Search

This essay engages Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus as a salient intervention into modern political theory. I analyze the work as a cipher for the tensions inhabiting Euro-modernity's stitched together fictions of racial determinism and racial dynamism legible in slavery, assimilationist projects and White fears reverberating throughout. Adapting the mythical ancient Prometheus as one who steals fire from the gods to create humans and civilization, Frankenstein dramatizes the risks and monstrous results of White imperial masculinity as a Euro-colonial Promethean project of subject formation and race-making. Viewed through the prism of the Modern Prometheus, modernity in general and liberal humanism in particular are recast as monster-making projects. The European "discovery" of Indigenous peoples amplified Promethean aspirations to create subjects through civilizational processes of religious conversion, the infusion of Enlightenment rationality, and assimilation into whiteness. Politically, the Promethean capacity to engineer humans and proto-humans using Native peoples as raw material allowed progressives to argue against outright extermination in favor of cultural genocide. Seeking to create a subserviant species, Victor Frankenstein confronts a revolting insurrection of his own making—a Creature who refuses slavery, claims mastery over his creator and demands a female companion. Yet Frankenstein's fear of creating "a race of devils" betrays a terror of what Whites know, but refuse to acknowledge, about themselves and racial others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the politics of memory at work in both Mexico's dirty war against political dissidents and the failed attempts to prosecute political leaders responsible for the atrocities. Utilizing information recently made available by the National Security Archive's Mexico Project, it explores how power relations influence public memory, and how this memory shapes democratic futures. A critical engagement with Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx informs an analysis of how the past lives on in ways that challenge political attempts to achieve closure. Through this encounter, the article advances a line of questioning about what constitutes a democratic relationship to time capable of resisting a politics of amnesia. I argue that a more democratic conception of time departs from the conventional metaphors of understanding temporality by seeking an ideal where multiple experiences of time can be present concurrently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the politics of memory at work in both Mexico's dirty war against political dissidents and the failed attempts to prosecute political leaders responsible for the atrocities. Utilizing information recently made available by the National Security Archive's Mexico Project, it explores how power relations influence public memory, and how this memory shapes democratic futures. A critical engagement with Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx informs an analysis of how the past lives on in ways that challenge political attempts to achieve closure. Through this encounter, the article advances a line of questioning about what constitutes a democratic relationship to time capable of resisting a politics of amnesia. I argue that a more democratic conception of time departs from the conventional metaphors of understanding temporality by seeking an ideal where multiple experiences of time can be present concurrently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2008 U.S. presidential race dramatized the connection between America's segregated memory and its segregated polity. This essay makes the case that James Baldwin offers valuable insight into the legacy of segregated memory in contemporary racial politics in general, and the presidential race in particular. To do so, I provide a brief historical overview of segregated memory since the Civil War, and offer an analysis of Baldwin's account of the conscious and unconscious dimensions of memory and the impact of myth-histories on African Americans and whites. This is followed by an exposition of Baldwin's approach to de-segregating memory, as well as the tensions and correspondences between his contributions to addressing mnemonic divides and those of Barack Obama in his "More Perfect Union" speech on race. The essay closes by outlining the political relevance of the theoretical tensions between Baldwin and Obama in an era alleged to have been made "post-racial" by the first black president. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents biographies of several authors in the field of sociology. They include Elisabeth Anker, Assistant Professor of American Studies at the George Washington University, David Bissell, Lecturer in Sociology at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, and William E. Connolly, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Their research projects on the field of sociology are given, as well as published books.