The Death of Western Marxism Is Serious and It Can Be Reborn—Review of Western Marxism: How It Was Born, How It Died, How It Can Be Reborn by Domenico Losurdo

In Western Marxism, Domenico Losurdo identifies the antithetical and sometimes hostile positions expressed on anti-colonial struggles as the salient feature of the “Western Marxist” tradition of radical European theory. As Losurdo shows, the formation of such positions, which dispense with an essential component of the Marxist theory of class struggles, is a result of a prevalence of theoretical concepts and tendencies within the Western Marxist canon, absent in leading spokespeople from countries in which Marxist governments held power after October 1917. As the article develops in part 1, the positions at issue include messianism, anti-statism, utopianism, anti-scientism, anti-technologism, anti-modernism, anti-labourism, antinomianism, romanticism, and idealism. In part 2, responding to critics who have challenged the value of Losurdo’s characterisation of a “Western Marxism” spanning into post-structuralist thinkers, the article shows how discerning Losurdo’s analysis is by focusing on popular “radical” Italian theorist, Giorgio Agamben. In the conclusion, the article is situated within the critical responses to Western Marxism, and calls attention to a perceived tension in Losurdo’s treatment of Ernst Bloch, and more widely, in the Marxian stance towards bourgeois rights and liberties.

Western Marxism: How it Was Born, How it Died, and How it Can be Reborn, written by Domenico Losurdo

Domenico Losurdo traveled to Beijing for the first time in the 1970s, when (Western) Maoism thrilled a large number of Western progressive intellectuals. But when these intellectuals turned away from China—which they accused of having consolidated an “illiberal totalitarian political regime” but also of having “restored capitalism”—by contrast Losurdo remained a friend of China. For him it was from the Chinese experience and its ability to survive the end of the USSR that one could draw inspiration to confront the most important event in the life of an entire generation: the radical crisis of Marxism and the defeat of the communist movement in the West. Western Marxism, born out of the shock of the First World War, is characterized by a utopian messianism prone to anarchism (the thesis of the extinction of the state, for example, or the claim of an immediate cancelation of borders, or hostility towards economy and technology). In China, on the other hand, Marxism has become the basis of national awareness and the consequent liberation struggle. Once political independence is reached, however, the revolution continues today in order to achieve economic independence. Hence the need for a re-elaboration of the same Marxian category of class struggle.

Western Marxism: How it Was Born, How it Died, and How it Can be Reborn, written by Domenico Losurdo

Primary and secondary education in the imperial core serves to reproduce the ideas of the ruling capitalist class. Revolutionary educators such as Paulo Freire have articulated ways that education may subvert this reproduction—a pedagogy of the oppressed that occurs both inside and outside the classroom. However, a group of left anticommunist recuperators surrounded Freire in his later years, twisting his words and tempering his radicalism. Domenico Losurdo’s anti-imperialist framework of analysis helps discern Western Marxist ideology in the works of Freire’s followers and critical pedagogy theorists, allowing us to interrogate the sanitization process Freire’s followers have enacted while also reasserting Freire’s anti-imperialist, Marxist-Leninist orientation. This article engages in a close reading of two works from Henry Giroux, one of the best-known theorists of Paulo Freire and critical pedagogy. Applying Losurdo’s analysis, the article locates numerous Western Marxist distortions of Freire in Giroux’s writing, particularly regarding the role of power for educators. Because education is an important part of the ideological superstructure of capitalist societies, a comprehensive approach to ending imperialism must include a critical examination of how educators may disrupt ideological reproduction and help build the subjective conditions for revolution. Only by ending US imperialism can we have true multinational liberation.

As someone who entered the United States as a foreign student in the late 1980s, my academic career was intensely shaped by the then burgeoning discourses on colonialism and postcolonialism.1 The triumvirate of Said, Spivak, and Bhabha functioned like a citation machine; and despite Said’s Orientalism, South Asia, especially India, dominated as the colonial/ postcolonial site par excellence. Much of this had to do not just with the presence of many a South Asian scholar studying, writing, and teaching in U.S. universities but also with the fact that some of the most brilliant work was being undertaken on India: Lata Mani’s work on the discourses on sati, the work of the Subaltern Studies historians, Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and her famous essays on the Rani of Sirmur, and of course Bhabha’s legendary essays “Sly Civility” and “Signs Taken for Wonders.” The outpouring of anglophone fiction from South Asia, topped off by the publication of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, made certain that there would be no dearth of work on South Asian (read Indian) postcolonial fiction, and even today, despite a fairer distribution of attention to other parts of the ex-colonial worlds, works on South Asia continue to dominate the scene. Much has been written about this privileging of South Asia (again, read India) and its incarnation as the quintessential postcolonial site, and I am not going to rehearse the debates here. But suffice it to say that while my teaching spans continents, my first book was part and parcel of the work on the discourse of gender and nationalism in colonial and postcolonial literary representations by British, Bengali, and anglophone South Asian writers. But, in another sense the book was comparative because it brought into play writers working in different languages, and I remember getting a report from Cambridge University Press asking me why there was no chapter on Rushdie.

