Short reviews

Abstract

The editors specify two features of the historical moment in which this volume is conceived: the “end of communism,” which marks considerable loss of credibility for Marxism, and the expansion of global capitalism, which calls for a revitalization of Marxism. The entwining of both dying and reviving signs may well reflect the dialectic so dear to Marxian traditions, but now it is Marxism itself that must stand or fall as a system of thought. Since thinking about Marxism beyond Marxism is therefore more than ever self-reflexive, any efforts to keep the Marxist signifier alive now must question what it has all stood for. And anyone knows that in today's world of decentering, fragmentation, and multiplicity it makes no sense to talk about anything in a singular form. In aspiring to think about the heterogeneous forms of radical social praxis that “seeks to imagine the unimaginable,” the volume must bring self-reflexive plurality to bear on its project.

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Notes on contributors

Liu Kang

Liu Kang teaches comparative literature at Pennsylvania State University in College Park, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. He is the author of Aesthetics and Marxism: Chinese Aesthetic Marxists and Their Western Contemporaries (forthcoming), and the principal coeditor, with Tang Xiaobing, of Politics, Ideology, and Literary Discourse in Modern China.

Amita Shastri

Amita Shastri teaches political science at San Francisco State University in San Francisco, California, U.S.A. Her primary research has been on the politics, ethnic conflict, and political economy of Sri Lanka.