Theory in Forms

António Tomás traces the history and transformation of Luanda, Angola, by showing how it emerges out of the continual redefinition and negotiation of its physical and social boundaries.

Writer Tanya Zack and photographer Mark Lewis offer a stunning portrait of Johannesburg and personal stories of its residents, showing how its urban transformation occurs not in a series of dramatic, widescale changes but in the everyday lives, actions, and dreams of individuals.

Pedro Monaville traces a generation of Congolese student activists whose work following the Congo’s independence became central to national politics and broader decolonization movements during the global 1960s.

António Tomás traces the history and transformation of Luanda, Angola, by showing how it emerges out of the continual redefinition and negotiation of its physical and social boundaries.

Working at the intersection of urban theory, Black studies, and decolonial and Islamic thought, AbdouMaliq Simone offers a new theorization of the interface of the urban and the political.

Prathama Banerjee moves beyond postcolonial and decolonial critiques of European political philosophy to rethink modern conceptions of "the political" from the perspective of Indian and Bengali practices and philosophies from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Hagar Kotef explores the cultural, political, spatial, and theoretical mechanisms that enable people and nations to settle on the ruins of other people's homes, showing how settler-colonial violence becomes inseparable from one's sense of self.

Noah Tamarkin illustrates how Lemba people in South Africa give their own meanings to the results of DNA tests that substantiated their ancestral connections to Jews and employ them to manage competing claims of Jewish ethnic and religious identity, African indigeneity, and South African citizenship.

Monica Popescu traces the development of African literature during the second half of the twentieth century, showing how the United States and the Soviet Union's efforts to further their geopolitical and ideological goals influenced literary practices and knowledge production on the African continent.

Ian Baucom puts black studies into conversation with climate change, outlining how the ongoing concerns of critical race, diaspora, and postcolonial studies are crucial to understanding the Anthropocene and vice versa.

Françoise Vergès examines the scandal of white doctors forcefully terminating the pregnancies of thousands of poor women of color on the French island of Réunion during the 1960s, showing how they resulted from the legacies of the racialized violence of slavery and colonialism.

Fadi A. Bardawil explores the hopes for and disenchantments with Marxism-Leninism in the writings and actions of revolutionary intellectuals within the 1960s Arab New Left.

Rudolf Mrázek presents a sweeping study of the material and cultural lives of internees of two twentieth-century concentration camps and the multiple ways in which their experiences speak to and reveal the fundamental logics of modernity.

Lynn M. Thomas constructs a transnational history of skin lighteners in South Africa and beyond, theorizing skin and skin color as a site for antiracist struggle and lighteners as a technology of visibility that both challenges and entrenches racial and gender hierarchies.

Achille Mbembe theorizes the genealogy of the contemporary world—one plagued by inequality, militarization, enmity, and a resurgence of racist, fascist, and nationalist forces—and calls for a radical revision of humanism a the means to create a more just society.