This paper proposes an approach in Southeast Asian studies using a post-colonial framework in the study of post-colonial Southeast Asia. This framework is based on the sociology of knowledge that analyzes the dialectical relationship between science, ideology, and discourse. Post-colonial studies is critical of the concept of universality in science and posits that a scientific statement of a society cannot stand alone, but is made by authors themselves who produce, use, and claim the so-called scientific statement. Several concepts in post-colonial theories can be used to develop area studies, i.e. colonial discourse, subaltern, mimicry, and hybridity. Therefore, this study also explores these concepts to develop a more comprehensive understanding of Southeast Asian culture. The development of post-colonial theories can be used to respond to the hegemony of social theories from Europe and the United States. The main contribution of area studies in the field of the social sciences and humanities is in revealing the hidden interests behind the universal social sciences.

A leading expert's brilliant analysis of how China will finally accept liberalism, and what that will mean for the United States. . Some observers expect China to become an economic superpower. Others expect it to fragment into pieces. Is China nationalistic and on the march, or is it a stumbling Communist dinosaur? Is it already a billion-citizen member of the global village? Is it, as the Clinton administration claimed, a strategic partner of the US ?Ross Terrill addresses the question upon which all these others depend: Is the People's Republic of China, whose polity is a hybrid of Chinese tradition and Western Marxism, willing to become a modern nation or does it insist on remaining an empire? Since the collapse of three thousand years of Confucian monarchy in 1911, China has neither established a successful political system nor adjusted to being a nation state. Today it stands as the most contradictory of major powers, hovering between an unsustainable tradition and a yet-to-be-born political form that would support its new society and economy. Hanging in the balance are the prospect for freedom within China (for both Chinese and non-Chinese citizens of the People's Republic), the future of America's relations with China, and the security of China's neighbors. Drawing upon Terrill's long experience studying China as well as upon new research, this enlightening and rigorous book will be a must-read for everyone who has a stake in the future of the global world order.

This article opens a debate with Anderson’s theses on “western Marxism,” identifying their limits and problems, and proposing an alternative thesis. It argues that the Marxism that developed in the English- speaking world was strongly influenced by the absence of popular movements that identify themselves as Marxist, particularly in the United States and Great Britain, and that Marxism was “nationalized” and “regionalized,” a development that was fed by the contributions of “western Marxism.”

The impoverishment of mainstream International Relations (IR) scholarship, especially as it is practised in the bastions of academic power and respectability in the United States, can be registered in terms of its wilful and continuing conceptual blindness to mutually constitutive relations of governance/resistance at work in the production of global politics. This has been underscored in recent years by the rise of powerful transnational social movements seeking to reform or transform global capitalism, a coalition of coalitions recently reincarnated in the form of a global peace movement opposing the blatantly neo-imperial turn in US foreign policy. As the essays in this Special Issue attest, critical scholars of world politics have developed conceptual vocabularies with which to (re-)construct, from various analytical-political perspectives, aspects of these governance/resistance relations. My task in this article is to argue that – under historical circumstances of capitalist modernity – a dialectical understanding of class-based powers is necessary, if by no means sufficient, for understanding social powers more generally, and issues of global governance and resistance which implicate those powers. Although it is not without its tensions and limitations, I have found re-envisionings of Marxian political theory inspired by Western Marxism – and in particular by interpretations of Antonio Gramsci – to be enabling for such a project. Marxian theory provides critical leverage for understanding the structures and dynamics of capitalism, its integral if complex relationship to the modern form of state, the class-based powers it enables and the resistances these engender; and Gramsci's rich if eternally inchoate legacy suggests a conceptual vocabulary for a transformative politics in which a variety of anti-capitalist movements might coalesce in order to produce any number of future possible worlds whose very possibility is occluded by capitalism. In the present context of globalising capitalism and neo-imperialism, such resistance has taken the form of a transnational confluence of movements for global justice and peace.

