In one of the most memorable accounts of the pantomime Pierrot, Baudelaire tells the story of the clown’s execution. Having gotten himself into trouble, “for some misdeed or other,” the kleptomaniac Pierrot finds himself faced with the guillotine.

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.

The above image comes from the 1995 film Safe, written and directed by Todd Haynes (who is frequently associated with the New Queer Cinema movement coming out of the 1990s). Safe follows Carol, a homemaker in Los Angeles who slowly becomes overwhelmed by her suburban environment and begins to experience mysterious bodily maladies.

"The first hammer blow feels like you're hitting yourself" explains Azzam Afifi describing his pain after being forced to demolish his home in East Jerusalem under Israel’s new "cost-effective policy.” It is a cheaper option for Palestinians, who would otherwise have the State of Israel charge them to do it, some sort of colonial rebate it imposes on Palestinians when it forces them to demolish their homes (Al Jazeera, 2017).

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.

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.

Many people are still fascinated by West Germany’s postwar reckoning with the Nazizeit. Each year, massive volumes of historical research and endless films about the period seem to appear. It was, indeed, a strange period, a national remaking that was not a rebirth, despite its “zero hour” designation.

There is no shortage of opinion pieces claiming to know what the Referendum held on 23 June 2016 on the UK’s membership of the European Union represents.[1] Yet in these early months, it is by no means clear what kind of an event this was and what might yet unfold from it. What is clearer is how this political moment has been felt, embodied and sensed, at least among many on the progressive Left.

Fortress Europe: the transgression of its borders by refugees, who call upon Europe’s much proclaimed "responsibility to protect," has revealed a crisis at the heart of the Fortress—terrifying for the rifts, contradictions and hypocrisies it is laying bare. Instead of tackling those contradictions in the interest of the safety and security of refugees, Fortress Europe is currently pulling up the drawbridges. Fences up, problem "solved"? Can the violence of drawing borders be so easily ignored?

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.

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).