CRITICAL TIMES 3:1

Now available online through Duke University Press

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Contributors to this issue address problems ranging from the emergence of new fascisms to the liberal and authoritarian logics of self-ownership, and from the movement for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions to the powers of literary fiction. The issue also features a set of critical encounters and artistic interventions that complement and formally complicate these scholarly contributions.

> Table of Contents

Call for Papers—On Strikes and Critical Theory

Modern labor strikes became a strategy of the working class with the onset of the industrial revolution, and they have been deployed since to both revolutionary and reformist ends. But much has changed in the practice of strikes since the period of their modern intertwinement with wage labor. Worldwide, there are many strikes today that betray novel logics and stage new political practices: feminist strikes in Latin America focusing on questions of social reproduction, debt, unwaged labor, and gender violence; immigrant strikes in the U.S. and France that demonstrate what “A Day Without Us” would look like; revolutionary strikes, prison strikes, and strikes for bread in the Middle East and South Asia; and a global climate strike led by youth and indigenous communities. These new strikes draw on and depart from the more traditional senses of the word that linked it to wage labor, pointing to a transformation of the political and conceptual landscape of the word "strike." Critical Times is exploring this phenomenon through a special issue, “On Strikes and Critical Theory,” which asks: in what ways, and to what effect, has "strike" become an organizing concept for a range of distinct political actions in a changed world? For information on where to submit an abstract (due October 15, 2020), see the call for papers here.

In the Midst | Blog

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"In the Midst" conveys the difficulties of writing during critical times, and registers the importance of writing from within concrete, unfolding situations, of staying with the troubles of the moment, of thinking from particular grounds, and of allowing for responsive, experimental, and tentative interventions.

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  • / September 9, 2020 11:50 am / Racial Justice

    Politics today is nothing short of civil war. The driving question is no longer so much whether this or that conflict is a civil war but what political work the notion of “civil war” is being exercised to do. States descend into civil wars when contrasting conceptions of life within them are deemed irreconcilable. Living, for a considerable proportion of the state’s inhabitants, is made unbearable. Those at least nominally controlling the state apparatus insist on obedience and deference to its way of being, on pain of erasure. Civil wars are struggles over competing ways of being in the world, over their underlying conceptions, over control of the state and its apparatuses to materialize and advance these commitments.

  • / July 13, 2020 3:55 pm / Anticolonialism

    Translated and introduced by Alex Brostoff. On March 6, 2020, at the seventh annual São Paulo International Theater Exhibition (Mostra Internacional de Teatro de São Paulo), a panel on “Anticolonial Perspectives” convened around the question, “What can we still imagine together?” At the opening roundtable, “On Time,” Brazilian Indigenous intellectual and activist Ailton Krenak addressed the occasion and its audience directly. In the remarks that follow, transcribed by Sonia Sobral, Krenak theorizes the polysemic possibilities and ambivalent effects of the encontro, a Portuguese term for an “encounter,” “meeting,” “assembly,” or “conference.” At once imbricated in ongoing colonial practices and imbued with the potentials of a collective subject, the encontro both intensifies and deters ecological disaster. “We are an unsustainable civilization,” Krenak contends, “We are unsustainable.” And yet, the prospect of encountering each other and continuing to imagine otherwise sustains the possibility of another tomorrow.

  • / June 29, 2020 6:48 pm / Black Struggle

    As Derek Chauvin pressed his knee into George Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, the United States was poised to cross the threshold of 100,000 COVID deaths. We were grieving those who lost their lives to the virus, cut off from friends and family, gasping for breath alone in emergency rooms, nursing or private homes, detention centers, on the streets….We were holding our breaths as we read the daily toll of the pandemic, disproportionately taking Black and Brown lives. Far from being a “great equalizer,” COVID-19 reveals the virulence of structural racism. African Americans are dying of the virus at three times the rate of white people in America. As some official channels urged us to follow the protocols of social distancing and physical isolation in the interests of collective care (and others defied precautions in the name of rugged individualism), an officer in uniform sank the full … Read More

 

Critical Times, a project of the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs, is a peer reviewed open access journal published by Duke University Press with the aim of foregrounding encounters between canonical critical theory and various traditions of critique emerging from other historical legacies, seeking to highlight the multiple forms that critical thought takes today.

Critical Times seeks to reflect on and facilitate the work of transnational intellectual networks that draw upon critical theory and political practice across various world regions. Calling into question hemispheric epistemologies in order to revitalize left critical thought for these times, the journal publishes essays, interviews, dialogues, dispatches, visual art, and various platforms for critical reflection, engaging with social and political theory, literature, philosophy, art criticism, and other fields within the humanities and social sciences.