May 2019 - Politics/Letters QuarterlyPolitics/Letters Quarterly

Browsing Archive May, 2019

Editorial Note 0
Introduction to Issue #15

Welcome to Issue # 15 of POLITICS/LETTERS. We’re going through some changes here, but we’ll come out ahead. Just not of ourselves. We lead with Nancy Fraser’s presidential ...
On May 20, 2019 / By James Livingston
Essay 0
Is Capitalism Necessarily Racist?

Presidential Address delivered at the one hundred fourteenth Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Savannah, GA, on January 5, 2018. Capitalism has always been deeply ...
On May 20, 2019 / By Nancy Fraser
Essay 0
Capitalism, Racism and Totality: A Response to Nancy Fraser

Thank you, Professor Fraser, for being here, and for such a stimulating paper. What I appreciated most was its refusal of a trend (or a temptation) in which ...
On May 20, 2019 / By Barnaby Raine
Essay 0
A Response to Nancy Fraser

There is no history of capitalism without a history of racism. But what is the specific relationship between racism and capitalism? How can this relationship be theorized? To ...
On May 20, 2019 / By Jordan T. Camp, Christina Heatherton, and Manu Karuka (The Racial Capitalism Working Group, Barnard College)
Essay 0
The Answer Is No: A Response to Nancy Fraser

The answer is no. Capitalism has been racist, yes, of course. History is unequivocal. There could have been no Manchester without Mississippi. But capitalism is not necessarily racist. ...
On May 20, 2019 / By Bruce Robbins
Essay 0
Coddled?

From beneath the rubble of liberal democracy come the yowls and yelps of those pinioned under the wreckage, guardians of the old order trying to set the ...
On May 20, 2019 / By Laura Kipnis
Book Review 0
Our Benevolent Feudalism

Elizabeth Anderson, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. 144 pp., plus commentary, notes, and index. ...
On May 20, 2019 / By James Livingston
Essay 0
On Refugee Literature and the Art of Giving a Fuck

A bestselling 2016 blog-book bears the title: “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck”. The title has undoubtedly gone some way in making the book eye-catching. Perhaps ...
On May 20, 2019 / By May Hawas
Essay 0
Zanzibar in Ivoryton

There is a small detail near the ending of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness that in the midst of the dramatic dialogue between Marlow and Kurtz’s Intended is often ...
On May 20, 2019 / By Gaurav Desai
Book Review 0
Figures of Catastrophe

Francis Mulhern, Figures of Catastrophe: The Condition of Culture Novel (London and New York: Verso, 2016). In 1843 Thomas Carlyle, archetypal Victorian sage, coined the phrase “condition of ...
On May 20, 2019 / By John Plotz