Flowers for Marx

FORTHCOMING Summer 2024

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.  ~ Karl Marx Since the spectacular collapse of the political aspirations of Bernie Sanders in the US[…]

The Fight for Black Liberation: Breaking the Political Strings in the Post-Trump Era

FORTHCOMING Spring 2024

The presidency of Donald J. Trump unveiled the calamity of white America’s determination to maintain so-called societal order during a period of landmark racial upheaval. From the death of George P. Floyd, Jr. and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, to the 2021 winter insurrection and the post-2020 restrictive presidential[…]

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[…]

Why the Center Can’t Hold: A Diagnosis of Puritanized America

Published: 05/30/2016

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” These words from Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming” provide Why the Center Can’t Hold with its organizing theme. And although Yeats was describing the grim atmosphere of post-World War I Europe, O’Neill regards the poem’s pronouncements as eerily predictive of the state of the world as we are[…]

Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics

Published: 12/10/2015

READ Lester Spence on how he conceptualized this book as a sort of critical response to Cornel West’s Race Matters and David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism, and why he chose punctum books as his publisher, HERE. Over the past several years scholars, activists, and analysts have begun to examine the growing divide between[…]