Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom by Maya Wind considers Israeli universities’ relationship to and advancement of the Israeli government’s policies of apartheid and displacement against Palestinians. Through this study, Wind seeks to discredit two oft-cited arguments about Israeli universities: first, that they are paragons of academic freedom and democratic practices in a region otherwise hostile to these virtues, and second, that Israeli academics and university administrators should be seen as distinct from and potentially opposed to the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians. In contrast, Wind shows first that Israeli universities, administrators, and academics are deeply embedded in apartheid and occupation and second that university operations, curricula, research, and geographic expansion are deliberately crafted to dispossess, discredit, exclude, and terrorize Palestinians and critics of the state of Israel.

Postage stamps are sites of nationalist imagery, produced continuously by the US government since 1847. Over time, a limited group of people deemed worthy of representing the nation on stamps-white male politicians and military heroes-was diversified to include different kinds of persons: women, Native Americans, African Americans, and people in the arts, sciences, athletics, and entertainment. This paper focuses on a singular exception to this iconographic diversification: workers, people who labor. Stamps that seem to be about labor (those devoted to such topics as labor leaders, collective bargaining, and employment for the disabled) are, we claim, about something other than "labor as such." Drawing on Marx's Grundrisse, we argue that in capitalist societies, waged labor and pauperism are indissolubly linked because laborers have no control over the reliability of their employment. Laborers are "humanity ground zero," people deemed (in capitalist common sense) to have accomplished nothing beyond working for a wage and who therefore cannot be represented in postal iconography as builders of the nation.

In this ambitious book, Sara Humphreys applies genre theory to video games to contend that Red Dead Redemption (2010) and L.A. Noire (2011) advance a revanchist version of racial, gender, and class politics. She cites the frontier western and Hollywood noir, what she calls “durable literary genres,” as structuring narratives that lend coherence and logic to the game worlds she analyzes, thereby authorizing and normalizing nativist, settlercolonial, and misogynistic ideologies. Beyond these claims, Humphreys argues particularly for the importance of video games to genre theory as well as their significance as “the primary means by which stories are told in the twenty-first century” (11). To these purposes, Humphreys describes the video games’ plots, geographies, and especially their characters—those players can inhabit and those they cannot (dubbed “NPCs”—nonplayer characters).

Examining the canon of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American stamps, Laura Goldblatt and Richard Handler show how postal iconography and material culture offer a window into the contested meanings and responsibilities of U.S. citizenship.

In this Photoarticle, we survey what we will call the post-historical U.S. postage stamps of the last third of the twentieth century. We focus on stamps depicting the space race and space travel, as well as the linkage of some of those stamps to the 1992 Olympic games, to analyze the iconographic and narrative consequences of an increasing turn toward the commercialization of postal services. The stamps we consider coincide with a series of new commercial strategies on the part of the United States Postal Service (USPS) and a broad resurgence in public interest in space travel. While many critics during the 1960s considered the space race to be a distraction from more pressing political concerns—such as urban poverty or the war in Vietnam—by the 1980s and 1990s, space travel had become a less controversial endeavor (perhaps due to its large-scale defunding), and astronauts, especially the Apollo 11 astronauts, were widely lauded as heroes. We have chosen this “topical” focus (as stamp collectors say) for two reasons. First, the iconography of space exploration is dominated by one specific moment, when the lunar module Eagle touched down on the moon on July 20, 1969. Despite an ongoing history of space exploration before and after 1969, the moon landing, we will argue, was treated in postal iconography as a timeless event —a climactic technological triumph that seemed to announce what Francis Fukuyama, in an influential essay, called “the end of history.”

This article analyzes the case of Avital Ronell, Amy Hungerford's response to striking Yale graduate students, and higher education funding to argue that such instances illustrate the precise features of rampant professionalization—its pressures, demands, and imperatives—in the midst of the radical transformation of the material conditions that first produced its practices. Despite the increasingly limited ability for faculty to determine how their fields intersect with and are conditioned by forces beyond the confines of their carefully delimited communities, particularly those of the capitalist market economy, collectively the professoriate acts otherwise. As a whole, faculty continue to churn out academic progeny through a long period of apprentissage for positions that, taken in aggregate, no longer exist. Intensified discourses and anxieties around professionalization emerge to fill this gap, both registering the latent crisis and suggesting a means for its overcoming. Building on these examples, the authors suggest that professionalization remains a tactic through which academic laborers self-discipline but that today such self-disciplining tends to operate through the contradictory entwinement of (worker) reproduction and (institutional) reputation. The article closes with a new figure: that of the “unprofessional,” suggesting that our task is to shift the expectations set by professionalization that our own reproduction can only be ensured through its congealment in the commodity of reputation.