Anthropology of Toxicity

Uncertainty, disavowal, forgetting, and stigmatisation are common responses to toxicity: dumping grounds are habitually portrayed as ‘strange, alien spaces with no comprehensive histories’ (Little and Akese 2024). How can we best face this s…

Haunting Biology : Book Forum

Emma Kowal’s Haunting Biology: Science and Indigeneity (2023) investigates the history of biological and medical research about Indigenous peoples in Australia. This book forum invited contributors to provide nuanced insights that engage the…

Pluralising Cancer

This Review essay seeks to interrogate the vast category of ‘cancer’. Taken together, the three books explored here pluralise cancer, locating it not just in organs and bodies but also in time and space—in the social, material, and historica…

Visual Culture and the Forensic: Culture, Memory, Ethics

Reviewed by Chelsea Wenzhu Xu, George Mason University David Houston Jones. Visual Culture and the Forensic: Culture, Memory, Ethics. London: Routledge, 2022. Questions of evidence and ethics in photography have been taken up by many theorists, as phot…

Life-Destroying Diagrams

Reviewed by Jacob Carter, University of Rochester Eugenie Brinkema. Life-Destroying Diagrams. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022. 470 pages. Throughout Eugenie Brinkema’s Life-Destroying Diagrams, form is described as infinite, boundless, and generati…

Minor China: Method, Materialisms, and the Aesthetic

Reviewed by Hsin-Yun Cheng, University of Rochester Hentyle Yapp. Minor China: Method, Materialisms, and the Aesthetic. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. 288 Pages. At first glance, the title of the book, Minor China, seems to counterintuitively bel…

Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art

Reviewed by Stefan Higgins, University of Victoria James J. Hodge. Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. 220 Pages. The task of “pulling back the curtains” on computational technology has …

Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination

Reviewed by Luke Jarzyna, University of Rochester Bertram D. Ashe and Ilka Saal, eds. Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020. 248 Pages. Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination (hereafter SPBI) brings toget…

Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire

Reviewed by Dylan Lackey, Global Center for Advanced Studies Jack Halberstam. Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. 219 pages. On the other side of interpellation, where the hail does not reach, where the call is unh…

Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism

Reviewed by Luke Urbain, University of Wisconsin-Madison Ariella Aïsha Azoulay. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. London: Verso Books, 2019. 656 pages. With the urgency of a manifesto and the volume of a brick, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s recent b…