Project MUSE®: Cultural Critique - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/41
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Cultural Critique.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USNo. 47 (2001) through current issueLatest Articles: Cultural CritiqueTWOProject MUSE®Cultural Critique1460-24580882-4371Latest articles in Cultural Critique. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Editorial Statement
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982655
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Cultural Critique provides a forum for creative and provocative scholarship in the theoretical humanities and humanistic social sciences. Transnational in scope and transdisciplinary in orientation, the journal strives to spark and galvanize intellectual debates as well as to attract and foster critical investigations regarding any aspect of culture as it expresses itself in words, images, and sounds, across both time and space. The journal is especially keen to support scholarship that engages the ways in which cultural production, cultural practices, and cultural forms constitute and manifest the nexus between the aesthetic, the psychic, the economic, the political, and the ethical intended in their widest
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/41/image/coversmallEditorial Statement2026-02-13text/htmlen-USEditorial Statement2026-02-132026TWOProject MUSE®36402026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-13Thinking Species
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982656
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The photographs are strange. Large color prints grouped together in narrative vignettes, they show people doing mysterious things in a deep green forest. A woman lies on her back in the dense foliage; she grabs her toes and splays her knees in a modified yoga pose. Another woman places her hand on the armpit of a friend. A couple embraces in an awkward kiss, almost a bite. Everything in the images is familiar but just a little "off" (fig. 1).In The Four Year War at Gombe (2009–2011), Alison Ruttan and her collaborators reenacted the chimpanzee war documented by Jane Goodall in Tanzania in the 1970s.1 Over the course of three summers, the group met in the forest along the banks of the Desplaines River in Illinois
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/41/image/coversmallThinking Species2026-02-13text/htmlen-USThinking Species2026-02-132026TWOProject MUSE®1275412026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-13Translation as Healing
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982657
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What is the relationship between decolonization and translation in processes of knowledge and cultural production? This essay addresses this question by engaging the psychiatric writings of Frantz Fanon. It starts from the insight that Fanon's perspective on psychic life, trauma, and disalienation offers significant resources to critically rethink and re-imagine decolonization in such processes. In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in Fanon's thought, with his work often used to reflect on colonial experiences across the world, and on the decolonization of dominant knowledge models (Alessandrini; Batchelor and Harding; Hoppe and Nicholls; Gordon; Mbembe; Rabaka; Smith; Wynter). Fanon's recently
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/41/image/coversmallTranslation as Healing2026-02-13text/htmlen-USTranslation as Healing2026-02-132026TWOProject MUSE®1385812026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-13Allegorical Ruins: Narrative Hieroglyphics in J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982658
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"The timbers we uncover are dry and powdery. Many have been held together only by the surrounding sand and, once exposed, crumble. Others snap off at the lightest pressure. How old the wood is I do not know … There are no human remains among the ruins. If there is a cemetery we have not found it. The house contains no furniture" (Coetzee 1980, 15). These words are spoken by the unnamed narrator of J. M. Coetzee's 1980 novel, Waiting for the Barbarians. The narrator works as a magistrate in one of the frontier towns of an unidentified Empire in an unspecified time and space. In his spare time, he scavenges the ruins outside the walled town for remains of an extinct civilization, presumably another Empire, "the old
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/41/image/coversmallAllegorical Ruins: Narrative Hieroglyphics in J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians2026-02-13text/htmlen-USAllegorical Ruins: Narrative Hieroglyphics in J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians2026-02-132026TWOProject MUSE®1515562026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-13Autonomy, Determinism, and Death in Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982659
