Thanks to Michael Hays for assuming the post of Interim Book Review Editor of boundary 2 effective today. Michael has been a long-serving member of the B2 collective. He is an independent scholar recently retired as Dean of Soka University in California and Professor at Cornell. He has also taught at NYU and Columbia. You can reach Michael at boundary2@gmail.com.
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What intellectual traditions, political movements, writers and critics shape our understanding of the relationships between literature and politics in the United States? By what means do we identify such things, and to what ends? And how do these questions and others invite us to consider emergent configurations of critical thought? What possible futures might they suggest?
The Literature & Politics section of The b2 Review solicits and invites original book reviews from interested contributors. We ask reviewers to evaluate critical works that consider how literary writers and writings engage forms of political thought, philosophy, history and action, as well as to evaluate figures, studies and traditions concerned with the dynamics between politics and the literary arts.
We ask for reviews of an intermediate length but word count is not as important as style; we ask that you write reviews for the specialist as well as for the interested reader. Reviews will appear on the boundary 2 website.
Please contact boundary 2 for further inquiry.
–Henry Veggian
b2 has decided to expand its engagement with intellectuals and artists from around the world, and from within and outside academia. We will launch a series of collaborations and exchanges within and outside the US to enable us better to interrogate the world we currently inhabit. Having relaunched ourselves a few years ago by closing the journal to unsolicited or unapproved submissions, we aim now to become a more active and purposive collective, a center, for progressive thinking and intellectual work. We will enhance the journal’s international involvements, hoping to dedicate more of our resources to the work of colleagues in different parts of the world. Politically, our aim is to help understand current configurations of power and open new lines of thought, drawing on historical resources, that meet our new realities.
boundary 2 invites abstracts of articles and proposals for special issues and dossiers of materials that engage analytically with books, authors, and movements from recent history. Abstracts and proposals should explain how the subject materials contain and offer resources useful now to the critical task of imagining, as Edward Said once said, “alternative futures.” Proposals should be historical and philological while taking seriously the most advanced critical work of the theory movement and its predecessors.
Please address questions and proposals to boundary2@outlook.com or post replies here.
Duke University Press has a site that regularly updates our table of contents, our calls for papers, and our special issues. Please see b2 at Duke.
This note asks our readers and visitors to offer us suggestions and advice. What are the topics we should be treating? Who are the writers and thinkers we should engage? Our editorial meeting is very soon and there is still time to make our agenda.
boundary 2 has decided to commit substantial time and resources to discussing “humanism,” a topic current in all serious intellectual disciplines now and central to the political organization of the world and its imaginative dispositions.
The panel invites comparatists to reflect on the spectral aesthetics of state power, to investigate how it colonizes a population’s mind, limits its imaginative possibilities, and yet creates new subject formations. The Derridean word “specters” is a point of departure. This seminar agrees that the spectral world of capital creates a “phantom State” and evacuates public spaces. It departs from the “Cold War mentality,” reflected in Derrida, and sees the traffic between the U.S. and China as evidence of an emergent neoconservative world of state power and imaginative deprivation as one cause of the current crisis in thinking. This seminar proposes that the way forward for a comparative critical humanist is to understand how state power, spectral and spectacular, now takes offense not, as during the cold war, at any one competing worldview but at the very root of the humanistic belief that the human’s desire to imagine and create alternative realities should know no limit. Building on the study of earlier spectral forms —
the novel, propaganda, and advertising — it seeks to understand how in most recent global media events, powerful states establish specters of their own insurmountable power to create new forms of subjectivity settled within consumerism, religion, and the passivity of the status quo. These specters (such as the bombing of Baghdad, the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, the military parades at the People’s Republic of China’s 60th anniversary) also threaten violence against any imaginable alternatives to their own domination of the norms of life.