In Black Skin White Masks, Frantz Fanon provides some essential tools for the analysis of a racialized subjectivity and the relationship of that consciousness to colonial structures. Fanon details the internalized condition of Black racialization as a form of alienation akin to non-being, asserting that “a Black is not a…

In The Conquest of the Unhappy Consciousness, Marcuse provides some important tools for understanding the contradictory condition of subjectivity under global capitalism, particularly in its capacity for criticism. I interpret Marcuse as asserting that art has the capacity to generate a critical consciousness in those who experience it. This is…

In first engaging with Arendt’s articulation of totalitarianism, I was initially struck by her choice of comparison of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. From the beginning of this section, Arendt treats the two nations and their respective leaders, Hitler and Stalin, as a self-evidently like pair. I found myself…

Fraser’s articulation of social/political aspects of the contemporary neoliberal shift in capitalism seems to be an important intervention in discussions about overcoming crises of class, gender, and race. Alongside Zambrana, Fraser shows that capitalist crises are not external to capitalism, such as in the case of hurricanes or viruses (119)…

In reading Wendy Brown’s In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, I found myself thinking more about contemporary right-wing reaction to, and within, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the relationship of this reaction to the larger conservative/neoliberal political and economic order. Brown spends significant time examining the theories of the progenitors of neoliberal…

Beyond this course, I am interested problems of race and ideology. As I have encountered contradictions within reformist approaches to racial liberation wherein the very methods proposed to achieve liberation simultaneously appeal to the fundamental constitutive features of the system that they purport to transform, I have been searching for…

As articulated by Dr. Albena Azmanova in the article “Viral Insurgencies: Can Capitalism Survive COVID?” the concept of metacrisis describes the condition wherein resolution of a primary crisis is forestalled, extending the deleterious effects of that crisis, the drawn-out impacts of which are the cause of a secondary crisis contingent…