MARXIST SOCIAL THEORY is enjoying an unparalleled influence in the contemporary intellectual life of the West, and its presence in the United States is no exception (Aronowitz 1981:ix). Well developed Marxist perspectives are increasingly evident in the social sciences, historiography, and literary criticism; so it is, perhaps, something of a surprise to discover the relative absence of a parallel discussion in folkloristics. The reasons for this absence and the possibilities for such a Marxist discourse particularly among English-speaking folklorists remain largely unexplored, although Fox has taken an initial step (1980). The present remarks are intended as another but more substantial initiative toward a continuing discussion. A full analysis of Marxist thought and folklore would require a discussion of several key topics: the status of folklore in the writings of Marx and Engels, the development of a Soviet folkloristics, the fate of Marxism in Western folkloristics, and conversely, the place of folklore in the development of Marxism outside the Soviet bloc and among Soviet dissidents. Previous discussions of these subjects have varied in quality and have lent an almost exclusive emphasis to Soviet practice or its rejection in the West (Dorson 1972; Fox 1980; Oinas 1973; Oinas and Soudakoff 1975; Sokolov 1950; Williams 1975; Zemljanova 1963). In a larger study in progress I discuss all of these areas and elaborate my theoretical views on the subject. In this instance, however, I wish to explore the most ignored of these topics-the place of folklore in the development of non-Soviet Marxism, specifically among selected and representative nonfolklorists whom I will generally refer to as Western Marxists. While folklorists have had little to say about Marxism and folklore, this Western Marxist tradition has demonstrated a high degree of interest in this relationship. Their commentary merits discussion both as an important chapter in a developing history of folkloristics (Ben-Amos 1973) and as a necessary background for future theorizing in this area. My chief contention is that the treatment of folklore by Western Marxists has a limited character. They intuitively view folklore as collective behaviors whose fundamental character is in some way inherently opposed to the dominant social order of state capitalism, an unclear formulation at best. Further,

Joshua Nicholas Pineda reviews Domenico Losurdo's Western Marxism.

