educational sector. This was accompanied by the rise of far-right populist movements that fuelled a backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion in corporate, educational, and governmental institutions. In such a context, it becomes necessary to ask how individual disciplines, including fan and audience studies, are equipped to respond to these challenges. Popular culture has historically been mobilized as a site of geopolitical messaging, but in today’s globalized mediascape, fandom communities themselves have become central spaces for political discourse, education, and organizing. This review considers three recent publications that bring intersectional approaches to bear on the study of fandom and politics, focusing on the themes of politics and identity, disability, and racialization. While fan studies has long highlighted the potential of fandom as a space for progressive activism, particularly for marginalized youth, scholarship has also turned towards understanding fandom’s entanglements with reactionary movements. However, these two strands of analysis are often framed as distinct and oppositional, flattening the complex ways in which identity markers such as race, gender, sexuality, xenophobia, and ableism intersect in fan spaces. By examining how these three publications challenge such binaries, this review argues that intersectional methodologies offer a more nuanced account of the potentials and pitfalls of fandom as a site of political discussion and organizing, and of its role in shaping broader cultural and political movements.
In this year’s review, we provide an analysis of works that explore narrowly defined topics to extraordinary effect. The sections are divided both thematically and by authorship. In the first two sections, Leah Benedict highlights works that grapple with the transitory and the minuscule: the operations of gestation and fetal life, and the ubiquity and ephemerality of motion in Caroline Arni’s Of Human Born: Fetal Lives, 1800–1950 and Janina Wellmann’s Biological Motion: A History of Life, respectively. In the third and fourth sections, Anna K. Sagal reviews two works that position the study of water beside the science of ecology to explore the mutualistic exchanges occurring between those seemingly distinct fields, showing how Victorian narrative structures and techniques of signification informed the material studies of their era: Ursula Kluwick’s Haunting Ecologies: Victorian Conceptions of Water and John MacNeill Miller’s The Ecological Plot: How Stories Gave Rise to a Science.
The first section of this review begins with two works that offer new insights into the topic of farmed animals: Adam Searle, Jonathon Turnbull, and Catherine Oliver’s ‘Climate Cattle: Metabolic Intervention in the Good Anthropocene’ and Lisa B. Bauer’s Livestock and Literature: Reimagining Postanimal Companion Species. Section 2 explores human–animal communication through Kristine Hill’s ‘Cat–Human Intersubjectivity and Joint Meaning-Making within Multispecies Families and Communities’, David Tierney’s ‘“The Poetry of a Dingo’s Bite”: Communication within Nonhuman Animal Play’, and Dave Wilson’s ‘Sounding Together: A Reflection on Extending Acoustic Assemblages and Transforming Sonic Environments in Improvisative Music’. Two edited collections, Vera Fibisan and Rachel Murray’s Blue Extinction in Literature, Art, and Culture and Christopher Kondrich, Lucy Spelman, and Susan Tacent’s Creature Needs: Writers Respond to the Science of Animal Conservation, provide imaginative commentary on extinction and conservation in Section 3. The final section navigates the possibilities of ‘animal futures’ in Matthew Calarco’s The Three Ethologies: A Positive Vision for Rebuilding Human–Animal Relationships, providing a fitting conclusion.
This year’s review of digital humanities (DH) continues to position DH at the epicentre of debates around AI, while tracing how these conversations have evolved within disciplinary scholarship from 2024 and early 2025. The surveyed interventions critically examine trajectories in contemporary DH where uncritical endorsements of massive datasets and computational complexity often result in algorithmic reductionism, which can obscure and oversimplify complexities in the domain of the humanities and social sciences. Building on the authors’ emphasis on decolonial approaches in DH—scholarship that frequently develops beyond traditional Anglo-American frameworks—this survey of scholarship reveals that significant DH contributions are not necessarily dependent on vast amounts of data. Rather, meaningful work in the discipline can emerge from relatively constrained information infrastructures that leverage the strength of community connections and focus on granular and localized user experiences. The essay is organized into five key areas: small-scale databases in DH; the limitations of scale in Global South and Global Majority contexts; resistance to bias in AI, metadata, and archival practices; user relationships with archives; and the emerging role of video games as digital archives. Together, these scholarly interventions reveal how DH researchers, educators, and practitioners can and should tactically repurpose strategic digital sites, tools, and methods for nuanced approaches that prioritize humanistic enquiry over the supposed objectivity of large-scale computational paradigms.
