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Literary Criticism Semiotics & Theory

Totality Inside Out

Rethinking Crisis and Conflict under Capital

edited by Kevin Floyd

contributions by Jen Hedler Phillis, Sarika Chandra, Brent Ryan Bellamy, Sarah Brouillette, Chris Chen, Joshua Clover, Tim Kreiner, Arthur Scarritt, Zoe Sutherland & Marina Vishmidt

Publisher
Fordham University Press
Initial publish date
Jan 2022
Category
Semiotics & Theory, History & Theory, Critical Theory
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780823298204
    Publish Date
    Jan 2022
    List Price
    $38.99
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780823298198
    Publish Date
    Jan 2022
    List Price
    $136.99

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Description

However divergent their analyses may be in other ways, some prominent anti-capitalist critics have remained critical of contemporary debates over reparative justice for groups historically oppressed and marginalized on the basis of race, gender, sexual identity, sexual preference, and/or ability, arguing that the most these struggles can hope to produce is a more diversity-friendly capital. Meanwhile, scholars of gender and sexuality as well as race and ethnic studies maintain that, by elevating the socioeconomic above other logics of domination, anti-capitalist thought fails to acknowledge specific forms and experiences of subjugation.
The thinkers and activists who appear in Totality Inside Out reject this divisive logic altogether. Instead, they aim for a more expansive analysis of our contemporary moment to uncover connected sites of political struggle over racial and economic justice, materialist feminist and queer critique, climate change, and aesthetic value. The re-imagined account of capitalist totality that appears in this volume illuminates the material interlinkages between discrepant social phenomena, forms of oppression, and group histories, offering multiple entry points for readers who are interested in exploring how capitalism shapes integral relations within the social whole.
Contributors: Brent Ryan Bellamy, Sarah Brouillette, Sarika Chandra, Chris Chen,
Joshua Clover, Tim Kreiner, Arthur Scarritt, Zoe Sutherland, Marina Vishmidt

About the authors

Kevin Floyd (1967–2019) was an Associate Professor of English at Kent State University and author of The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism.

Kevin Floyd's profile page

Jen Hedler Phillis lives in Chicago. Her primary academic area of interest revolves around the intersection of poetics and politics; her primary political area of interest revolves around dismantling capitalism. Her first book, Poems of the American Empire, was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2019.

Jen Hedler Phillis' profile page

Sarika Chandra is an Associate Professor of English at Wayne State University. She researches and teaches in the areas of globalization studies, American Studies, and Race and Ethnic Studies. Theorizing the U.S. in a transnational frame, her work focuses on race, ethnicity, im/migration, and the environment. Chandra is the author of Dislocalism: The Crisis of Globalization and the Remobilizing of Americanism (Ohio State University Press, 2011). Her publications have appeared in various volumes and journals including American Quarterly, Cultural Critique, and Modern Language Notes. With Chris Chen, she is finishing a book on capitalism and contemporary theories of racial group formation.

Sarika Chandra's profile page

Brent Ryan Bellamy teaches courses on critical worldbuilding, graphic fiction, American petrocultures, and science fiction at Trent University. He has published work in Canadian Review of American Studies, The Cormac McCarthy Journal, Mediations, Open Library of the Humanities, Paradoxa, Postmodern Culture, Resilience, Science Fiction Studies, Western American Literature, and several edited collections. He has edited journal special issues on energy humanities, resource aesthetics, and science fiction and the climate crisis and two books, Materialism and the Critique of Energy (MCM' Publishing) and An Ecotopian Lexicon (University of Minnesota Press). His book Remainders of the American Century: Post-Apocalyptic Novels in the Age of US Decline is available from Wesleyan University Press.

Brent Ryan Bellamy's profile page

Sarah Brouillette is a Professor in the Department of English at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She is the author of three books: Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (Palgrave, 2007); Literature and the Creative Economy (Stanford, 2014); and UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary (Stanford, 2019).

Sarah Brouillette's profile page

Chris Chen is an Associate Professor of Literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Chen has published poetry, essays, interviews, and reviews in boundary 2, The South Atlantic Quarterly, The Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics, The New Inquiry, Crayon, 1913: A Journal of Forms, Tripwire, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. His book-length comparative study of contemporary Black and Asian North American experimental poetry, Literature and Race in the Democracy of Goods, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury. With Sarika Chandra, he is finishing a book on capitalism and contemporary theories of racial group formation.

Chris Chen's profile page

Joshua Clover is the author of seven books, including Roadrunner (Duke University Press, 2021) as well as Riot.Strike.Riot: the New Era of Uprisings (Verso 2016), a political economy of social movements, with recent editions in French, German, Turkish, and Swedish. He is a currently Professor of English and Comparative Literature at University of California, Davis as well as Professor of Literature and Modern Culture at University of Copenhagen.

Joshua Clover's profile page

Tim Kreiner is a Lecturer in the Department of English at Yale University. He is completing a book of literary history titled The Long Downturn and Its Discontents: Poetry, Culture Wars, and the New Left. His writing on poetry and politics has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics (Routledge, 2018), Contemporary Literature, Post-45, Los Angeles Review of Books, Viewpoint Magazine, and Lana Turner.

Tim Kreiner's profile page

Arthur Scarritt is Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at Boise State University. He studies how people challenge and reproduce the multiple forms of inequality that make up their lives. His book Racial Spoils from Native Soils (Rowman and Littlefield, 2015) looks at how Peruvian neoliberal reforms exacerbate the racist coloniality that keeps indigenous Andeans oppressed. He is working to apply these insights to the U.S. and globally. Scarritt’s 2019 article, “Selling Diversity, Promoting Racism,” published in the Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, explains how the diversity efforts of a commercially oriented university end up bolstering campus racism. This research comes out of the Intermountain Social Research Lab (IMSRL). The lab employs intensive undergraduate research training as part of its investigation into the privatization of public higher education. Research from the project has shown how the neoliberal university trains students to embrace the inequalities, limited learning, sexism, and racism that undermine the value of their educations. He earned his bachelor’s at the Evergreen State College and his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Arthur Scarritt's profile page

Zoe Sutherland is a writer based in Brighton. She is a Senior Lecturer in Humanities at the University of Brighton and writes on various aspects of feminist theory and history, as well as on contemporary art.

Zoe Sutherland's profile page

Marina Vishmidt is a writer and editor. She teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work has appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Artforum, Afterall, Journal of Cultural Economy, e-flux journal, Australian Feminist Studies, and Radical Philosophy, among others, as well as a number of edited volumes. She is the co-author of Reproducing Autonomy (with Kerstin Stakemeier) (Mute, 2016), and the author of Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital (Brill 2018/Haymarket 2019). She is one of the organizers of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths and a member of the Marxism in Culture collective and is on the board of the New Perspectives on the Critical Theory of Society series (Bloomsbury Academic).

Marina Vishmidt's profile page

Editorial Reviews

Strongly interdisciplinary, Totality Inside Out crosses the disciplines of history, philosophy, political theory, art, sociology, political economy, literature, and climate science, reconceptualizing the force of capitalism to account for the irreducible complexity of contemporary social formations.---Cinzia Arruzza, The New School for Social Research

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