Marlon Lieber

Reading Race Relationally: Embodied Dispositions and
Social Structures in Colson Whitehead’s Novels

What does it mean to write African American literature after the end of legalized segregation? In this study of Colson Whitehead’s first six novels, Marlon Lieber argues that this question has permeated the Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s writing since his 1999 debut The Intuitionist. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s relational sociology and Marxist critical theory, Lieber shows that Whitehead’s oeuvre articulates the tension between the persistent presence of racism and transformations in the United States’ class structure, which reveals new modes of abjection. At the same time, Whitehead imagines forms of writing that strive to transcend the histories of domination objectified in social structures and embodied in the form of habitus.

Download from transcript or order from Columbia University Press.

“This fresh perspective on Whitehead’s first six novels is a vital contribution to ongoing discussions. Reading Race Relationally should be of considerable interest to researchers of contemporary fiction, especially to those following ongoing debates on African American literature and its very concept, as well as class in contemporary fiction.”

– Valentina López Liendo

(De)Automating the Future: Marxist Perspectives on Capitalism and Technology

Much has been written about the prospects of automation in recent years. While many have raised concerns over the threat of technological mass unemployment, others have anticipated a fully automated communist utopia which will provide material abundance to everyone. (De)Automating the Future gathers chapters that critically investigate automation’s ambivalences from inter-disciplinary Marxist perspectives. The contributions raise questions about automation’s affordances for postcapitalism, its transformation of manual and mental labour, and its role in the intensification of class antagonisms and exploitation.

Order now from Brill. Paperback forthcoming from Haymarket Books.

“The book’s project resembles the role of philosophy as described by Hegel, which … seeks to grasp the essence of phenomena—in this case, automation—and establish a solid reasoning without falling into an antinomy between the positions arguing automation is either desirable or not … (De)Automating the Future offers a precise analysis of the automation debate from a historical materialist lens.”

– Yusuf Murteza