Walter Benn Michaels

A critique of the American obsession with diversity argues that we are ignoring the ever-widening economic divide in American society, that diversity has created a false notion of social justice, and that we need to emphasize equality over diversity.

How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality

The Trouble with Diversity

Adolph L. Reed

No Politics But Class Politics

Trouble with Diversity

Arguing that the contemporary commitment to the importance of cultural identity has renovated rather than replaced an earlier commitment to racial identity, Walter Benn Michaels asserts that the idea of culture, far from constituting a challenge to racism, is actually a form of racism. Our America offers both a provocative reinterpretation of the role of identity in modernism and a sustained critique of the role of identity in postmodernism. “We have a great desire to be supremely American,” Calvin Coolidge wrote in 1924. That desire, Michaels tells us, is at the very heart of American modernism, giving form and substance to a cultural movement that would in turn redefine America’s cultural and collective identity—ultimately along racial lines. A provocative reinterpretation of American modernism, Our America also offers a new way of understanding current debates over the meaning of race, identity, multiculturalism, and pluralism. Michaels contends that the aesthetic movement of modernism and the social movement of nativism came together in the 1920s in their commitment to resolve the meaning of identity—linguistic, national, cultural, and racial. Just as the Johnson Immigration Act of 1924, which excluded aliens, and the Indian Citizenship Act of the same year, which honored the truly native, reconceptualized national identity, so the major texts of American writers such as Cather, Faulkner, Hurston, and Williams reinvented identity as an object of pathos—something that can be lost or found, defended or betrayed. Our America is both a history and a critique of this invention, tracing its development from the white supremacism of the Progressive period through the cultural pluralism of the Twenties. Michaels’s sustained rereading of the texts of the period—the canonical, the popular, and the less familiar—exposes recurring concerns such as the reconception of the image of the Indian as a symbol of racial purity and national origins, the relation between World War I and race, contradictory appeals to the family as a model for the nation, and anxieties about reproduction that subliminally tie whiteness and national identity to incest, sterility, and impotence.

Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism

Our America

Adolph L. Reed, Jr.

Denouncing racism and celebrating diversity have become central mainstays of progressive politics: for many on the left, social justice consists of equitable distribution of wealth, power, and esteem among racial groups. But as Adolph Reed, Jr. and Walter Benn Michaels argue in this groundbreaking collection of essays, the emphasis seems to be tragically misplaced. Not only does a fixation with racial disparities distract from the pervasive influence of class—it actually legitimises economic inequality. “Adolph Reed, Jr. is the towering radical theorist of American democracy of his generation.” —Cornel West “Walter Benn Michaels is cunning, brilliant, acutely suggestive, exhilarating to read.” —Eric Lott “Wokelords and anti-racist liberals will be frustrated, enraged, and defeated. This book pushes us closer towards the uncompromising, bare-knuckled anti-capitalist movement we so desperately need.” —Cedric Johnson “An exhilarating journey that swaps the orthodoxies of contemporary progressive culture for a class politics rooted in universalism.” —James Bloodworth “Adolph Reed, Jr. and Walter Benn Michaels have been among the clearest voices critiquing the dominant race reductionism in American intellectual life and proposing a real egalitarian alternative.” —Bhaskar Sunkara “Anyone interested in the politics of race and class must push aside the dogma of identity and grapple with what Reed, Jr. and Michaels have been arguing for decades.–Jodi Dean “These essays tell the story of the last seven decades, charting the decline of the left and American politics. The result is as rich as it is rare: a long view that is pressing and immediate.” —Corey Robin “Reed, Jr. and Michaels take a hammer to common ways of thinking about race, class, inequality and identity, revealing ugly truths, and challenging us out of our comfort zones.” —Kenan Malik

No Politics but Class Politics

Jennifer Ashton

Corrina Peipon

Hyperrealist photographer of California skateparks Amir Zaki's new monograph covers twenty-plus years of photographic work, includes an essay and interview.

Amir Zaki Building and Becoming

Donald E. Pease

The term American Renaissance designates a period in our nation's history when the literary "classics" appeared—works "original" enough to mark a beginning for America's literary history. But the American Renaissance, Donald Pease argues in his introduction, does not belong to the nation's secular history so much as it denotes a rebirth from it: "Independent of the time kept by secular history, the American Renaissance keeps what we could call global Renaissance time—the sacred time a nation claims to renew, when it claims its cultural place as a great nation existing within a world of great nations. Providing each nation with the terms for cultural greatness denied to secular history, the 'renaissance' is not an occasion occurring within any specific historical time or place so much as it is a moment of cultural achievement that repeatedly demands to be reborn." The American Renaissance Reconsidered examines this demand for rebirth in terms other than those ordained by the American Renaissance itself. In the seven pieces collected here it is reborn, not outside of, but within America's secular history, as the authors examine anew the period of the American Renaissance—and the period in which its history was written. Contributing authors are Eric J. Sundquist, Jane P. Tompkins, Louis A. Renza, Jonathan Arac, Donald E. Pease, Walter Benn Michaels, and Allen Grossman.

The American Renaissance Reconsidered

"Michaels has written a book that will be essential reading for all those interested in American fiction and American culture. . . . This is a daring, brash work of the best kind—it will be much discussed."—Philip Fisher, Brandeis University "Like Michel Foucault, Michaels locates the 'political' in the relations between individuals, in consciousness, and in language. His work represents a far more subtle, internalized, and unschematic conception of the convergence of literature and power than we have had in American studies. He is one of the most gifted practitioners of cultural criticism today."—Leo Marx, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

American Literature at the Turn of the Century

The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism

Bertolt Brecht once worried that our sympathy for the victims of a social problem can make the problem’s “beauty and attraction” invisible. In The Beauty of a Social Problem, Walter Benn Michaels explores the effort to overcome this difficulty through a study of several contemporary artist-photographers whose work speaks to questions of political economy. Although he discusses well-known figures like Walker Evans and Jeff Wall, Michaels’s focus is on a group of younger artists, including Viktoria Binschtok, Phil Chang, Liz Deschenes, and Arthur Ou. All born after 1965, they have always lived in a world where, on the one hand, artistic ambition has been synonymous with the critique of autonomous form and intentional meaning, while, on the other, the struggle between capital and labor has essentially been won by capital. Contending that the aesthetic and political conditions are connected, Michaels argues that these artists’ new commitment to form and meaning is a way for them to depict the conditions that have taken US economic inequality from its lowest level, in 1968, to its highest level today. As Michaels demonstrates, these works of art, unimaginable without the postmodern critique of autonomy and intentionality, end up departing and dissenting from that critique in continually interesting and innovative ways.

Photography, Autonomy, Economy

The Beauty of a Social Problem

The Shape of the Signifier is a critique of recent theory--primarily literary but also cultural and political. Bringing together previously unconnected strands of Michaels's thought--from "Against Theory" to Our America--it anatomizes what's fundamentally at stake when we think of literature in terms of the experience of the reader rather than the intention of the author, and when we substitute the question of who people are for the question of what they believe. With signature virtuosity, Michaels shows how the replacement of ideological difference (we believe different things) with identitarian difference (we speak different languages, we have different bodies and different histories) organizes the thinking of writers from Richard Rorty to Octavia Butler to Samuel Huntington to Kathy Acker. He then examines how this shift produces the narrative logic of texts ranging from Toni Morrison's Beloved to Michael Hardt and Toni Negri's Empire. As with everything Michaels writes, The Shape of the Signifier is sure to leave controversy and debate in its wake.

Walter Benn Michaels

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