Exit West will perhaps be termed a ‘refugee novel’, such is its immediate relevance to the global humanitarian crises that are simultaneously shaking and reinforcing the rhetorical significance of Western borders in relation to ideas of sovereignty, nationhood and identity. Since the 16th century, considerations of sovereignty have been largely predicated on the existence and maintenance of clearly delimited and enforceable national borders. In this slim novel, the focus of Mohsin Hamid’s... [read more]
I wasn’t far into Teju Cole’s essay collection Known and Strange Things when I realised the book wasn’t what I had anticipated, drawn from the cover copy promising a ‘first collection of essays’ on ‘politics, photography, travel, history and literature.’ Rather than a series of cultural essays as such, it’s more a collection of brief reviews, many pre-published in magazines and reviews. Cole’s writing is elegant and his observations often insightful and enthusiastic; I’d... [read more]
Stuart Walton, In the Realm of the Senses: A Materialist Theory of Seeing and Feeling
reviewed by Jeffrey Petts
In the Realm of the Senses is subtitled ‘a materialist theory of seeing and feeling’ and is suitably structured in two parts: a ‘theory of the senses’ and a second part divided between chapters on each of the five senses (plus, disconcertingly, one on ‘the sixth sense’). Concerns soon mount about the approach and scope of the book. The first sentence sets the tone for the whole work: ‘The realm of the senses, in which humanity has allegedly dwelt ever since its spiritual craft... [read more]
Liam Gillick, Industry and Intelligence: Contemporary Art Since 1820
reviewed by Kathryn Brown
Writing has been an integral part of Liam Gillick’s artistic practice for well over two decades. Ranging across art critical debate, political deliberation, self-reflection, and fiction, the space of the book is, for Gillick, intimately linked to the exhibition spaces of art. The essays comprising Industry and Intelligence began as the Bampton Lectures that Gillick presented at Columbia University in 2013. The resulting book continues the author’s exploration of writing as a vital testing... [read more]
Jesús Vassallo, Seamless: Digital Collage and Dirty Realism in Contemporary Architecture
reviewed by Christo Hall
We’re all staring at 2D images. Despite the tricks, cues and illusions that are fooling our brains to think otherwise, when we look at a photograph, digital or print, it’s a flat world brought to life by adept photographers and our imaginations. This illusion of depth perception has deadened us to the reality that if we navigate Times Square on Google Street View or wade through belfies on Instagram in order to daydream over #roomwithaview, we’re still staring at an oblong screen in our... [read more]
Naomi Alderman’s The Power is an exercise in what if: What if suddenly one day all of the women on the planet developed a power to shoot electricity out of their hands? What if the power was stronger in some and weaker in others? What if the patriarchy could no longer defend itself? What if women were the ones in power? In Alderman’s persuasive imagining, these what-ifs lend themselves to odd turns and even odder outcomes, yet the final result is an astonishing confirmation of the... [read more]
Reece Jones, Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move
reviewed by Dominic Davies
In January 2011, 15-year-old Felani Khatun began the return journey from India with her father, where he had been working without a visa, to their home country of Bangladesh. The family had been working illegally because acquiring passports is such a densely bureaucratic – and for Felani’s family, far too expensive – process. Instead, Felani and her father paid a smuggler $50 to arrange for their crossing. Though pre-2000 the border had been lightly guarded, terrorist attacks in Mumbai... [read more]
Thomas Davis, The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life
reviewed by Guy Stevenson
Recent work on inter-war modernism has emphasised a shift from psychological introspection – exemplified by figures like TS Eliot, James Joyce and Ezra Pound – to active re-engagement with the outside world. The latter camp, chastised by George Orwell in 1940 as ‘eager-minded schoolboy[s] with a leaning towards Communism’, are the main subject of this book – a group of British writers and artist that included WH Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Henry Moore and whose politics were... [read more]
Joe Kennedy is a theorist and a football fan. His book Games without Frontiers critiques neither and instead seeks to redeem both via their not-so-unusual connections. Kennedy explores how political and theoretical concerns play out in and through football, and how football implies important things in its various theoretical and political contexts. Far from seeing the game as merely a symptom of or distraction from political and social concerns, Kennedy reveals the deeply complex and... [read more]
Halfway through his latest theoretical work, Slavoj Žižek undergoes an exploratory colonoscopy. Naturally, he does nothing so dull as share its results with us, but is more fascinated by the fact that, after the procedure, the consultant discreetly offers him a DVD of the examination. What on earth is one expected to do with it? Žižek wonders whether it might make a nice change to the bill of fare on the nights he gets together with old friends to watch a classic film. Playing next in this... [read more]