Of the wide variety of disability studies scholarship published in 2024, much of the field was preoccupied with representations of disability in advertising, with disability as a spectacle, and with disability as expressed through voiceless, silent, or disfigured faces. Such topics are omnipresent, but their ubiquity often means they are assumed and under-interrogated. This review of a selection of books and journal articles teases out such assumptions, whilst also taking into account the significant changes to disability studies scholarship and disability justice movements given ongoing political unrest; namely, the re-election of Donald Trump in the USA and the UK government’s proposals to cut disability benefits across Britain. The review considers Ella Houston’s Advertising Disability, Erin Pritchard’s Dwarfism Arts and Advocacy: Creating Our Own Positive Identity, and the autumn 2024 issue of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. Following an introduction, it is divided into four sections: 1. Advertising, which examines the complex position of the disabled body in the world of adverts and marketing; 2. Spectacle, which expands on the economic and social positioning of disability, often in the form of professional roles taken up by or denied to disabled people; 3. Voicelessness, which posits the possibility that silence is not a privation of sound but a rejection of normative communication; and 4. Further Research, which points to where future analyses of disability studies literature could proceed.
This chapter begins with consideration of the reissue of Julia Kristeva’s seminal Revolution in Poetic Language before moving on to grapple with the limits of art, poetry, and translation in relation to politics, ethics, and knowledge in the poetics scholarship of 2024. Over the course of five major topics, I review eleven books and five articles. The first three sections move through politics, rhyme, and technology. The fourth section examines the critic’s role in poetic companionship and feminist appreciation, and in the fifth and final section the subject is collaboration between art and poetry. By the conclusion, what is affirmed in this year’s work in poetics scholarship is an echoing sense of affinity, which materializes in both poetic and political likenesses and unlikenesses.
This review addresses three significant aspects of affect theory in 2024: the attempts to turn affect from a theory into a practice, or into an empirically verifiable object; the exploration of how narrative arts mediate established regimes of feeling, and may help create new ones—which may in turn lead to better modes of collective life; and environmental affect, past and present. The introduction frames the review around an observation from Spinoza’s Ethics: ‘[H]ope cannot exist without fear, nor fear without hope’. The review is then divided into three sections that reflect upon the inherently unstable and intertwined nature of hope and fear and their significance to the present: 1. Activism and Empiricism; 2. Social Inventiveness; and 3. Environmental Affect. A brief conclusion then reflects on the reviewed works together.
This review of the year’s work in visual culture in 2024 is structured around the theme of capitalist extraction, which generates three broad questions. How is visual culture implicated in regimes of extraction? Second, how does visual culture contribute to these practices? Third, how might visual cultural objects and practices challenge and combat the resource aesthetics of extractivist capitalism? To address such questions, this review is divided into six sections, beginning with an introduction to the intersections of visual culture and global systems of capitalist extraction. The second section explores the conceptual and methodological grounding provided by Priya Jaikumar and Lee Grieveson’s introduction to Media+Environment’s special issue on the extractive film. The third extends such grounding into a discussion of Siobhan Angus’s Camera Geologica, which situates photography in global regimes of materiality, mining, and labour. The fourth section discusses Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, a text that historically situates visual culture in capitalist political economy and considers how a style obsessed with presence has come to dominate in the political economy of globalized capitalism. The question of visual culture’s active participation in extraction is discussed next, with recourse to Kathryn Yusoff’s Geologic Life and Theo Reeves-Evison’s ‘On Prospecting’. The final section surveys how all these contributions theorize ways for visual culture to challenge its implication and participation in global systems of extraction.