Gloria Fisk’s Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature (2018) is a timely book, not only because it contributes to the continuing debate on world literature that has occupied literary academic circles since the 1990s but also because it sets out to uncover the immense impact of neoliberalism on academia in the United States. In meeting these two challenges, Fisk chooses to focus on the reception of the work of Orhan Pamuk, who, after being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2006 for peering “into the melancholic soul of his native city,”1 was canonized by US academia as one of the iconic authors of world literature.In the introduction, Fisk warns the reader not to expect a monograph on a single author. Instead, she takes Pamuk’s oeuvre as a case study in order to ask a set of broader questions concerning “the conditions by which Western literary cultures expand to their east” (22). She makes this choice based on the novelist’s reception in the West less as a literary figure than as a political negotiator. Fisk maintains that Pamuk is usually praised not for the aesthetic pleasure that readers derive from his novels but “for the infrastructural work he performs between the Judeo-Christian West and the Islamic East, providing a bridge where one is needed, a diplomat between warring parties, a window from one side of the world to another” (2).The main argument of Fisk’s study thus becomes an in-depth critique of the kind of pragmatism that advocates the instrumental use of literature as a source of cross-cultural understanding. By urging us to think about the processes of translation and publication, and the function of world literature in college curricula, she asks whether literature produced in the non-Western world can be regarded as an aesthetic form independent from the interests of the Western cultural and educational institutions that publish, review, and circulate it. While problematizing the view that world literature is meant for cross-cultural enlightenment, Fisk implies that this is not a reciprocal process because it offers Anglophone readers admission to worlds to which they would otherwise have no access, while the world of such readers remains inaccessible to non-Western writers.2 This position raises the question of whether novels marketed as “world literature” face the risk of being read as glorified travel books or polished guides to the “real” lives of people living in distant foreign countries. In both cases, the outcome is the same: world literature remains open to misreadings or, even worse, to cultural assimilation.Fisk undertakes the task of responding to this question in the three sections of her book. In the first section (“What Good Can a Novel Do?”), she refers to the English translations of The Black Book (2006), Snow (2004), and The Museum of Innocence (2009) in order to show “how Pamuk constructs his authority to convey nonfictional truth about Turkish people and their history to the West” (22). In the second (“What Good Can a Novelist Do?”), she focuses on Pamuk’s public personae as literary celebrity and political figure. In the third (“What Good Can World Literature Do?”), she focuses on the theoretical framework and institutional practice of world literature as it is taught at universities in the United States and Turkey.The first section opens with a question: Why has a novel as complicated and ambiguous as Orhan Pamuk’s Snow become so popular among North American readers? Fisk suggests that the author himself nurtures ambiguity by “inject[ing] layers of doubt around everything that Western readers have learned from his long, detailed, and deeply political novel” (49). She questions whether the novel’s greatness lies in its potential to bring Western readers “into its Turkish characters’ thoughts and feelings and, more precisely, into their perspective on a world that is politically structured” (34); she concludes by saying that Pamuk’s readers come to him with the expectation that he will reveal “what actual Turkish people think” (36). Fisk thinks that this expectation has to do with the fact that the author has been praised by “the culture brokers of Western literary institutions” (such as Margaret Atwood, John Updike, and the members of the Swedish Academy) for what Fisk identifies as “his representation of the Turkish people with mimetic accuracy.”The discussion of the use of voice and perspective in Snow constitutes one of the most interesting aspects of Fisk’s argument on Pamuk’s reception in the Western world. Fisk shares with the reader her observation that Ka, the Western-educated and alienated protagonist of the novel who, like his creator, “wears a magician’s cape but carries a reporter’s notebook” (65), performs “a journalistic function” within the novel. While reporting to his Anglophone readers, he also describes “what our [the Anglophone readers’] gaze feels like from the other side” (42). Fisk refers to an instance in Snow when Ka remembers walking the streets of Frankfurt, singling out a lone German, and wondering what that man sees when he looks at him. This internalized Western gaze is what Meltem Ahıska (2003: 351) refers to as “Occidentalism,” a term that describes the complex interiority of the modern Turkish individual: “Once it found itself in the wake of Western modernity, Turkey has been engaged in a constant reconstruction of the image of the ‘West’ as well as an effort to regenerate the long lost ‘East.’” Fisk, however, maintains that Pamuk uses this narrative device in order to indulge “the narcissistic desire of Western observers to see their self-reflection” (42). She further argues that this perspective leads the author to perform a role not unsimilar to that of “native informant”: “It is the role of the domestic informant, perhaps, who tells hegemonic powers what it feels like to live inside them, unseen” and who, unlike the native informant, voices a critique “of the blinding effects of hegemonic power on the people who enjoy it” (43). But engaging with the hegemon can involve certain risks, as Fisk also acknowledges. She warns us against the danger of a form of narration that attempts to cure Western readers of their blindness to the world but that may also lead them to think “that the minds of Turkish people lie within the reach of our collective imagination—that we can enter them if we try, with the novel’s help” (44). Fisk recognizes the possibility that such narration may re-create the hegemonic relation that it has come to criticize in the first place. Still, her distinction between the “native informant” and the “domestic informant” remains rather vague and confusing.Fisk’s analysis of Pamuk’s estranged character Ka as someone who feels like an alien both in Berlin and in Kars, prepares the reader for the discussion of exile later in the book. Fisk does not agree with Kader Konuk on the temporal aspect of the author’s exilic consciousness but instead compares Pamuk with James Joyce, quoting Edward Said, who wrote that Joyce “chose to be in exile: to give force to his artistic vocation” (126 [see, also, Konuk 2010: 15; Said 2001: 137]). However, when Fisk suggests that we read Pamuk’s self-imposed exile in the same vein, she seems to ignore the possibility that his choice may be based on the realization