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Segregation’s Sequiturs

John-Baptiste Oduor on Adolph L. Reed Jr, The South. Materialist account of the Jim Crow order, blending memoir and sociology to rebut essentializing depictions of Southern white supremacy.

Brecht In L.A.

From the author of Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, a rediscovered appraisal of Bertolt Brecht’s war-time exile in California. Tracing the swirl of interconnections between salonnières and stars, exiles and dissidents, artists of stage and screen. Beyond Hollywood frustrations, what of a Brechtian cinema?

Capital and Cybernetics

Current debates on techno-capitalism often underplay the relative autonomy of the digital realm. Responding to Evgeny Morozov’s ‘Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason’ in NLR 133/4, Timothy Ström outlines the abstractionist and expansionist logic of a novel cybernetic-capitalist form, originating at the apex of the US imperial system.

American Decline?

Predictions of American decline have multiplied over the past half-century, in tandem with the country’s expanding world power. Marco D’Eramo balances the strengths of a novel mode of dominion—military, financial, digital, diplomatic—against growing domestic strains levied by political deadlock and economic globalization.

Two Atlantic Lefts

The legacies of the Sanders and Corbyn waves include new cohorts of democratic-socialist elected representatives. As a provisional synecdoche for the electoral turn, Caitlín Doherty examines the records to date of the Democrat ‘Squad’ on Capitol Hill and their Labour equivalents at Westminster.

An Avoidable War?

In the first of three texts on the war for Ukraine, an examination of the narrative dominating Western media coverage—an unprovoked Russian assault, in which NATO, a defensive alliance of democracies, has played no role?

Structures of Oppression

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.

Hell with the Lid Off

Tom Mertes on Gabriel Winant, The Next Shift. Ethnographic study of deindustrialization and the rise of the health-care sector in Pittsburgh.

Caste, Race—And Class

A critical engagement with Isabel Wilkerson’s revival of the ‘caste school of race relations’ that flourished in the US social sciences in the 1940s. How might other international outcast groups—Dalits, Jews, Roma, Burakumin—compare to African-Americans? What logics explain their unique condition?

Cutting to the Chase

David Simpson on Franco Moretti, Far Country. Europe as counterpoint in a collection of literary-historical close readings of forms across the span of American culture.

Paradigm Shifts

Do Biden’s American recovery plans and the EU’s New Generation package signal the shift to a post-neoliberal era? A comparison of the two, unpacking policies, ideologies and capitalist economies, indicates diverging tracks.

Lockdown Limbo

Personal-sociological reflections on a pandemic year. From hospital consulting room to virtual seminar, rural Kentucky to affluent Berkeley, household isolation as division of labour, and appearances and realities of the wider social order.

Trench Warfare

Granular analysis of America’s 2020 election results in rustbelt counties, the small-town Midwest, Red exurbs and Texan borderlands. With record turnouts on both sides of an otherwise immobile voter divide, the economy—not the pandemic—provides a key to the equivocal verdict on Trump’s four years in office.

Appointment by the People?

Tom Mertes on Alexander Keyssar, Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? The oligarchic mechanism at the heart of the US presidential system and persistent failure of attempts to reform it.

Faultlines

American politics cast as a zero-sum battle between party coalitions for state-led divisions of the spoils—cheap money, bailouts, health insurance, tax—lending the electoral battle its peculiar intensity. Dominant and recessive logics of the party system in a stagnant economy.

Eros and Psyche

Laura Kipnis on JoAnn Wypijewski, What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo. What do recent sexual alarms reveal, or occlude, about America’s structural violence and unravelling social fabric?

Escalating Plunder

In the US, amid soaring unemployment, loss of health insurance and rising poverty, a $4 trillion hand-out to capital, with Biden’s party and Trump’s shoulder to shoulder. Robert Brenner analyses the Covid-19 bailout in the broader context of a faltering productive economy and growing elite predation.

The Monster Enters

Opening a set of reflections on COVID–19, the author of The Monster at Our Door puts the novel virus in its epidemiological context.

Hollywood’s New Wave

Emilie Bickerton on Jonathan Kirshner and Jon Lewis, eds, When the Movies Mattered. Brief efflorescence of a radicalized cinema in Hollywood, driven by the political anxieties of the seventies.

Red Flag over the White House?

Benjamin Kunkel on Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto. A case for the democratic-socialist transformation of the United States, drawing lessons from the failures of the twentieth century.

Neo-Impressionist Hegemon?

Anders Stephanson on Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire. A reading of America’s global power through its territorial possessions, from ocean archipelagos to military bases.

America’s New Left

Five members of Democratic Socialists of America give their views on the organization’s dramatic growth and the strategic dilemmas it must address—above all, relations to Sanders and the Democratic Party.

America vs China

Introducing a triptych of perspectives on the PRC, as the drumbeat from Washington grows louder. Is the American imperium now so vast, so overweening in its demands, that any rising power must grate against it?

What Is Trump?

The pitfalls of bad historical analogizing laid bare in ubiquitous attempts to pin a ‘fascist’ label on the 45th president. Instead, Riley argues, Trump is better grasped as an incoherent amalgam of Weberian forms of rule—ramshackle patrimonialism, weak charisma—operating like a foreign body inserted into America’s capitalist-bureaucratic state.

End of the Neoliberal Era?

