High Theory

In this episode of High Theory, Zac Zimmer talks to Kim about Decolonizing the Novum. The novum is a concept developed by Darko Suvin that names the new element of a science fiction or speculative fiction narrative. SF narratives from the Americas that rewrite archival material about colonization and first contact have begun an imaginative project of decolonizing that novum. In Zac’s words, the "novum" has been part of our definition of science fiction since Darko Suvin first offered up the concept of part of his critical assessment of SF. This idea of "novelty" is linked to conquest and colonialism through the figure of the New World, i.e. the post-1492 Americas. Thus untangling the relationship between colonialism, novelty, and science fiction must pass through the historical record of the conquest. One way to do this is to focus on SF that deeply engages the archival record of the XVIth century in the Americas: texts and artworks that use speculation to depart from the knowledge that things didn't quite occur the way the dominant paradigms would lead us to believe, and to imagine other futures linked to past moments of historical contingency. In the episode, Zac references an incredible list of writers and theorists, including Edmundo O'Gorman and Walter Benjamin, Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts,” You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, Destrucción de todas las cosas by Hugo Hiriart, and “Decolonization is not a metaphor” by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. The transcript lives here as a WordDoc and here as a PDF. Zac’s book, First Contact: Speculative Visions of the Conquest of the Americas (Northwestern University Press 2025), is a comparative study of Latin American science fiction and narratives of the sixteenth century conquest of the Americas. It moves through a corpus of Mexican novels, Andean visual arts practices, and other cultural artifacts that have dramatized counterfactual narratives. Reimagining the early colonial period’s historiography from a south-to-north directionality while inventing parallel realities, these texts, which are concerned with limit cases, alterities, and alternative temporalities, refuse any reliance on the imperial ontologies of European expansion. Zac examines these works to explore the slippage that exists between science fiction as the exemplary genre of the modern, colonial reality and literary speculation as an aesthetic tool that can be used to imagine other possible worlds. You can read a review in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Zac Zimmer works as an Associate Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz. His research explores questions of literature, aesthetics, politics, and technology in the Americas.In addition to his current research on the cultural infrastructure of technosystems, he co-facilitates the Ethics & Astrobiology reading group, part of UCSC's Astrobiology Initiative. In the Literature department, he teaches classes on Latin American literature, science fiction, ethics & technology, and the poetics of California infrastructure. The image for this episode is the view from the Hubble Space Telescope, showing the birth of a sun-like star, retrieved from Flicker for High Theory by Lili Epstein. Image credit: NASA, ESA, G. Duchene (Universite de Grenoble I); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of High Theory, Milan Terlunen talks to Kim about Pre-Reading. There are many books we will never read and films we will never watch, but it turns out we know quite a bit about them in advance. A concept developed in his work on the plot twist, pre-reading names the epistemic practices by which we approach a text before we read it (if we ever do). The pre-reading environment is shared, social knowledge that shapes our expectations long before we open the cover or hit play. This podcast episode forms part of the pre-reading environment for Milan’s article, "What We Can(’t) Know Before We Read: Towards a Theory of the Pre-Reading Environment" (Book History 27, no. 2 (2024): 346-374). The article proposes the Pre-Reading Environment as a new object of study for understanding how texts relate to communal knowledge. While easily overlooked by scholars, equipped with fuller knowledge derived from their own reading, Pre-Reading Environments are among the most widespread epistemic objects in book history. Turning to two literary texts, Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015), the article examines how their respective Pre-Reading Environments, in newspapers and on Twitter, strategically concealed key plot points that might pre-emptively spoil the experience of potential readers. The transcript of this episode lives here as a WordDoc and here as a PDF. Milan Terlunen is a scholar of literature, with a focus on narrative and the history of reading practices. He works as a Researcher in Digital Humanities at the University of Sussex. While a PhD student at Columbia University he co-created and hosted two podcasts – How To Read and In Sacred Spaces – and co-founded the Humanities Podcast Network in 2021, where he met Kim and Saronik. He is also an editor of the Palgrave Handbook of Humanities Podcasting, a huge project that he ran along with Kim, Saronik, and Beth Kramer. A book about podcasting would not be complete without its own podcast. Keep your ears peeled for Podcasting the Humanities later this year. The image for this episode is an illustration from Jean de Bosschère’s Weird Islands (1921), titled “Read Books on Practical Navigation.” It is a line drawing showing a reader swamped by piles of books. The image was found for High Theory by Lili Epstein on the Public Domain Image Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of High Theory, Saronik talks with Erik Baker about the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic. The dominant work ethic of our current moment, it asks us to constantly create new work for ourselves. Eric contrasts the entrepreneurial work ethic with the industrious work ethic, which valued hard work and drudgery in one’s allotted task. Over the course of the 20th century industriousness was replaced by entrepreneurship in the American economic imaginary. The ultimate villain of the entrepreneurial mode is the bureaucrat, the ultimate failing is complacency. This toxic, exhausting ethos in which the standard of all labor is changing the world, paradoxically stabilizes our economic system, by trapping us in unachievable dreams. We should note that High Theory as an academic side hustle is exemplary of the