Whither Marxist and historical materialisms after the moment of the “new”? It has now been 15 years since Diana Coole and Samantha Frost published New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. While Jason W. Moore among many others have theorized historical natures and the terminal shock of planetary loss of at least “four cheaps” (labor, food, energy, and raw materials), the politics and theory of contemporary Marxism in literary studies and concomitant fields remains significantly and provocatively contested.  Given the dynamic complexity of contemporary crisis, one that features extremities of climate change, stark authoritarianism, and commodification (“Artificial [I] everything everywhere all at once”), one is hardly surprised that Marxist cultural critique itself has rethought and resituated its contributions to socio-economic analysis and forms of conjunction (see the collection edited by Colleen Nye and Christopher Nealon, After Marx [2022]).  Reflecting on “after Marx” or more recently “after Jameson,” materialist understanding has a new urgency and sense of critical praxis.  Whether rethinking the value form, the nature of labor, or the conditions of social transformation, contemporary Marxist critique maintains a polemical conversation with modes of concrete change across culture and political economy.  On the one hand, this seminar wants to assess the critical priorities of Marxism and/as materialism; on the other hand, its aim is to push back against the idea that innovative critical interventions are simply refinements of an interpretive niche.  Marxist cultural analysis is certainly like a model of global literary criticism, but its attention to the historical concreteness of oppression and the situatedness of knowledge offers distinctive pathways for critical engagement. 

We invite papers that take up the challenge of contemporary crises as openings for a Marxist understanding of culture and society.  The aim is to encourage a critical conversation on Marxist and materialist concerns.  Rather than fall back on an authentication axiom (really real Marxism rather than newly new materialism), how are contemporary constellations of radical critique active in a Marxist problematic?  Do these evince priorities or interventions of a different kind?  We know that capitalism lives (sometimes in zombified formations) but is Marxism adequate to its assessment and attenuation?  Why?  How?  Have the demands of crisis rendered Marxism as quaint as some modes of literary criticism before the enormity of change?

Possible topics include:

Value (literary, social, economic)

Form(s) (literary, social, economic)

Conjunction (crisis, insurgency, transformation)

Racial Capitalism

It’s the ecology….

Precarity and Labor

Comparative Marxism and Literature

Democratic Socialist Aesthetics

Literary History and contradiction

Class(es)

Institutions and institutionalization

Late, later, latest, and too late Marxism

Colonial Presence and Resistance (Literature)