NLR 87

interview
Volodymyr IshchenkoUkraine’s Fractures

Antecedents and aftershocks of the Maidan protests. A Ukrainian sociologist discusses the riven political and ideological landscape laid bare by the fall of Yanukovych, and the tensions being stoked in the country’s east by Russian interference and Kiev’s ongoing military assault.

articles
Wolfgang StreeckHow Will Capitalism End?

Its challengers apparently vanquished, the main threat to capitalism may now come from disorders that lurk within the system itself. Wolfgang Streeck diagnoses its crisis symptoms, from persistent stagnation to global anarchy, and asks what lies in store as they multiply.

Boubacar Boris Diop & Aminata TraoréAfrican Impostures

Exchanges between two West African intellectuals amidst the latest French incursion in the region, this time on Malian soil. The recurrent delusions of humanitarian warfare, and continued submission of local elites to Paris.

Sean StarrsThe Chimera of Global Convergence

Has the rise of the BRICs weakened the West’s grip on core sectors of the world economy? Sean Starrs weighs impressions of Western decline against the empirical evidence, finding plentiful signs of enduring US and European corporate power.

José Emilio Burucúa & Nicolás KwiatkowskiThe Absent Double

What images arise when representation reaches its limits? Two cultural historians explore the emergence since classical antiquity of a series of visual devices for depicting massacres: from hunting scenes and martyrdoms to infernos and Doppelgänger.

Sven LüttickenCultural Revolution

Mutations of an untimely concept, in a period when capitalism has arrogated to itself the power of radical transformation. From Debord and Marcuse to the contemporary art world, by way of punk rock and hip hop.

reviews
Forever Orwell

Francis Mulhern on Rob Colls, George Orwell: English Rebel. The protean cult of Eric Blair finds its latest iteration.

Gunboat Abolitionism

Robin Blackburn on Richard Huzzey, Freedom Burning. Victorian Britain’s anti-slavery crusade as accomplice of imperial expansion.

Terms of Disparity

Barry Schwabsky on Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis. Episodes from a history of modern art, from Winckelmann to Mallarmé to Vertov.