Reviewed by: Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else) by Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò Gasira Timir Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else). By Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò. Haymarket Books, 2022. 168 pp. In Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else), Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò probes the limits of au courant organizing paradigms, carefully diagnosing the naturalization of deference politics in organizing circles as disobliging and unyielding to actual coalitional solidarity. In doing so, Táíwò leverages numerous critiques of standpoint epistemology, which he glosses as crucially privileging what we now generally apprehend as socially situated knowledge, or knowledge inflected by one's lived experience and identity. In Táíwò's appraisal, standpoint epistemology's inauguration of "deference" as an organizing principle—that is, deference toward the perceivably most marginalized voices in the room and toward the insights that emerge out of their identity experiences—is theoretically useful only insofar as it eventually manages to redistribute the balance of power away from those whose relative positions make them, arguably, accomplices to one (or, indeed, many) vectors or systems of oppression. However, deference falls critically short in situations where internal evaluations pertaining to how or where one locates marginalization ultimately work against organizers' larger-field objectives. That is, deference fails when its own internal logic privileges more parochial [End Page 183] or myopic considerations such as the "mere avoidance of 'complicity' in injustice or promotion of purely moral or aesthetic principles" over apparent "constructive" outcome, in Táíwò's estimation (12). Indeed, Táíwò suggests that it can be observed of attempts at deference that power too often ends up shifting only marginally vertically. Elite Capture thus argues that unchecked overreliance on deference makes oppositional political organizing vulnerable to elite co-optation, resulting in radical movements' eventual inertia. "Elite capture" is a phrase imported from discussions of international affairs and political economy, characterizing (originally) a form of global and government corruption in which an "advantaged few steer resources and institutions that could serve the many toward their own narrower interests and aims" (22). Táíwò's theoretical analysis of how, via elite capture, even "political projects more generally can be hijacked—in principle or in effect"—dovetails nicely with extant critiques of, for example, so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion corporate culture, as well as with broader institutional critique in fields like critical university studies (23). Warning of the proliferation of elite capture of radical movements, Táíwò explains how deference strategies, when deployed reflexively, can cluster and sequester power around a relatively elite contingent who—even if marginalized within the context of the rooms they occupy—do not represent, by themselves, the marginalized persons whose interests they purport to advance. As Táíwò maintains in chapters "Reading the Room" and "Being in the Room," elite capture of identity politics is what happens when deference is deployed in asymmetric proportion to the marginalization that exists outside of his spatial metaphor of a notional organizing room. In chapter 2, "Reading the Room," Táíwò substantiates this logic with a provocative explication of the fable "The Emperor's New Clothes," tackling the architecture of deferential groupthink and pointing out what can be gleaned about the incentives at the helm of an entire townspeople's self-deception. Táíwò ultimately suggests a couple of reasons an aporetic townspeople would align themselves with their emperor's assertion that he is decorated in highly sophisticated and unique garments when he is, instead, actually naked. They might be genuinely persuaded by the false story of the invisible garment because they believe another false story about the emperor's unique insight into the deep structure of reality. … This is the [End Page 184] kind of explanation that people often give when they try to explain oppression by appeal to "implicit bias," "ideology," "epistemic injustice," or cultural explanations rooted in the moral and spiritual rot of oppressive societies. (44) The additional reason is apparent "value capture" in this scenario. Value capture, Táíwò explains, is a process by which we begin with rich and subtle values, encounter simplified versions of...

Abstract: The increasing popularity of academic "quit lit" has energized discussions of the affective difficulties of academia, with much of the focus on the topic of grief. This essay asks whether our conversations about the emotional labor of higher education might benefit from a shift away from understanding this grief as unique to the profession. What new pathways for collective action and care might open up if we understood our work in academia, particularly our teaching, as sharing many qualities with the work performed by others? I argue that if we understand teaching as a performance, and ask what it therefore shares with the performances, labor, and work of others, we can gain an expanded and more productive understanding not just of the affective dimensions of our profession but of our grief as well.

