Ali Alizadeh

Marx in Our Time

Is today’s Marxism yet another vogue – perhaps in tandem with the current popularity of self-proclaimed democratic socialist politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – destined to be supplanted, in due course, by another, mo...

What Is Mallarmé For?

A Terrible Beauty: Liberty or Death: The French Revolution by Peter McPhee

Balanced and measured though he is, McPhee is aware that the French Revolution is too vital and controversial an event to be subordinated entirely to a historian’s caution. And it is his less cautious, more assertive comments and explanations whic...

A Gigantically Obvious Wrong Thing: R&R by Mark Dapin

‘It’s my argument that, in dramatising and deprecating acts of direct physical violence – however menacing their perpetrators and however innocent their victims – a work such as this war novel and, perhaps by extension, many others associated with...

Poetic Slaves to Ideology

Regimes of reading: The Practice of Value by John Frow

The Practice of Value: Essays on Literature in Cultural Studies articulates, with precision and clarity, the book’s argument and content. This is a book specifically about doing value or essaying – from a Latin root, which comes to English via Old...

Art and Emancipation: Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art

According to Rancière, modern democratic politics and modern non-classical arts are two manifestations of the same new, revolutionary social space. In this space, sensibility or sense perception (aisthesis in Greek: the origin of the word aestheti...

What Lay In The Ashes: The Last Days of Jeanne d’Arc by Ali Alizadeh

The Last Days of Jeanne d’Arc blends fiction and nonfiction in its reconstruction of Jeanne’s life, not to offer a new conclusion about the warrior, but to urge us to view her otherwise than through the lens of her canonisation. The fictionalised

Humiliations accrue: Transactions by Ali Alizadeh

Alizadeh is an acclaimed poet and academic, and a self-confessed ‘unashamedly political writer’... In Transactions, he uses extreme examples of disenfranchisement, disempowerment and the unrestrained exercise of power to expose the inequities of t...