entrepreneurial work ethic, even if we have no ethics. That’s why we made a Patreon. The transcript of this episode lives here as a WordDoc and here as a PDF. Erik’s new book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America (Harvard UP 2025) explains how this entrepreneurial work ethic took hold, from its origins in late nineteenth-century success literature to the gig economy of today, sweeping in strange bedfellows: Marcus Garvey and Henry Ford, Avon ladies and New Age hippies. Business schools and consultants exhorted managers to cultivate the entrepreneurial spirit in their subordinates, while an industry of self-help authors synthesized new ideas from psychology into a vision of work as “self-realization.” Baker argues that the entrepreneurial work ethic has given meaning to work in a world where employment is ever more precarious––and in doing so, has helped legitimize a society of mounting economic insecurity and inequality. Where work is hard to find and older nostrums about diligent effort fall flat, the advice to “make your own job” keeps hope alive. Erik Baker is a lecturer in the History of Science Department and the director of the senior thesis program for the History & Science concentration. He received his PhD from Harvard and his BA from Northwestern University. He has published on the history of social science and American capitalism in Modern Intellectual History, History of the Human Sciences, and Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. He also writes widely for magazines such as n+1, The Baffler, and The Drift, where he is an associate editor. Image for this episode is an unidentified book illustration from the British Library Commons. It shows a group of people kneeling in front of a dollar sign. It was found for High Theory by Lili Epstein on the Public Domain Image Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of High Theory Nasser Mufti talks with us about Brutalism. A twentieth century architectural style featuring imposing structures made of a lot of concrete, brutalist structures tend to provoke strong reactions. People either love it or they hate it – you never get a middling conversation about brutalism. Often used for government buildings, university libraries, and hospitals, Nasser suggests it represents the architecture of the state itself, massive bureaucratic structures in which we get lost, but also perhaps, nostalgia for a state that actually takes care of its citizens. Before we recorded the episode, Nasser sent me this article about the Brutalist campus at the University of Illinois where he works, which is full of beautiful black and white images. In the episode he refers to a line in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853), which describes Chesney Wold as “seamed by time.” And he reminds us that verb form “decolonizing” is quite new, even Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986) only uses the gerund in the title. The neologism “decolonizing” is distinct from the world historical project of decolonization and the historiographic method of decolonial analysis that comes from Latin American studies. Nasser Mufti is an associate professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where his research and teaching focuses on nineteenth century British and postcolonial literature and theory. He is especially interested in literary approaches to the study of nationalism. His first book, Civilizing War: Imperial Politics and the Poetics of National Rupture (Northwestern University Press, 2018) argues that narratives of civil war energized and animated nineteenth-century British imperialism and decolonization in the twentieth century. You can read it online, open access, which is pretty damn cool! He is working on two new projects, the first, tentatively titled Britain’s Nineteenth Century, 1963-4, looks at how anticolonial and postcolonial thinkers from the Anglophone world turned to nineteenth century British literature and culture as a way to think decolonization. The second, titled “Colonia Moralia,” examines the dialectics of postcolonial Enlightenment through comparative readings of T.W. Adorno and V.S. Naipaul. The image for this episode is a photograph of Boston City Hall, a Brutalist building mentioned in the episode. The black and white photograph shows an interior courtyard of the building, a large concrete structure with many windows, located at One City Hall Square, Boston, Suffolk County, MA. It comes from the US Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Collections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of High Theory, Nina Studer tells us about alcohol. The restrictions and prohibitions, medical and moral discourses surrounding alcohol reveal a great deal about a given society in a particular historical moment. Nina uses alcohol as a lens to analyze the history of French colonization in North Africa. Who consumed alcohol, in what places, how much, and what kinds, what was viewed as healthy and what was viewed as dangerous, even criminal, can help us approach larger questions of gender, class, and nation. If you want to learn more, check out her new book, Hour of Absinthe: A Cultural History of France's Most Notorious Drink (McGill-Queens University Press, 2024). The book explores how the mythologizing of one distilled alcohol led to the creation and fabrication of a vast modern folklore. Mystique and moralizing both arose from the spirit’s relationship with empire. Some claim that French soldiers were given daily absinthe rations during France’s military conquest of Algeria to protect them against heat, diseases, and contaminated water. In fact, the overenthusiastic adoption of the drink by these soldiers, and subsequently by French settlers, was perceived as a threat to France’s colonial ambitions - an anxiety that migrated into French medicine. At the height of its popularity in the late nineteenth century, absinthe reigned in the bars, cafés, and restaurants of France and its colonial empire. Yet by the time it was banned in 1915, the famous green fairy had become the green peril, feared for its connection with declining birth rates and its apparent capacity to induce degeneration, madness, and murderous rage in its consumers. Dr. Nina Studer is a historian working on the 19th and 20th century history of French colonies in North Africa and the Middle East. Her work focuses on the history of drinks, in particular tea, coffee, Fanta/Coca-Cola, Orangina, wine and absinthe. Her doctorate, published as The Hidden Patients: North African Women in French Colonial Psychiatry (Böhlau, 