Reviewed by: The Politics of Realism by Thomas Docherty Moinak Choudhury The Politics of Realism. Thomas Docherty. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. 288 pp. Thomas Docherty's The Politics of Realism charts how realism in late-eighteenth- to twentieth-century Europe animates struggles over representations of sex, labor, and death. Alongside these primal impulses, he argues that realism enables unmediated opinions (against state-sanctioned narratives), privacy (against the demands for total transparency), and authenticity (against the manufacturing of consent). Docherty uses these categories to triangulate realism's changing shapes across two centuries of Western aesthetic debates and politics. Despite this vast landscape, the narrative moves nimbly through deft interconnections and signposts. The Politics of Realism will appeal to readers and critics of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, visual culture, and populism studies as it responds to resurgent demands for separating aesthetics and politics. Docherty divides the real and its representations into three segments: "Controlling the Real," "Making the Real," and "Making the Unreal." The first section, which consists of four chapters, addresses the commercial, private, improper, and illegal representations of the real that sought to counter state control in late-eighteenth-century England and nineteenth-century France. The first chapter shows how access to [End Page 159] meaning through the image (mimesis) rather than through narration (diegesis) threatens the government's control over education and culture. Due to its contagious appeal, the image presents a platform for assembling the uneducated, the disenfranchised, and colonized subjects. Docherty emphasizes how governmental fears about these means and ends of public assembly led to a rise in censorship laws, such as the Obscene Publications Act (1857) in England and the reimposed stamp duties and restrictions on "colportage" in France. The second chapter proves how, despite these suppressions of dissent, state censorship was not immune to resistance. It focuses on how Gustave Courbet's "Pavillon du Réalisme," established in opposition to the 1855 Paris World Exhibition's state-backed organizers, showcases that realism, apart from its aesthetic value, was "itself a matter of contentious cultural argument" (57). In the third chapter, Docherty moves from Courbet to Flaubert and Baudelaire to highlight two primal conditions underlying realism—sex and death—and how the private sphere uses them to resist bourgeois morality. He describes Flaubert's travels in the Middle East and North Africa to argue that death and sex are critical to his views of realism. For instance, Flaubert's The Dictionary of Accepted Opinions, which was composed while grieving over the death of his close friend, Alfred Le Poittevin, highlights how "the 'proper' functioning of language … may well be conditioned by impropriety" (73). While in mourning, Flaubert's sexual adventures, Docherty suggests, drove his literary transgressions. But this shift to writing is incomplete. In his aesthetic critiques, Flaubert concentrates on how the materiality of everyday speech opposes bourgeois decorum. This private realism also has a revelatory function: the immediacy of using everyday speech collapses the "temporal and historical division" between the present and its belated representation (73). However, it is ultimately Flaubert's bereavement and libidinous energy, Docherty claims, that shape his public critique of bourgeois decorum, propriety, and property. In chapter 4, Docherty expands the connection between realism and law. He shows how, for Percy Bysshe Shelley, literature legislates truth claims and, thereby, realism. Elsewhere, he describes how literary value, as defined by Jane Austen, offers an alternative to "capitalist realism" (115). Docherty expands these critiques by highlighting how Flaubert's Revue and Dickens's Bleak House attack the "competence of [End Page 160] the legal order to determine what constitutes reality" (114). Together, these examples chart another fundamental shift: instead of standing for "some primary order material reality," realism increasingly implies competing delineations of "truth" and its underlying forces (114). The second section, "Making the Real," expands on this interest in reconstructing realism. Chapter 5 highlights a growing interest in "ocular proof" and, more importantly, how political and aesthetic structures influence new approaches to perception (119–20). In another sweeping move, he brings together Émile Zola and Ivan Turgenev to argue that they are no longer concerned with "claims of realism" but "instead claims of truth" (142). This nascent historical materialism, for Docherty...

Abstract: The epidemic of bubonic plague that struck London in 1603 created its own culture of collectivity. Instead of seeking to place blame on others, the writers responding to the epidemic understood the disease to be divine punishment and a call to collective moral reform. Analyzing the plague pamphlets of Thomas Dekker, William Muggins, Thomas Middleton, and a Dutch refugee residing in London, Jacob Cool, this article argues that the focus on personal moral responsibility for the plague and the need for collective reform created an unexpected culture of collectivity in early modern London.

Reviewed by: Lichens: Toward a Minimal Resistance by Vincent Zonca Nicole Emanuel Lichens: Toward a Minimal Resistance. By Vincent Zonca. Translated by Jody Gladding. Polity Press, 2023. 250 pp. Once you begin read ing Vincent Zonca’s Lichens: Toward a Minimal Resistance, it is likely that you will start to notice these minute life forms everywhere you turn. You may be surprised by the abundance of lichens in poetry; they appear in the stanzas of Tomas Tranströmer and Pablo Neruda, not to mention in ancient Japanese haiku, as well as in recent writing by indigenous poets such as Joséphine Bacon and Natasha Kanapé Fontaine. Perhaps you will observe lichenous imagery in visual art as well, in the surrealist work of Antoni Pitxot and Bernard Saby, for instance, or the immensely enlarged photographs of Oscar Furbacken. You may even find yourself contemplating lichen in music, if you are attuned to the patterns of growth and transformation that inform the aleatory compositions of John Cage or the organically evolving sonic textures of György Ligeti and Iannis Xenakis. Of course, once your eyes and ears are opened to lichen in art, you will almost surely also note their living likenesses in the landscapes where you dwell. You may discover vital patches of texture and color clinging to a tree or a cement wall that you had never previously examined. All the writers, musicians, and artists mentioned above appear in Zonca’s book, and they [End Page 157] represent but a fraction of philosophers, scientists, and creators whose work he connects to the topic of lichen. As the variety of these inspirations indicates, Lichens is a wide-ranging text. It traces its subject from antiquity to modernity, traversing continents, epochs, epistemologies, and many diverse media along the way. Zonca revels in the motley assortment of sources his study takes in. In his own terms, “[e]ven more radically than the philosophy of science, ecocriticism, or anthropology,” Zonca’s approach brings “biology, literary and art criticism, ethnology, and philosophy all together at the same time in order to cultivate curiosity. This is the chosen stance of the undisciplined approach of the essay, the symbiotic functioning of lichen: joyously to blend the disciplines and extract the juices” (11–12). Zonca is committed to a lichenous praxis. Just as lichens make a mockery of taxonomic divisions by being simultaneously fungi and algae, Zonca’s writing embraces hybridity, plurality, and full-blown polymorphic possibility. The border-crossing of Zonca’s methodology puts Lichens in the company of recent texts such as Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015) and Thom van Dooren’s A World in a Shell (2022). Tsing’s and van Dooren’s studies—which focus on matsutake mushrooms and Hawaiian snails, respectively—are also similar to Zonca’s in that they draw attention to an organism (or suite of organisms) that is at once humble and ubiquitous. As Zonca writes, “Lichen is familiar to everyone, known to no one” (3). These scholars each, in various ways, make the case that there is much that humans as a species (and the environmental humanities as a field) might learn from careful study of organisms that play fundamental yet oft-overlooked roles in ecosystem functioning. One might expect that an author who characterizes his own scholarship as “undisciplined” would produce a rather chaotic manuscript, but Lichens is in fact quite clearly organized. Zonca’s text is divided into four major sections, beginning with “First Contacts,” which serves to introduce readers to the world of lichens. This introductory chapter begins with some very brief reflections on Zonca’s own interest in lichenology, which he traces back to “the imaginary world of my childhood and adolescence” (2). The rest of this section introduces other ideas about lichens, which Zonca will tease out in more depth across the pages to come: their nature as symbiotic consortium organisms, their [End Page 158] confused place in scientific histories (and the challenge they pose especially to biological categorization), and their ability to thrive across a wide variety of habitats, particularly those that seem least hospitable to other organisms. Zonca also devotes significant space in...