This chapter offers an overview of select contributions in the interdisciplinary field from the year’s work in feminist theory. My approach foregrounds a critical ideological position in the field: that feminist theory does not solely emerge from academic institutions of knowledge, but that it is first and foremost produced as knowledge and praxis that is derived from daily life, especially from the lives of marginalized peoples, activists, and grassroots individuals whose standpoints and experiences best exhibit the structures of power and oppression. For this reason, this review essay includes non-academic sources such as news media, social media, and podcasts alongside academic publications. In the same ideological vein, my overview looks beyond Euro-American contexts (within which I am situated) to bring into view feminist issues and theory that emerge from other global locations, which are often sidelined in surveys of knowledge production. Thus, I attempt to showcase in some small measure what feminist theorists have done in response to interconnected global issues that continue at the time of writing. The following four sections make up the main body of this review: 1. Feminist Theory Is Social; 2. Feminist Theory Against Cisness; 3. The Global Reproduction of Settler Colonialism; 4. Feminist Practices of Grief.
While the Anthropocene concept maintains a central role in ecocriticism, in 2024 scholars have continued to trouble the ways it ‘allows “the human”’, as Claire Colebrook writes, ‘to be a grand narrative of geological scale’, homogenizing the ‘we’ that is culpable for unfolding planetary crises while also cementing the human as ultimate planetary agent (Virginia Woolf and the Anthropocene, p. 84). The work reviewed in this essay covers a range of topics that work to multiply and complicate this ‘we’ from a variety of fields and disciplinary perspectives, including literary theory, the environmental humanities, Indigenous studies, extinction studies, philosophy, and theoretical biology. The year’s work in ecocriticism is also marked by a desire to rethink the field’s existing methods, in addition to the methods via which stories of environmental crisis are told more broadly. I examine works that highlight the limitations of critique for facilitating hope in relation to ubiquitous toxicity; the ways in which marine life troubles methods of extinction storytelling; the problems with considering deep time to be unthinkable and incompatible with human phenomenology; and the questions eluded by the field’s own reliance on mutualism, entanglement, and relationality as theoretical figures for ecological hope. The review focuses on two edited collections, one monograph, a special section of a journal, and two individual articles, and is divided into four sections: 1. Affective Ecocriticism; 2. Storying Blue Extinction; 3. Theorizing the Impersonal; and 4. The Dreams of Mutualism.
Abstract As an overview to this year’s works in feminist theory, this chapter focuses on the use of personal narrative in feminist writing published in 2023. Overall, I contend that five overlapping motivations give way to contemporary feminist autotheory: first, a sustained interest in addressing the structures of feelings or affects that subtend and give shape to everyday life; next, an exhaustion with and suspicion of both empiricism and poststructuralism; still more, an interest in using writing and scholarship to promote healing or practice care; in addition, an insistence on complexity and particularity and the refusal of generalization; and, finally, a reparative turn towards mothers, especially Black and Brown mothers. The review begins by briefly contextualizing the works in relation to autotheory. The remainder is divided into three sections: 1. Affect, the Everyday, and the Black and Brown Maternal, which considers Moon Charania’s Archive of Tongues and Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes; 2. Beyond Positivistic Empiricism, which turns to Carol Ulises Decena’s Circuits of the Sacred and Ed Cohen’s On Learning to Heal; 3. Attending to Pain and Loss, which reflects on Ayu Saraswati’s Scarred and Megan Sweeney’s Mendings. It ends with a brief conclusion considering autotheory in the university classroom.
Abstract This chapter reviews five works of psychoanalytic scholarship published in 2023: The Poetry of the Word in Psychoanalysis: Selected Papers of Pere Folch Mateu, edited by J. O. Esteve and Jordi Sala; three books about Marion Milner: The Marion Milner Method: Psychoanalysis, Autobiography, Creativity by Emilia Halton-Hernandez, The Marion Milner Tradition, edited by Margaret Boyle Spelman and Joan Raphael-Leff, and Alberto Stefana and Alessio Gamba’s Marion Milner: A Contemporary Introduction; and Antisemitism and Racism: Ethical Challenges for Psychoanalysis by Stephen Frosh. Following a short introduction, the review is divided into three sections to discuss these works in turn.