that “home” has become an exile in its own right, especially when one considers the rise of authoritarianism in Turkey. To her credit, though, in the section where she writes on Pamuk’s public persona as a political figure, Fisk goes to great lengths to explain to the non-Turkish reader the reasons behind Pamuk’s persecution by nationalist extremists. She also includes a paragraph in her introduction on the violation of human rights in Turkey since the coup d’état of 2016, which ended with the dismissal and detention of more than 100,000 civil servants, including teachers, judges, and academics. “Those pressures,” she admits, “put Turkish academics in 2017 in a position akin to Orhan Pamuk’s in 2006” (29).Problematizing Pamuk’s role as a medium of “cross-cultural understanding,” Fisk also underlines instances in his novels that remain opaque to the Anglophone reader, such as the headscarf controversy in Snow. She points to Elif Batuman’s (2011) observation that many reviewers (such as Margaret Atwood and Christopher Hitchens) misremember it as a novel about girls who commit suicide because the state prevents them from wearing headscarves in school, even though most of the suicides remain unexplained in the novel. Fisk concludes that the Anglophone reader’s lack of knowledge of Turkish history is to blame for such misreadings: “They come to Pamuk’s novels without the education we would need to question his representations of historical realities we don’t know” (77).Reading Fisk on Pamuk’s reception in the West, one has the impression that Western readers encounter obscurities that may complicate the reading of the texts, particularly foreign words and expressions that look alien and “representations of historical realities” about which they have no prior knowledge. But isn’t this always the case when one reads novels set in other countries, epochs, and cultures? Fisk attributes to the Western reader a political naivete that can be overcome by going beyond the reading of the text as a “national allegory”3 and engaging in the multiple layers that Pamuk’s novels usually offer. However, instead of regarding Western readers as individuals responsible for their lack of historical knowledge, Fisk shifts the burden to Pamuk, who, she claims, is no different from the poets banished from Plato’s Republic because of their power to mislead readers: “Pamuk performs exactly that kind of manipulation on his Western readers, who lack sufficient knowledge about Turks and Turkey to check the mimetic quality of any cultural logic he constructs” (83).In the final section, Fisk voices her suspicion that the primary problem is not world literature itself but, rather, the contrast between the impact of the global market for such literature in academia and the discourse that US-based academics adopt against capitalism. According to Fisk, to be able to address the real problem, academics should first admit that they are “ontologically inseparable” from global capitalism: “As the world is governed by global capital, and as the university is neoliberal, so are we” (192). In order to face the problem, they have to give up the illusion of the academy as the locus of anticapitalist critique and adopt what she calls “a more honest critical discourse,” which would place literary criticism “squarely in the institutions and markets that enable it within and beyond the university, so literary critics could launch critiques from that admittedly compromised position—just as Orhan Pamuk locates his literary oeuvre in the market where it is bought and sold” (186).This final remark comes as a surprise if one considers the strong critical attitude that Fisk assumes all through the book against the ideological tools of neoliberalism in academia. Apart from labeling Orhan Pamuk as an author compromised by the global market, if not as someone who is reproducing and benefiting from its hegemonic workings, Fisk also seems to advocate the view that academia can produce this “honest critical discourse” only if it comes to terms with the existing system. She argues at length, and convincingly, to show that academia is already tainted and needs to acknowledge this fact but ends up saying that the only solution is “to admit that structural dependency as an unavoidable fact of life in late capitalism” (191).There are several problems inherent to this position. First of all, even if we agree with Fisk, there is a difference between being aware of the fact that one’s writing is not totally independent from political and economic realities and completely surrendering to the mechanisms of global capitalism. When Fisk urges US critics to consider “ceding the possibility of political perfection to look for better ways to do political good,” she seems to ask them to yield to the kind of pragmatism she criticizes earlier in the book. She sides with the critic who is “rhetorically more pragmatist than zealot” and claims that, if we assume this position, we (scholars) “become better able to work from the desire we broadly share to chip away at the structural sources of hegemony and domination” (193). Another point Fisk makes is that the critics of world literature, once they admit their structural dependency to the neoliberal system, may then be able to devise the rhetorical models that engage “with the sources of real suffering in the world” (192). Yet she does not explain why they should do so, given that they must concentrate on their own survival within the system.Fisk urges us to think about the “costs and benefits” (194) of the discourses surrounding world literature determined by the “local interests of the humanists” at US-based universities. “Those interests are not irredeemably bad,” she notes, “but they fit poorly together with the more global aims that bring Western readers to Pamuk.” These global aims must also have to do with the marketing strategies to be developed in light of this new discourse because, Fisk thinks, we need better answers to “questions that have nothing to do with the best way to interpret literature that travels to its readers from far away,” such as, “why research in the humanities is worth the trouble and the money.” This brings us to the last and most important problem: by reinforcing the idea of a structural dependency on capitalism, Fisk seems to have given up on the ultimate goal of academia: the production of independent critical thinking. While it is true that “everybody needs money to live” (189), including scholarly critics who have to make compromises “to maintain [their] livelihoods” (194), the biggest compromise would be to yield to the idea that scholars are bound solely to their work as a means of survival. If this is the case in US academia, it calls for resistance rather than acceptance and integration.Going back to the central question of Fisk’s book—namely, “What is the good of world literature?”—one feels obliged to voice the same concern: How can we hope to create a better world if we agree to surrender art and literature to an ever stronger capitalist orientation toward pragmatism? My suggestion is that we follow the footsteps of the late novelist Ursula K. Le Guin (2014), who reminds us that literature is one of our primary tools in nourishing this hope: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”