Reviewed by: Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World by Anna Arabindan-Kesson Zay Dale Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World. By Anna Arabindan-Kesson. Duke University Press, 2021. 320 pp. In Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World, Anna Arabindan-Kesson attends closely to the role of cotton and Blackness in aesthetic and commodity traditions in the United States and globally. Arabindan-Kesson makes it clear that her work is not after a diachronic study of cotton and history; rather, she is concerned with the “visual and material associations between Blackness and cotton” (6). In this well-written, lavishly illustrated, and thoroughly researched book, Arabindan-Kesson develops an approach to art and Blackness that begins in textiles. What emerges from Arabindan-Kesson’s work is a new study of art, history, and literature through Black bodies and white cotton via attention to the visual modality of reducing “Black lives to raw material” (18), a modality in which cotton, Blackness, and history are all violently intertwined. The aesthetic nature of cotton in art forms the central thesis of the book. In the art in which cotton is depicted, Arabindan-Kesson identifies a belief that there exists a certain fugitive space in the threads of cotton: according to this belief, in the viewing, touching, and feeling of cotton, one can recognize its “speculative vision” (21). Each of the four chapters and the coda incorporate this [End Page 153] notion of speculative vision to understand the networks of commerce and Blackness and the ways that Blackness comes to exist through artworks that posit it as a speculative vision of resistance inhabiting the cotton they depict. The first chapter, “Circuits of Cotton,” looks at contemporary artist Lubaina Himid, particularly her artwork Cotton.com (2002), to examine the way Himid not only looks back at history in her work but also looks back upon past and present blindness to exploitation and questions how we can “not see this history” (32). By beginning with this contemporary artist and working back to nineteenth-century art and history, Arabindan-Kesson establishes this reduction of fiber to flesh, thereby building a relationship between Black bodies and textiles; but she also shows the eradication of Black handwork so that Blackness cannot be tied to aesthetics of textiles (38). Arabindan-Kesson guides the reader through the artwork while underscoring the importance of cotton’s role in the draping of the body: clothing for the Black body begins, in the US, not in clothing as artistic expression but clothing as “uniform” (46). Black wearers of this uniform were meant to be seen as deprived of an individual body. The clothes given to them were not fit for their bodies or made with the environment in mind—especially with regard to the heat of the south. This constant state of confinement in a poorly fitting, uniform, cotton drapery shows how cotton not only “shape[d] their daily routine” but also “conditioned their existence” as beings (55). Arabindan-Kesson, however, ends this section by showing us how, from quilt-making to self-styling, enslaved people radically resisted the experience of the mandatory draping of uniforms. More importantly, cotton, because it touches white bodies through the weaving of cotton cloth by Black hands, has the “radical spatial” effect of existing everywhere all at once (61), escaping the confinement imposed upon the Black bodies that produced it. As such, from the hand-picked cotton to the textile factories, Black hands and Blackness can be found ubiquitously. While the first chapter of this book is concerned mostly with cotton in the US, the second chapter spreads the involvement of cotton to Britain. During the nineteenth century, Black abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet traveled throughout Britain giving lectures that detailed the “relationship between the price of cotton in Britain and the value of slaves in America” (69). Indeed, Garnet envisions a Black metaphysical [End Page 154] spirit, if you will, that remains attached to the cotton picked by Black bodies. The material Black bodies, as transitory entities, create a Black spirit and resulting cultural cosmopolitan that Arabindan-Kesson will pick up...