One of the most exciting books to have been indexed by Southwest Humanities this year, Politically Red, by Eduardo Cadava and Sara Nadal-Melsió, will be published by The MIT Press in early December. In this expansive work, the authors situate “contemporary demands for social and racial justice by exploring the shifting relations between politics and literacy.” Through close, original readings of such towering figures of revolutionary thinking as Rosa Luxemburg, W. E. B. Du Bois, Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, and Fredric Jameson, Cadava and Nadal-Melsió argue that writing and reading are always collaborative and never individual activities that are crucial for reshaping political imagination. Through an exploration of a body of resources for anti-racist and other political work that the authors call the “red common-wealth,” Politically Red demonstrates how language and the tasks of reading and writing constitute political and historical events. For more information about this forthcoming title, please see the publisher’s website here.
SOUTHWEST HUMANITIES 