International forces crowd the military bases of the Sahel, whose fragile ecosystem provides the latest front in the ‘war on terror’. Rahmane Idrissa, historian of the region, situates the fluid relations between farmers and herders, conquerors and marabouts in its longue durée.

In The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, David Edgerton takes aim at narratives of Ukania’s secular decline that would foreground its extraverted economy and capitalist-aristocratic ruling class. How coherent is his alternative?

The notion of ‘caste’ has gained currency as a descriptor of America’s racial order. Sketch for a systematic comparison of African-American and Dalit predicaments, querying the analogies, in an engagement with Sujatha Gidla and Alan Horn’s ‘Caste, Race—and Class’ in NLR 131.

Aesthetics and politics of computer-generated installations at LUX: New Wave of Contemporary Art on the Strand. Immersive, hypnotic: a rapture for techno-capital?

A critical rejoinder to David Harvey’s reflections on the Grundrisse in NLR 130. If capital automatically responds to a falling rate of profit by seeking out a larger mass of labour, how does that square with the facts of the business cycle?

Responding to Dylan Riley’s critique, Harvey extricates Marx’s double-edged law of profit—a falling rate and rising mass—from discussion of capitalist counter-measures. Competitive innovation, Eastern massification and the pay-offs for capital of speculative infrastructure spending.

Transformative programmes for literary criticism as radical ‘aesthetic education’—and the methodological and material obstacles they may encounter. Patricia McManus continues the discussion begun by Francis Mulhern, Lola Seaton and Joseph North.

If the pandemic has reasserted the priority of preserving life through the legal mechanisms of the state, what are the implications in societies governed by the normalizing logic of the spontaneous market?