Prognosis for the US economy, after a decade of unprecedented monetary stimulus. Does the distempered character of the recovery—soaring profits, feverish asset prices, anaemic wage growth—signal a structural crisis in the existing regime of capitalist accumulation, and transition to a new institutional framework?

The Year 1960

Prelude to the explosive struggles of the sixties in California, as the social actors, left and right, gather in the wings. Black student militants, white aerospace workers, City developers, RAND Corps dropouts, Latino activists—and Lena Horne, taking direct action against racism in Beverley Hills.

Passing the Baton

Leaving the White House with record ratings, why couldn’t Obama’s efforts secure it for his former Secretary of State? The legacy that helped Trump into office—and prospects for America’s newest left.

De Te Fabula Narratur

The electoral appeal of protectionism to exploited subjects of a superannuated empire, pinched by overseas competition: for Trump, read Joseph Chamberlain, monocled rabble-rouser of 1905 and scandalizer of liberal England’s free-trade consensus?

Election 2016

Opening an NLR symposium on the US transition, Mike Davis argues the vote was not a critical realignment but a razor-thin margin for the Republican, mobilizing rustbelt discontent while locking in the Christian right.

American Brumaire?

The electoral watersheds of 2016 signalled a rejection of the global-neoliberal formula of rule, but no viable establishment alternative exists. In its absence, Riley argues, Trump may offer a neo-Bonapartist substitute for a coherent hegemonic project.

Politics of Insecurity

Exploration of the fractured subjectivity, racialized legacies and multiple, entwined insecurities of the American working class—the millions taken for granted by Clinton, relentlessly wooed by her opponent.

Road to Globalism

Anders Stephanson on John A. Thompson, A Sense of Power. Rise of American globalism, from Wilson to Truman.

America’s Slowdown

Robert Gordon’s panoramic Rise and Fall of American Growth foregrounds exogenous explanations for the fall-off in us economic dynamism since the seventies. Challenging his account, Michel Aglietta explores the role financial rents and shareholder agendas have played in sapping growth—and prospects for a new era of eco-tech innovations.

Poetics of Resistance

David Lau on Piotr Gwiazda, US Poetry in the Age of Empire, 1979–2012. American civic poetry from Vietnam to Occupy Wall Street.

Just Another Panic?

Adam Tooze on Ben Bernanke, The Courage to Act. Self-serving insider account of the financial crisis by the former Federal Reserve chair.

Constructing the Liberal Subject

David Simpson on Mark Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man. Crystalization of liberal universalist discourses through the eras of FDR and McCarthy.

Home Alone

Costs of America’s imperial project registered in the emotional damage inflicted on its soldiers, and multiplier effects on those around them. Contrasting perspectives—reportage, blockbuster, trauma-group documentary—on men and war, as veterans’ suicides overtake us battlefield casualties.

Mosaics of American Nationalism

Annealed through expansionism after the Civil War, could America’s sectional divisions re-emerge if the empire falters? Kevin Pask explores the changing parameters—closing frontiers, rising Sunbelt—of the nationalism that dares not speak its name.

Southern Questions

Dylan Riley on Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself. Historical reframing of the New Deal for the age of Obama.

Crash of 1837

Tom Mertes on Alasdair Roberts, America’s First Great Depression. Political outcomes of economic crisis in the antebellum United States.

Consilium

“This issue of the journal is devoted to a two-part study of American foreign policy by Perry Anderson. ‘Imperium’ examines the objectives and outcomes of us world power; ‘Consilium’, the thinking of its policy elite. nlr has run three special numbers before: Tom Nairn . . .” read more

Imperium

“This issue of the journal is devoted to a two-part study of American foreign policy by Perry Anderson. ‘Imperium’ examines the objectives and outcomes of us world power; ‘Consilium’, the thinking of its policy elite. nlr has run three special numbers before: Tom Nairn . . .” read more

The Toughness Crew

Anders Stephanson on Peter Beinart, The Icarus Syndrome. American foreign policy from Wilson to Obama, through the spectacles of Niebuhrian realism.

Homeland

Deadlocks of American politics viewed within a longer optic, as outcomes of interlocking determinants—regime of accumulation, sociological shifts, cultural mutations, catalytic minorities—within an all-capitalist ideological universe.

Decline of the West?

Mired in recession at home, pledged to perpetual warfare on the periphery—in what shape is the global sheriff? Régis Debray draws up a balance sheet of its vital symptoms.

Systemic Slowdown?

Kozo Yamamura on Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation. Can flagging growth in the US be explained by closing technological frontiers?

The Last White Election?

Panoramic survey of America’s political landscape as revealed by November’s vote, with age, gender, ethnicity and geography the volatile determinants of Obama’s victory. Within an increasingly polarized ideological force field, how will the coming struggles unfold between Democratic President and Senate and a Republican House, itself consumed by turmoil?

Under the Flag

Barry Schwabsky on Anne Wagner, A House Divided: American Art since 1955. Painting and sculpture in the age—and shadow—of US hegemony.

California’s Fields Ablaze

Paul Buhle on Frank Bardacke, Trampling Out the Vintage. Chronicle of the United Farm Workers and their mercurial leader, Cesar Chavez.

Over the Horizon?

Nine years on, what is the balance sheet of the Occupation? An accounting of imperial assets—oil contracts, weapons deals, hobbled client state—still in Washington’s pocket after the drawdown.