We are [. . .] unalterable rebels, without gods, master or fatherland; irreconcilable enemies of all despotism, moral or material, individual or collective, in other words, of law and dictatorship…
Issues
Introduction: How to Be Now
“What’s happening with the special issue? The ‘now’ of its title keeps changing its referent!” So one of our contributors complained in June, after we had predicted an April publication…
Fuck the Avant-Garde
Rachel Greenwald Smith
Ironies of Web 2.0
Damon R. Young
Boredom in Contemporary African American Literature
Aida Levy-Hussen
😂; or, The Word of the Year
C. Namwali Serpell
Painful Repetition: Service Work and The Rise of the Restaurant Novel
Since the 1970s, the composition of the working class in the United States has changed dramatically. Service work now dominates the labor market. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that…
Philippine Reproductive Fiction and Crises of Social Reproduction
The quietest, most docile worker could, behind her apron or her uniform, be sharpening a blade. —Mia Alvar, “The Miracle Worker”1 On July 19th, 1994, Sarah Balabagan, a fourteen-year-old overseas…
American Graphic Design in the 1990s: Deindustrialization and the Death of the Author
This essay offers an account of one profession’s attempt to come to terms with the meaning of work in a context of economic and technological flux. Bound from the beginning…
The Politics of Language Writing and the Subject of History
Timothy Kreiner