Annihilation Aesthetics: On the Disappearances of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
This special issue of Thesis Eleven will be published in August 2025. Below includes a introduction to the volume accompanied by an artist’s statement by Chantal Meza whose artworks works will be featured in the issue.
by Eric Ferris
Previously honoring Agnes Heller and George Markus, the conference was part of an ongoing, larger Chinese federal research project on aesthetics which, in part, is a canopy for critical theory and has to date resulted in serious scholarship on Eastern European Marxist thinkers by Chinese intellectuals. Co-sponsored by Thesis Eleven, The Research Center for Marxist Theory of Literature in the College of Literature and Journalism at Sichuan University in Chengdu, China, and the Marxist Aesthetics Committee of the Chinese Association of Aesthetics, the conference not only reflected Bauman’s global influence, it was also an example of how his influence continues to grow.
Bringing together the various heterodox traditions, groups and scholars that came under the heading of Open Marxism for the first time, this book assesses the evolution of Open Marxism from the initial usage of the term by Kostas Axelos in France in the 1950s and the journal, Arguments, principally the ‘anarchist Marx’ of Maximilien Rubel and the ‘Libertarian Marxism’ of Daniel Guérin, through Open Marxism as it was developed in Eastern Europe, especially in the scholarly work of Karel Kosik in Czechoslovakia, the work of the Polish Open Marxists and the Praxis group in Yugoslavia …
Christine Mintrom, New Zealand Musicians in Australia 1959 – 1976 Vol. 1 and 2 (Tangerine Press, 2025)
Melbourne launch 2pm Sunday February 23 @ Wolfhound, 386-388 Brunswick St, Fitzroy.
Despite strong criticism, functional reasoning is still present in social theory and research. However, references often remain hidden. As a consequence, potentials cannot unfold, nor shortcomings be reflected. Starting from this consideration, our special issue aims to reconsider the potentials and shortcomings of functional lines of thinking in current sociology.
The Socialist Side of World Literature explores Socialist Realism in English-language publications since 1935. While many studies have focused mainly on the Soviet Union and Europe, often overlooking significant figures from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and marginalized groups in the First and Second Worlds, this book looks at the many crucial questions that have remained unanswered, including why the emergence of Socialist Realism in Eastern Europe constituted a pivotal cultural event for Russia.
This conference centers on exchanges in literature, film, and acrobatics between the (former)Third World and the (former)First and (former)Second Worlds, alongside interactions within and across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Equal emphasis is placed on addressing gender and minority issues within these contexts. We invite submissions from scholars across disciplines to engage in this vibrant intellectual exchange.
by Carlo Bordoni
If there are any records in Italian sociology, Franco Ferrarotti (1925-2024) conquered them all: the youngest full professor of Sociology at the Sapienza University in Rome, winner in 1961 of the first and (at that time) only chair in his discipline. He was also the founder of journals and degree courses (such as the one in Sociology at the University of Trento), a diplomat, translator, editorial and research director, in the course of a long and incessant activity that has rightly been defined as multifaceted, due to the insatiable variety of interests and aspects he touched upon.
5:30pm, December 5, Melbourne
Who is afraid of decoloniality? Knowledge, Language and Culture as India’s new battlegrounds.
Professor Ira Raja (University of Delhi) joins us to discuss the risks of romanticising indigenous cultures while ignoring the internal hierarchies within colonized societies.
by Rjurik Davidson
The King is dead, long live the King!” This ancient French phrase, dating to at least the Fifteenth Century, is the kind that might have set Fredric Jameson on one of his extended, languorous, alternately dense and playful, intellectually demanding examinations. Marxism’s preeminent cultural critic for more than fifty years, Jameson was the foremost proponent of dialectical thought, in which two seemingly contradictory phenomena were shown to be united by some underlying logic.
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