Vol. 31, No. 1-2 [2023]
Focus Editors: Christopher Breu, Jeffrey R. Di Leo

This special issue, Infastructuralism, is dedicated to thinking about the centrality of infrastructure to the humanities and to the most pressing political questions of our moment. We define infrastructure broadly to include economic structures and systems, ecosystems, material state formations, institutions, computational and web-based materialities (including servers, fiber-optic cables and code), various forms of labor, forms of textuality that exceed representation, as well as all that more regularly goes under the name of infrastructure. As people working in the humanities, we are interested in how cultural objects and forms of theory engage with the question of infrastructure. How does representation engage with that which exceeds and enables it?  

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Vol. 30, Nos. 1-2 [2022]
Focus Editor: Alex Taek-Gwang Lee

Asia is not self-evident. The region called Asia was culturally defined after the Russia-Japan War and geopolitically designed after the Second World War. Modern Asia was the historical byproduct of colonialism and its effects; the rise of nationalism in Asia was collective resistance to colonial modernization. Modernity in Asia has been the consequence of the dialectical process between modernization and counter-modernization. Its complicated historical background registers the strong demand of “Asian theory” for analyzing the structure of Asian modernity. Recently, as participating in the global distribution of labor, contemporary Asia has attracted many scholars not only for its rapid economic development, but its cultural products. Asian contemporary artists and writers have critically acclaimed for their successful recognition. This issue aims to bring together various theoretical interventions into Asian literature, art, and culture with a focus on the dynamic relation between Western theory and Asian intellectual history.

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Vol. 29, Nos. 1-2 [2021]
The “paranoid style in American politics,” as Richard Hofstader famously described the Cold War scenario of the 1960s, is one in which threats, hostilities, and treacheries are seen as directed not toward an individual so much as “against a nation, a culture, a way of life.” Today, as we witness a resurgence of xenophobia, nationalism, and fascism, aggressive masculinity, mistrust of “elites,” and a distrust of news, information, and facts, we face a more contemporary paranoid style. Taking both paranoia and style seriously, what cultural, theoretical, and political formations can be seen to express, resist, or otherwise configure the paranoid style of the 21st century?

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Volume 28, Numbers 1-2 [2020]
This issue examines how control modulates conditions of permanent crisis, endless environmental degradation, and creative destruction making every aspect of society less habitable and more insufferable. From the increasing financialization of everyday life to the growing administration and automation of social processes, control has come to take on an expanding and expansive role in the contemporary world—one that is neither ontologized nor automated but rather engineered for polarization and the increasing transfer of wealth upwards. Still, whether the present cultural and political moment calls for a move beyond the conceits of Deleuze and other twentieth-century speculation on control is the central topic of this issue.

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