New Left Review 149, out now.
As we enter the fevered last days before the US presidential election, Anton Jäger analyses the pathologies of American political culture, where—as Engels once put it—two great gangs of political speculators battle for power; where a new hyper-politicization has replaced the quiescence of the Clinton–Bush years, while the determination of US policies remains beyond popular reach.
In the Latest Issue
in a bravura essay that was to open the unfinished first volume of his monumental Poetics of Social Forms Fredric Jameson locates the Iliad, and its logic of agon, within the ‘immense transition’ from the great imperial cities of the Bronze Age, while Perry Anderson reflects on his fifty-year relationship with Jameson, whose work has been a landmark for NLR. Marc André reveals how French national-security interests have mobilized, under cover of individual rights to privacy, to block access to sensitive dossiers on Algeria. Emilie Bickerton on the counter-cinema of Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche: images and soundscapes, emanating from the banlieue and maquis, caught with anthropological precision. As the neoliberal moment recedes, Jeremy Adelman & Pablo Pryluka weigh up Latin America’s prospects under the impacts of continuing export-dependency, a US bent on ‘near-shoring’ and the shifting fortunes of the Chinese economy.
Plus book reviews: Emma Fajgenbaum on on Clinton Fernandes’s study of Australia’s geopolitical role, and Nic Johnson on Guido Alfani’s long-run history of Western wealth since the days of the Italian city-state.
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