What is strikingly novel in Signs in the Dust are Lyons' efforts to articulate and ground attempts to overcome the nature-culture binary by way of theories of signs found in the writings of three medieval and early modern thinkers. The scholastic semiotics of these three figures provides Lyons with the metaphysical means to find even in the very dust a physio-semiosis, or genuine exchange of signs.

Rather than attempting to bind the subject to a new fantasy or fiction, Liquidation World encourages its readers to think through the subject as a material entity organized by what Nathan Brown has called a “logic of disintegration” (Brown). In doing so, Kukuljevic ends up forgoing relations of identification in favor of participation—not with an idea but with the empty, meaningless matter that cannot be thought—except with the peril of thoughtlessness.

China has experienced enormous economic growth over the past four decades, with the rising tide affecting urbanites and villages alike—albeit vastly unevenly. However, times are changing, with the nationally declared economic slowdown lapping at the door. Drum Village finds itself at cross roads: heavily reliant on coal mining and primary industry, the economy of the region is in decline.

In this piece I describe some elements of the affective style of Donald Trump’s campaign to be the Republican Party presidential nominee and speculate on how they might have resonated with some of the affective conditions of parts of post-Financial Crisis and post 9/11 America.

The majority of Americans who did not vote for the new president relished in the irony that stars were refusing to fete someone who rose to power by hosting a reality show in which celebrities had to ingratiate themselves to him, in order to become his “apprentice.” Donald J. Trump, a man with his name brandished atop tall buildings, and seared into vacuum-sealed steaks, couldn’t even secure his personal friend, Paul Anka to sing “My Way” for his inaugural dance, settling for Tony Orlando, sans Dawn, instead.

Catherine Nash’s "Genetic Geographies" offers a thorough and nuanced critique of recent developments in genetic genealogical research and the implications of this research for thinking race, ethnicity, identity, kinship, and nationality. The book is also an examination of how the science of genetic genealogy is translated into popular culture.

"An Emotional State" not only nuances our stock generalizations but offers new interpretations of the affective structure of postwar West German life. Above all, Parkinson wants to thaw what we have come to see as a frozen emotional landscape. She leaves behind paradigms of coldness, rigidity and blockage, arguing that an intense psychic energy was moving through this landscape.

This particular form of nationalism is nostalgic for Britain’s “greatness,” melancholic for a “purer” British society (Gilroy, 2004), and defensive about the privileges that it enjoys and the extent to which it might share those with others. However, it can’t be mapped directly onto “England”: it’s a part of all the countries that make up the UK (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), and London is not immune to it.

To remove the varnish from the “gloss” of humanitarianism this book poses a simple question: “who ‘the needy’ are in the humanitarian encounter”? The thoughtfulness with which this question is posed demonstrates Liisa Malkki’s unwillingness to take assumptions about the neediness of the Global South for granted.

Concepts and philosophers fall in and out of fashion. The pressure to be “current” is strong—critical theorists of all stripes live and write under the tyranny of the new. In this context (whether you are working through Fanon or Spivak, Leibniz or Peirce, Heidegger or Spinoza, Butler or Marx), temptations to engage a range of derivatives but “sign” a paper with the “source” are perhaps more pressing than ever.

Our manuscript explores the human-donkey relationship in Botswana where smallholder farmers own donkeys as a means of subsistence and income generation. To examine this relationship we apply a feminist posthumanist iteration of performativity to capture who the donkey is, what they experience and how these performances are shaped within the context of Botswana.

Haraway writes about “response-ability.” I read her as writing the word that way to highlight how the knowledge that we produce can make us better able to appreciate the way that we are always already bound up in the dynamics we seek to understand. We cannot get outside them, we cannot have innocent and objective relationships to them and we cannot be absolved of our complicity. For me, this is a difficult and necessary mantra as a white scholar studying race. I am and always will be conducting research in the context of systemic, historically rooted and materially consequential white supremacy.

Based on a decade of research in the UK, US and Singapore, the book examines the transnational relations through which theatre emerges, ‘tracking’ both practitioners and creative process in their physical and imaginative border crossings to explore how meanings and identities are constructed, negotiated, and reconfigured across different spaces of production, performance and reception.

The focus of the relatively short interview below is to introduce the controversial turn in Ferraris' work to what he dubs a “new realism,” which finds him a kindred spirit to the speculative realists (Iain Hamilton Grant and Graham Harman have written forwards to the two English translations of his works this past year), as well as Markus Gabriel, whose realist theory of fields of sense has already made a mark in Germany, Italy, and elsewhere (though Ferraris’s turn to realism predated these movements).

Arnold Farr speaks to Margath Walker about his research on German idealism, Marxism, critical theory, philosophy of race, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, and liberation philosophy.