Southwest Humanities is excited and very proud to announce that Jaleh Mansoor’s newest book, Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction: A Counterhistory (Duke University Press, 2025), for which we recently compiled the index, was published in May 2025. In this highly anticipated work, Mansoor reimagines the story of modernist abstraction through a Marxist lens, revisiting how avant-garde art intersects with labor, capital, and the production of abstraction. Drawing on Marx’s provocative metaphor of “prostitution” to describe alienated labor, Mansoor explores how both generalized and gendered forms of work are embedded not just in the content but in the very formal processes of modern art. From Manet’s Olympia and Seurat’s The Models to contemporary works by Hito Steyerl and Hannah Black, she argues that abstraction serves as a site of resistance: artworks respond to capitalist and biopolitical pressures not through representation, but through their material form and structure. In doing so, Mansoor reframes abstraction as a tool for understanding how art can expose crises of production and imagine counter-practices to capital. This is the second book by this crucial author that has been indexed by Southwest Humanities. For more information, please see the publisher’s website here.
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