Abstract: This essay takes as is impetus a response to Victor Peterson II’s essay “On the Supernumerary” to offer a rejoinder to the typical criticisms of Afropessimism and at the same time staging its own theoretical intervention into Black studies as a critical and political enterprise. Arguing that Peterson’s essay restages the same critiques around identity politics in different terms, “Laughter of the Zero” proceeds by way of a rethinking of racial blackness through Peterson’s own terms, along the way identifying two persistent absences in the usual critiques of Afropessimism that both fail to account for its historical emergence and its economy of enunciation. A redefinition of blackness as subjectivity, not identity, is emergent, positing racial blackness as means calculation of different exposures to vulnerability and the necessary accompaniment of an authoritative calculating meta-subject. Finally, by taking the numerical assumptions to task, this essay locates problems inherent in Afropessimism as a call to answer from within the theory itself.
Abstract: The following paper presents a micro-history across the seams of culinary, financial, and art history in Lower Manhattan in the 1980s. The narrative traces how New York artists and overseas investors—powered by the Japanese asset bubble—were drawn together during the summer and fall of 1989 to create a Museum of American Graffiti alongside a short-lived supper club, the collapse of which helped clear the way for a new generation of deluxe sushi restaurants. The unlikely convergence of Japanese risk capital and the New York avant-garde reveals a deeper transformation in the cultural economy of the late twentieth century. The restaurant, financial, and art worlds were not merely neighboring scenes but parts of the same circuit of speculative energy, each translating liquidity into taste and taste back into value. The arrival of Japanese investors in SoHo and NoHo did not just inject money into the city’s real estate and art markets; it redefined what counted as sophistication, ushering in an aesthetic that linked minimalism and luxury, risk and refinement. More than a curious footnote to the 1980s boom, this episode illuminates how artistic exploration and financial speculation became mutually intelligible practices, how food and art could become parallel theaters of globalization, and how the ghost of one failed venture, a “museum” of graffiti art, helped prepare the ground, literally and metaphorically, for the rise of a whole generation of high-end sushi restaurants in New York.
Abstract: Can Dalit cinema continue to offer a critique of Indian democracy in its current majoritarian, ethnocentric, and intolerant form? Spurred by the agonistic turn in democratic political theory and the globalization-induced dereliction of institutions and collective participation, this article pursues this question along two trajectories. First, through an engagement with Nagraj Manjule’s film Fandry ( The Pig , 2013) and its aesthetic genealogy in the longer arc of Indian realism, with its complex visions of majoritarian violence and subaltern culpability. Second, through the arc of democracy’s relationship with visuality, where the irruptive psychic entailments of Ambedkar’s iconography in India’s public and cinematic life revise the problem of culpability with relation to Hindutva’s intolerant territoriality. By foregrounding the passive, intimate, and durational register of Fandry ’s countervisual bearing, the article interrogates the analytic scope of Indian democracy in relation to post-national Dalit cinema.
Abstract: After Disney's nineteenth MCU film, Avengers: Infinity War , kills half of the franchise's superheroes, its sequel, Endgame , introduces the Quantum Realm—a subatomic reality that superposes all possible worlds as an inexhaustible resource to extend its grand narrative of superhuman salvation. Through Disney's quantum leap, this paper examines how new materialist thinking in current cultural production re-ontologizes, or "quantumizes," its intellectual properties as excess that enfolds contradictions, such as scenarios of hidden risks and their preemptive solutions. The current ontological turn in the social sciences and humanities speculates about this sort of quantumized substratum as a strategic means to think about disciplinary sustainability in the Anthropocene.