Reviewed by: The Nation Writ Small: African Fictions and Feminisms 1958–1988 by Susan Z. Andrade Olakunle George Susan Z. Andrade. The Nation Writ Small: African Fictions and Feminisms, 1958–1988. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. ix + 252 pp. The last decade has witnessed renewed scholarly interest in non-Western literatures and traditions. There is a distinct aspect to this new tide of interest having to do with methodological turns in literary studies and global developments beyond academia. The methodological turns I have in mind include the naturalization—some will say domestication—of postcolonial studies, feminism, and Western Marxism, while the global historical development is the post-9/11 heightening of anxieties over terrorism, international conflicts, and the perceived clash of cultures. One sign of these developments is the currency of cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, and world literature in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. As labels of methodological alignment or ethical-political vision, these terms are fashionable in a good way: potentially, they may yield new ways of affiliating and understanding the texts of culture. And yet, under the sign of cosmopolitanism and world literature, the gains in theoretical sharpness are often attenuated by losses in historical grounding and attention to the local complexities of these literatures as sites of humanistic knowledge. Susan Z. Andrade’s The Nation Writ Small: African Fictions and Feminisms, 1958–1988 is best appreciated if it is located against this background. The book contributes to transnational literary studies by bringing the evidence of African fiction to the table. The Nation Writ Small scores high points on two ends of the playing field, so to speak. On the one hand, it contributes to African studies by bringing theoretical insights from feminism, postcolonial theory, and Marxism, thereby compelling a rethinking of some of the clichés of the field. At the same time, the [End Page 547] book contributes to transnational literary studies by leavening broad conceptual issues with fine-tuned readings of African “fictions and feminisms.” The Nation Writ Small is divided into a substantial introduction and four chapters devoted, respectively, to Flora Nwapa and Buchi Emecheta; Ousmane Sembène, Mariama Ba, and Sow Fall; Tsitsi Dangarembga and Nuruddin Farah; and Assia Djebar. Andrade’s introduction frames the book’s analytical procedure by carefully navigating around what might be called the image-analysis of Florence Stratton’s Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender (1994) and the “anti-reflectionist” stance of Olakunle George’s Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters (2003). Andrade argues that Stratton’s feminist book is one-dimensional, restricted as it is to analyses of images in terms of accuracies or distortions. Andrade rejects the schematism and tautology of Stratton’s critique of male writers, whereby ideological limitations are accounted for simply on the basis of sexism or writers’ identities as male subjects. For Andrade, “Stratton seems to assume that there is a single, correct way to represent men and women … and that the measure of a work lies in the truthfulness of its representation” (14). Moving beyond this, Andrade’s strategy is to consider the interplay of form and content, as well as the complex work of culture that representations perform. Turning to Relocating Agency, Andrade faults George for being “too committed to exposing the gap between the social and the representative to engage the relation of the aesthetic to the cognitive” (16). The cost is that George ends up giving short shrift to content. I take this to mean that a covert formalism, or worse, weak aestheticism, results from George’s hostility to reflectionist criticism. Full disclosure: as the author of Relocating Agency, I sometimes do not recognize the book’s arguments in Andrade’s claims about its polemical excesses. But my (non-neutral) reservation aside, the construal of mimesis-representation that she elicits is sound: “Once something has been represented in words or visual images, the world has been altered or transformed, for now the object exists alongside the representation, the object, and some form of itself that is also not itself” (17). Given the promise she sees in Georg Lukács’s approach to realism, it makes sense that she finds Fredric Jameson’s “Third-World Literature in the Era of...

Through a reappraisal of the work of four major figures in critical theory – Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin – Filippo Menozzi rethinks the tradition of critical theory in relation to pressing concerns in postcolonial studies. Revealing these authors’ continued relevance to urgent issues in the 21st century, from struggles against racism to social movements and the transmutations of global capitalism, Menozzi reimagines them as central to an alternative genealogy of critical theory that moves beyond their European provenance and the limitations of “Western Marxism”. In doing so, this book challenges, more broadly, the view of critical theory as steeped in Eurocentrism, culturally conservative, and politically defeatist. Contesting this in four chapters,Postcolonial Historical Materialisminserts Adorno, Lukács, Bloch, and Benjamin into key contemporary sites of militancy and debate. Engaging with a wide range of European and non-European sources, Menozzi proposes a new concept of “postcolonial historical materialism”, indicating how the heritage of critical theory can reopen global possibilities of utopia and revolution in a non-utopian age of global emergencies, social unrest, and the unfinished history of decolonisation.