The latest issue of Critical Times includes an interview with Makhosazana Xaba, renowned South African feminist poet, writer, and translator of Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961) into isiZulu.
Read the wide-ranging conversation here:
doi.org/10.1215/2641...
From our archive: Milad Odabaei's essay on reverberations of the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
"Sickness of the Revolution: Loss, Fetishism, and the Impossibility of Politics"
read.dukeupress.edu/critical-tim...
Critical Times journal cover showing three women standing shoulder to shoulder against a light background with issue title and details below
The Weekly Read is "Race and Caste: Crisis and Histories of the Postcolonial Contemporary" by Ruchi Chaturvedi and Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi. The article is the introduction to a special issue of the open-access journal Critical Times (8:2). Read it for free: buff.ly/hGQZIJq
As always, all Critical Times articles are available to everyone through open access
read.dukeupress.edu/critical-tim...
Issue 8:2 of Critical Times is now out from @dukepress.bsky.social
"Race and Caste: Hierarchy and Universality, Part I" is the first of two special issues guest-edited by Ruchi Chaturvedi and Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi on the topic of race and caste
new from @criticaltimes1.bsky.social:
special issue “Race & Caste: Hierarchy and Universality” on racialized & caste subjugation in Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean as well as anticaste & antiracist archives and scholarship - check it out (open access):
read.dukeupress.edu/critical-tim...
"In this diluvian moment when no one is spared, Palestinian liberation can be your ark too."
Read Khaled Furani's "Paradoxes of Liberating Palestine: A Letter to Michael Walzer on his 90th Birthday"
ctjournal.org/2025/12/19/p...
"Flirting with the Absolute and the Limitless: Neoliberal Violence as Seen from the South"
An Exchange between Gisela Catanzaro and Zeynep Gambetti
ctjournal.org/2025/12/17/f...
Feminists encircled by police in Turkey
"Some of neoliberalism's methods were invented in the periphery and then brought back to the core to be refined and adapted. Decisive, in our view, is not so much the ideal or idealized rationality guiding neoliberalism ('neoliberal reason'), but what has been done in its name."
Now available on the Critical Times blog:
ctjournal.org/2025/11/03/s...
"Neoliberalism has other effects in regions where, in addition to surplus populations, there are those which I would call 'waste,' and this produces effects other than resurgent fascist tendencies."
An Exchange between Daniel Loick and Rosaura Martínez-Ruiz
Now available on the Critical Times blog:
ctjournal.org/2025/11/03/s...
"By paying closer attention to the hatred of surplus populations in contemporary global fascisms, we can see another dimension of authoritarian domination: not just objectification—disposing the other—but also abjection, disposing of the other."
An Exchange btwn Daniel Loick & Rosaura Martínez-Ruiz
"Avoiding Gaza: An Open Letter" by Simona Sawhney
Now available on the Critical Times blog:
ctjournal.org/2025/10/21/a...
"The paradox of the figure of the Palestinian... arises because the same Palestinian who, on the one hand, appears as a violent existential threat, on the other appears as a psychic but no less existential threat—this time as a figure who perhaps replicates your own past history."
Simona Sawhney
Now available on the Critical Times blog:
ctjournal.org/2025/10/21/a...
"If, like colonialism, fascism lives its most virulent afterlife today in the admiration of those it most despised, our collective task—yours as well as ours—would be to resist and challenge such admiration, with all the strength we can muster."
Simona Sawhney, "Avoiding Gaza: An Open Letter"
"[E]ach of these ships—and the other ships they inspired—helps create a floating canvas of transinsurgency that carries the seeds of decolonization through the sea."
From the Critical Times archive, @nicosmi.bsky.social on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla: read.dukeupress.edu/critical-tim...
"How, in a moment when the left seems to have lost its political grammars and political imagination, can it be sure that it is not adopting the very language of antagonism against the right that the right itself brought into being?"
Maria José de Abreu
ctjournal.org/2025/09/15/o...
"Pasolini's 'Scritti corsari' warn of this odd dance between opposites, between the old and the new worlds, where the opposite of fascism is not always anti-fascism..."
Maria José de Abreu, "On the Disappearance of Fireflies"
Available now on the Critical Times blog: ctjournal.org/2025/09/15/o...
"And yet, it is precisely the days before—the days that matter most—that we, the other inhabitants of this earth who stand with Gaza, are no longer able to support augment or touch. Our collective political protest in many parts of this earth has waned. Not because we don’t care but because we fail"
"Our protest might still touch the future, but not the days before. We call this politics."
-- Samera Esmeir, "The Days Before."
Available now on the Critical Times blog: ctjournal.org/2025/08/21/t...
"[C]onducting authority as unbounded has brought into terminal crisis the operation of the fundamental status attached to this authority—that is, of a citizen."
From the latest issue of Critical Times, Adil Hasan Khan on India's citizenship crisis: read.dukeupress.edu/critical-tim...
"The semantic power of academic freedom is all the more intense because it is inseparable from another even more charged principle: equality."
From the latest issue of Critical Times, Ajay Skaria on Gaza and academic freedom: read.dukeupress.edu/critical-tim...
"[D]ehumanizing the enemy ... as the embodiment of absolute evil poses a direct threat to the fundamental values of democratic states."
From the latest issue of Critical Times, @hypatiabeauvoir.bsky.social on grievability and the figure of the terrorist: read.dukeupress.edu/critical-tim...
"What happens to religion in the Philosophical Investigations? Is it gone, or is it everywhere?"
From the latest issue of Critical Times, Hengameh Ziai on Wittgenstein, Talal Asad, and nonsense: read.dukeupress.edu/critical-tim...
From the latest issue of Critical Times: @makdisi.bsky.social, "Beyond the Palestine Exception."
read.dukeupress.edu/critical-tim...
Cover of Critical Times, Vol. 8, Issue 1, April 2025. Features a red line drawing on white background: an owl with outstretched wings flies above an old-fashioned alarm clock showing 2:00. To the right is a partial outline of a robed figure. A green and gray band at the bottom reads “8:1 April 2023” and “CRITICAL TIMES Interventions in Global Critical Theory.”
Critical Times Volume 8, Issue 1, is online and available open access. View the TOC and read "Gaza and the Unsettling Equality of Academic Freedom" by Ajay Skaria: buff.ly/gxOd4YW
We will be highlighting individual articles from the issue over the next few weeks, so keep an eye out. As always, all Critical Times article are available to everyone through open access.
Issue 8:1 of Critical Times is out now from @dukepress.bsky.social!
Featuring @makdisi.bsky.social, Ajay Skaria, Hengameh Ziai, Zamansele Nsele, Senzeni Marasela, Adil Hasan Khan, and @hypatiabeauvoir.bsky.social
All articles available here: read.dukeupress.edu/critical-tim...
