ABSTRACT

Any level of study within literature and culture requires an engagement with a wider scope of themes, issues and discourses, and these debates are often centred around key ‘essays’. This book examines a wide range of these essays on topics such as posthumanism, racism, feminism, necropolitics, the Anthropocene, gender, Global North/South, neo- and de-colonialism, universals, borders and limits, interspecies relations, blackness, cosmopolitics, epistemology, addiction.

 

The essays selected represent scholars from a range of disciplines, ethnicities, nationalities and genders, and offer readings relevant across the arts and humanities. Each chapter explains why the essay is of vital importance in our contemporary era, introduces and explains the key themes and theories with which it engages, demystifies any complex content and positions it within wider current debates.

 

Covering all of the essential debates that students and academics must engage with, alongside a close analysis and critique of contemporary seminal essays in the debate, this book will be an essential read for students of literature and culture across the arts and humanities.

 

chapter |24 pages

Introduction

Keytexts – the contemporary essay

chapter 1|6 pages

Junkspace

On ‘Junkspace’ by Rem Koolhaas (2002)

chapter 2|6 pages

Blackness matters

On ‘1 (life) ÷ 0 (blackness) = ∞ − ∞ or ∞ / ∞’ by Denise Ferreira da Silva (2017)

chapter 3|6 pages

The superpositioning of cuteness

On ‘The Cuteness of the Avant Garde’ by Sianne Ngai (2005)

chapter 4|6 pages

How matter matters

On ‘Posthumanist Performativity’ by Karen Barad (2003)

chapter 5|6 pages

Posthumanism

On ‘Posthuman Humanism’ by Rosi Braidotti (2013)

chapter 6|6 pages

Companion species

On ‘Unruly Edges’ by Anna Tsing (2012)

chapter 7|5 pages

Feminism and happiness

On ‘Killing Joy’ by Sara Ahmed (2010)

chapter 8|6 pages

The pharmacopornographic pandemic

On ‘Learning from the Virus’ by Paul Preciado (2020)

chapter 9|6 pages

Epistemologies of the Global South

On ‘Public Sphere and Epistemologies of the South’ by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2012)

chapter 10|5 pages

Counter-forensics

On ‘Open Verification’, Eyal Weizman (2019)

chapter 11|6 pages

Necropolitics

On ‘Necropolitics’ by Achille Mbembe (2003)

chapter 12|6 pages

The undercommons

On ‘The University and the Undercommons’ by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney (2004)

chapter 13|5 pages

Cosmopolitics

On ‘Cosmopolitics’ by Emily Apter (2018)

chapter 14|5 pages

Comrades of time

On ‘Comrades of Time’ by Boris Groys (2009)

chapter 15|6 pages

The mentality of the Anthropocene

On ‘The Brain of History, or, The Mentality of the Anthropocene’ by Cathérine Malabou (2017)

chapter |11 pages

Afterword