Evil Twins and the Ultimate Insight: Ayn Rand, Vladimir Nabokov, and the Polarized Politics of Reading

Published: 10/05/2023

With the 2020 election, political polarization in the U.S. entered a ludicrous end-stage. Partisanship, once a pseudo-rational system of biases, has devolved to a conflict between incompatible realities. In search of some pathway toward consensus, Evil Twins and the Ultimate Insight: Ayn Rand, Vladimir Nabokov, and the Polarized Politics of Reading looks to the works[…]

Recovering the Radical Promise of Superheroes: Un/Making Worlds

Published: 08/24/2023

Superhero meaning making is a site of struggle. Superheroes (are thought to) trouble borders and normative ways of seeing and being in the world. Superhero narratives (are thought to) represent, and thereby inspire, alternative visions of the real world. The superhero genre is (thought to be) a repository for radical or progressive ideas. In the[…]

Lamma: A Journal of Libyan Studies 2

Imprint:

Published: 06/20/2023

Lamma aims to provide a forum for critically understanding the complex ideas, values, social configurations, histories, and material realities in Libya. Recognizing, and insisting on, the urgent need for such a forum, we give attention to as wide a range of disciplines, sources, and approaches as possible, foregrounding especially those which have previously received less[…]

re: evolution

Imprint:

Published: 04/13/2023

Delving into the fissures of language as an opportunity to create something new, Rosenfield appropriates texts from various fields of knowledge (evolutionary theory, psychoanalysis, advice on the science of living, and feminist theory) to rewire ideas of authority, subjectivity, and expert opinion. The resulting re: evolution is part text-book, part poem, part song-of-science, part feminist[…]

Microbium: The Neglected Lives of Micro-matter

Published: 09/07/2023

Microbium: The Neglected Lives of Micro-matter tells the story of small matter such as bacteria, coral, fungi, lichen, pollen, protozoa, and viruses. With short entries that are organized like a herbarium or similar specimen collection, the book is a “microbium”—both the term for a single microbe and a play on “microbiome.” As such, Microbium makes[…]

Static Palace

Published: 12/01/2022

In the face of unimaginably violent systems, our most vulnerable bodies—sick, disabled, unable to rise from bed—offer the resistance of imperative vulnerability. What can we learn from the body that cannot help but fail? How can porosity perform treachery within entrenched opressions? What kind of reading and relationship to text can enrich relationship instead of[…]

Living with Monsters: Ethnographic Fiction about Real Monsters

Published: 05/11/2023

For every generic type of monster—ghost, demon, vampire, dragon—there are countless locally specific manifestations, with their own names, traits, and appearances. Such monsters populate all corners of the globe haunting their humans wherever they live. Living with Monsters is a collection of fourteen short pieces of ethnographic fiction (and a more academically-inclined introduction and afterword)[…]