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It is autonomy, as opposed to medicine, that is more inclined toward a good death. Such a death is one that follows a good life, the definition of which each one of us determines autonomously. However, the argument here is that our autonomy is a matter of chance and luck, and the springboard, in this article, for epitomising this interplay between autonomy and determinism is terminal illness.Kalanithi (1977–2015) was diagnosed with stage IV metastatic lung cancer during his last year of residency training at Stanford University when he was thirty-six. The fag end of Kalanithi's life gleans meaning from becoming a father and a writer, and this was his means of exercising autonomy. Underscored in his memoir is the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/41/image/coversmallAutonomy, Determinism, and Death in Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air2026-02-13text/htmlen-USAutonomy, Determinism, and Death in Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air2026-02-132026TWOProject MUSE®881872026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-13"What We're Supposed To Be Doing": Ideology and Structural Injustice in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982660
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The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual.I was pretty much ready when I became a donor. It felt right. After all, it's what we're supposed to be doing, isn't it?It is commonplace to observe that our world is a deeply unequal place. We know it—or we think we do. On average, those who live in wealthy capitalist states enjoy a share in material prosperity that lies so far beyond the typical experience on planet Earth that they may as well inhabit separate galaxies. Billions of people have no access to basic goods and infrastructure. Over 40 percent cannot afford healthy food, while 50
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/41/image/coversmall"What We're Supposed To Be Doing": Ideology and Structural Injustice in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go2026-02-13text/htmlen-US"What We're Supposed To Be Doing": Ideology and Structural Injustice in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go2026-02-132026TWOProject MUSE®1168162026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-13"Box the Compass": Paul at Sea with Melville and Serres
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982661
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And St. Paul, too, knew how to box the compass, my lad! Mind you that chapter in Acts? I couldn't spin the yarn better myself."Three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a night and a day in the open sea," Paul of Tarsus wrote to a group of followers in the Roman city of Corinth. "I have been constantly on the move," he continued, perhaps remembering the movement of his body with the waves of the deep dark waters, "I have been in danger from rivers, in danger from bandits, in danger from my own people, in danger from Gentiles" (2 Cor. 11:23–26).1 In addition to the self-pity, fear, and glorification of suffering that Paul reveals in this list of dangers—modes that persist among many followers of Paul to this day—these
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/41/image/coversmall"Box the Compass": Paul at Sea with Melville and Serres2026-02-13text/htmlen-US"Box the Compass": Paul at Sea with Melville and Serres2026-02-132026TWOProject MUSE®1410492026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-13Rape Debates Revisited The Work of Rape by Rana M. Jaleel (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982662
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Historically rape and other forms of sexualized violence … have had no fixed meaning … they were not and are not definitionally obvious but are instead sites of struggle.Queer of color critique and queer critiques of war have focused their attention on the Middle East and Latin America, largely sidestepping rape as an issue or analytic, and have declined to take up the 1990's wars in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.These central claims frame the opening of Rana Jaleel's provocative, dense, and difficult book The Work of Rape. This is not a book about rape but about the work of rape as "a transnational genealogy of rape and law in the aftermath of the Cold war" (18). Jaleel is interested in contestations over how
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/41/image/coversmallRape Debates Revisited The Work of Rape by Rana M. Jaleel (review)2026-02-13text/htmlen-USRape Debates Revisited The Work of Rape by Rana M. Jaleel (review)2026-02-132026TWOProject MUSE®601662026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-13"Leather Men, Drag Queens, and Disco Dancing": The Historical Varieties of Queer Nightlife
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982663
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My title gestures toward plural histories and cultures because no singular experience of the past exists.In a widely read polemic published in 2024 in the online magazine The Quietus, Chal Ravens reflected on the busy "academization" of nightlife and dance music culture. Noting the large number of recent books, journal issues, and symposia devoted to these topics, he asked the question: "Is Everyone Talking About Dancing, Rather Than Doing It?"1 Ravens's article was prompted by the rush of recent accounts of rave culture, like Mackenzie Wark's book Raving (2023), but he noted in passing the proliferation of writings devoted to historical and present-day experiences of queer nightlife. An incomplete list of such
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/41/image/coversmall"Leather Men, Drag Queens, and Disco Dancing": The Historical Varieties of Queer Nightlife2026-02-13text/htmlen-US"Leather Men, Drag Queens, and Disco Dancing": The Historical Varieties of Queer Nightlife2026-02-132026TWOProject MUSE®230222026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-02-13