Abstract: Following recent research in historical and cultural studies of "the book" and the practitioner field of book arts, the book is now approached no longer only as a vehicle for content but as a rich and mutable material entity. But in this materialist framework, is it possible to discern a politics of the book? This article addresses that question from two angles. First, it sets out a figure for the analysis of political material culture: the "communist object." This figure is developed through Russian Constructivist concern with the "intensive expressiveness" of matter, Walter Benjamin's analysis of the "collector" and his critique of use value, and the confounding capacities of the "fetish." Drawing on the perceptual field of book arts, the article then employs the concept of the communist object to investigate the dynamics of political printed matter, with a focus on the small-press pamphlet. The article concentrates on three contemporary small-press projects of nondoctrinal communist persuasion: Unpopular Books, 56a Archive, and Infopool. Against the anemic image of political media as "counterinformation," the article seeks to develop an expanded understanding of the material culture of political media, an understanding that foregrounds a communism of organic and inorganic process.

Abstract: This article offers a critique of the concept of "people of color," highlighting a form of blindness to the singularity of racial slavery internal to its articulation. It pursues a theoretical itinerary that reads the radical black feminism of Saidiya Hartman and Hortense Spillers, the political ontology of Frank B. Wilderson, and the cinematic vision of Haile Gerima against certain signs of prevarication, even gainsaying, regarding the nature of slavery and its afterlife in prominent strains of critical (race) theory, here advanced by noted scholars like Giorgio Agamben and Achille Mbembe. The disseminated misrecognition of modern slavery is then traced in the discourse of post-civil rights racial politics, especially in the aftermath of September 11, 2001.

Abstract: This essay offers a close reading of the Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty's film Hyenas and looks especially at the way the film addresses issues of development and dependency in postcolonial and contemporary Africa. Released in 1992, Hyenas is an adaptation of the Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt's 1956 play Der Besuch der alten Dame (translated into English as The Visit). The essay discusses how Mambéty's film is insistently heteroglossic, combining various lineages of thought, mythology, and aesthetics from African as well as Western sources. The film draws, for example, on folkloric stories of the hyena (which is a pan-African phenomenon) but looks as well at contemporary mass-mediated images of poverty and aid. Similarly, its cinematic strategies and aesthetics uniquely draw from European, American, and African sources. This combination of influences in the film reinforces Mambéty's message that the chronic problems of underdevelopment emerge from both external and internal sources. Although the film critiques economic neocolonialism, this critique is directed in multiple directions, toward international agencies as well as national and local agents. In the course of this analysis, the essay discusses other of Mambéty's films including Touki Bouki, La petite vendeuse de soleil, and Le franc, investigating particularly how issues of social mobility and stasis are developed across Mambéty's body of work. It also discusses Mambéty's work in light of works by Sembène Ousmane (Xala) and Gaston Kaboré (Wend Kuuni).

Abstract: This essay examines the historical emergence and recent revival of the figure of the tsotsi via the transatlantic migration of aesthetic forms and their dispersal across generic and social spaces. The historical arc of the tsotsi traverses a period that opens at the beginning of apartheid and stretches into the present. I argue that this era saw the developing recognition on the part of the settler colonial state that coercive apparati needed to be supplemented by the desiring machinery of the mass media, which the South African state awkwardly appropriated, first through censorship and then through carefully controlled production, but always in a manner that was intended to sustain a racially differentiated relationship to consumption and the uneven development intrinsic to capital. Crucial to the tsotsi's emergence, I argue, are the relationships between cinema and other media forms (print, radio, sound recording, and so forth) and the structure of overhearing that they enable. Paying particular attention to the ways in which the jazz musical and cinema noir converged to produce a figure of masculine sovereignty defined by a refusal to not desire in a space of racially contained consumerism, I then consider how particular visual and linguistic practices were autonomized in the mode of style. At the center of the essay is an exploration of the apotheosis of masculinist claims to sovereignty via style; it concludes by reflecting on the gendered aporia in any politics of style.

Abstract: This editorial note introduces the translations that follow of two pieces written in fall 1956 by Aimé Césaire: his speech "Culture and Colonization," delivered at the first Congrès International des Ecrivains et Artistes Noirs, hosted by the journal Présence Africaine in Paris in September, and his open letter to Maurice Thorez in October, in which he resigned from the French Communist Party. The editorial note places the two pieces in the context of the political currents of French colonialism at the time (on the eve of the Algerian revolution) and of Césaire's own development as a politician and writer. In particular, it highlights the links between these documents and his well-known book Discourse on Colonialism (1955), which is widely considered to be one of the classics of anticolonial thought.

Abstract: "Culture and Colonization," which has long been unavailable in English translation, was Aimé Césaire's speech at Le Premier Congrès International des Ecrivains et Artistes Noirs, hosted by the journal Présence africaine in Paris in September 1956. The congress is one of the pivotal events of the Pan-African movement, bringing together artists and intellectuals from around the African diaspora, including Alioune Diop, Jacques Rabemananjara, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, George Lamming, Cheikh Anta Diop, and Jean Price-Mars. Césaire's reflections on the relations between colonization and culture were a crucial intervention that provoked much debate among the delegates. The speech is an indispensable companion piece to Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism (1955) and his open letter to Maurice Thorez in October 1956, which also appears in translation in this issue.

Abstract: Aimé Césaire's Lettre à Maurice Thorez, which appears here in a new translation by Chike Jeffers, is the Martinican poet, playwright, theorist, and politician's letter of resignation from the French Communist Party (PCF). He first explains his resignation by making reference to the revelations concerning Stalin in Khrushchev's famous "Secret Speech" and to the PCF's reluctance to deStalinize. He soon turns, however, to considerations related to his "position as a man of color." He claims that it has become clear to him that the struggle against racism and colonialism cannot be reduced to the class struggle. He criticizes the European Left's imperialist tendencies and argues against dividing progressive forces in places like Martinique along dogmatic ideological lines. Césaire thus treats his break with the Communists as a declaration of independence and reclamation of initiative on the part of black people. He ends with provocative thoughts on the relationship between universalism and particularism.