Abstract This chapter begins with a discussion of three works of poetics that emphasize local and material concerns from poets-theorists-activists engaged in collaborative and experimental writing practices. This openness in form and enquiry is further reflected in the major works published in 2023 that are under examination in the body of the review, which together attend to six major topics: (1) the formation of national poetries; (2) the role of the academy in preserving or destabilizing the lyric voice; (3) the intimate impasse of confessional and anthropocentric writing; (4) the sensorial body of hybrid writing; (5) the limiting structures of racial capitalism; and (6) the role of poetry in public life. Ending with a brief reflection on the immense influence of Lyn Hejinian, this chapter attests to the openness of enquiry that the aesthetic, philosophical, and political field of poetics permits from its discrete social locations and close attention to the page, the voice, and the body.
Abstract Scholarship on the creation and circulation of forms of popular culture has always been concerned with questions of audiences and reception. Initial theorizations of audiences as overly credulous, easily swayed masses have long been significantly complicated to account for more active participation. One of the key drivers of this move of framing audiences from passive to active has been the emergence of the discipline of fandom studies. Today, the field is truly multidisciplinary, encompassing popular culture and media studies, literary studies, communication studies and psychology, marketing and tourism studies, amongst others. Additionally, while fan communities have always been transnational and transcultural, the explosion of cross-cultural phenomena like the Korean Hallyu Wave (the worldwide popularity of Korean media texts and celebrities) has brought renewed attention to the interconnected nature of the contemporary global mediascape. Even as it has expanded, one of the main challenges to the discipline has been criticism that it has overemphasized aspects of fan identity, such as gender identity and sexual orientation, while neglecting the role of race. This critique challenges the structure of the field, whereby certain critical genealogies, methodologies, and even fandoms themselves, are granted a canonical and universal status while others are seen as tertiary. This review of published works in popular culture studies focuses on studies of fandom that aim to break these silos, selecting three publications that address different aspects of today’s globalized fandom mediascape to underline the necessity for fandom scholars to expand their understanding of how these spaces are interconnected. Thematically, the review considers how these publications address and extend three core interests of fandom studies: 1. Digital Platforms and Politics; 2. Identity and Community; and 3. Transcultural Flows.
Abstract The year’s work in posthumanism includes both surveys of the field and publications that contribute significantly to posthumanist thought by examining processes and practices that call the singularity of the human into question. If we were to think of the principal strands of posthumanist thought that dominated publications in 2023, then human embodiment, environmentalism, and care-beyond-the-human, appearing in multiple collections and essays, would be clear choices. This review is divided into four key sections that consider how such strands play out in a range of disciplinary contexts in work published across 2023: 1. Surveys and Elaborations, which considers comprehensive accounts of the posthumanist school of thought and works that contribute to specific posthumanist themes; 2. Posthumanism in Literature and Culture, which considers the continuing interest in the literary and cultural enunciations of the posthuman, particularly fiction and art; 3. Posthumanism and the Anthropocene, which considers posthumanism’s intersections with environmental thought; and 4. Posthumanism and Care, which examines work on theorizations of care in which non-human and other-than-human care figure prominently.
Abstract While this year’s chapter on plastic theory/studies is relatively short, with only three texts reviewed, it is a harbinger of important texts in preparation that, next year, will broaden the field into dimensions as diverse as world literature and theology. Such an expansion is logical when we see that the texts published this year include: an important and practical textbook introduction as part of MIT Press’s Essential Knowledge series (Imari Walker-Franklin and Jenna Jambeck’s Plastics); a chapter in a book on flashpoint epistemologies (Ranjan Ghosh’s ‘Plastic Pedagogy: Rabindranath Tagore Revisited’); and a book that links plasticity to political thought (Fathali M. Moghaddam’s Political Plasticity). As this review will show, together these texts speak not only of the contemporary anxieties of a world enmeshed in climate and political catastrophes, but also of the pedagogical and political hopes of new generations of scholars and artists, who are thinking about plasticity and plastic theory—not only in texts but also in their practices and art—in relation to a future still in formation.