2015) is available via Open Access. Currently she works as an associate researcher at the Institut Éthique Histoire Humanités at the University of Geneva, part of Dr. Francesca Arena’s team looking into the medical history of wet dreams between the 18th and the 20th century. The SNSF-project has the title: “Nuits polluantes: masculinité et médecine en Suisse et en France (XVIII – XX siècles)”. The image for this episode is an advertisement for the Algerian wine "Sénéclauze" from 1933, from the personal collection of Nina S. Studer. Many thanks to Nina for sharing it with us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ian Fleishman develops the concept of failed passing in his new book Flamboyant Fictions, which reimagines free will in queer lives as an accidental affirmation of identity despite efforts towards adherence to standards and norms. In this, he works with his predecessors in queer theory like Judith Butler, José Muñoz, Leo Barsani, Lee Edelman and others. In our conversation, Ian also gives us a glimpse of his readings of failed passing in widely varying texts such as the works of André Gide and Jean Genet and the films of Luchino Visconti, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Schroeter, Todd Haynes, François Ozon, and Xavier Dolan, to the music and public persona of Shawn Mendes and Troye Sivan. Ian Fleishman is the inaugural Chair of the Department of Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Flamboyant Fictions: The Failed Art of Passing (Northwestern 2024). His previous books are An Aesthetics of Injury: The Narrative Wound from Baudelaire to Tarantino (Northwestern 2018) and Performative Opacity in the Work of Isabelle Hupert (Edinburgh 2023), co-edited with Iggy Cortez. Image: From the cover of Flamboyant Fictions, by Monograph / Matt Avery Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay talk about negative life, which names the misalignment of individual and species survival, as a condition of thought and film. In developing this concept, they shed light on the gaps within the rhetoric of entanglement, and push against ethics and politics that insist on the values of human and nonhuman relations. Negative life already inheres in existing social relationships because the world is already broken. Steven and Jean-Thomas critique much of ecocriticism’s romantic attachment to contingencies and solutions that would have us ignore this truth. Steven Swarbrick is Associate Professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York. He is the author of two books: The Environmental Unconscious: Ecological Poetics from Spenser to Milton (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) and The Earth Is Evil (forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press, “Provocations” series, 2025). He is a coauthor, with Jean-Thomas Tremblay, of Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (Northwestern University Press, 2024). He has been a guest at High Theory in the past, and his previous episode on ‘The Environmental Unconscious’ can be found here. Jean-Thomas Tremblay is Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities and Director of the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought at York University, in Toronto. He is the author of Breathing Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2022) and, with Steven Swarbrick, a coauthor of Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (Northwestern University Press, 2024). Excerpts from a book-in-progress on climate action, liberal sensemaking, and the "world" concept have appeared in Critical Inquiry and are forthcoming in Representations. Image: © 2025 Saronik Bosu. The silhouette of a forest and that of a cow floating above it, against an orange sky, and a general atmosphere of smoke and haze. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paloma Checa-Gismero talks about the many processes of re-evaluation, re-contextualization, and re-animation that designates an object as art. To illustrate this point, she calls our attention to the work of artists like Mierle Laderman Ukeles in the 1970s, or the 1989 exhibition titled Magiciens de la terre at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. She develops the concept of aesthetic conversions in her new book about the histories and geographies of art biennials, which, in the post cold war world, converted subaltern aesthetic genealogies into forms that were legible to a nascent cosmopolitan global elite. Paloma Checa-Gismero is a historian of global contemporary art. She is Assistant Professor of Art History at Swarthmore College. Originally trained as an artist, she has been an active art critic since 2009. Her scholarship and criticism have been published in Afterall, FIELD, Third Text, The Journal of Modern Craft, among others. She is the author of Biennial Boom: Making Contemporary Art Global (Duke University Press, 2024). Image: © 2023 Saronik Bosu. It is a tilted and warped version of the capital letter B that spills out of the frame, its three parts in maroon, violet, and deep green, against a yellow ochre background. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of High Theory, Laura Stamm talks about the biopic. One of the oldest forms of narrative cinema, biographical pictures are a mainstay of the medium today. Early biopics played an important role in public health discourse, representing the discoveries of science and the lives of scientists, which in turn led queer artists to adopt the genre in response to the AIDS crisis. Laura’s book, The Queer Biopic in the AIDS Era (Oxford UP, 2022), asks why queer filmmakers repeatedly produced biographical films of queer individuals living and dead throughout the years surrounding the AIDS crisis. These films evoke the genre's history building up lives worthy of admiration and emulation and the parallel history of representing lives damaged. By portraying lives damaged by inconceivable loss, queer filmmakers challenge the illusion of a coherent self presumably reinforced by the biopic genre and in doing so, their films open the potential for new means of connection and relationality. In the episode Laura references many films, including the Greta Garbo film Queen Christina (1933); Freud: The Secret Passion (1962); The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936); Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940); John Greyson’s musical Zero Patience (1993); and the Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black (2024). Her research extends beyond the 1980s moment of crisis, and in the episode she gives a good explainer pre-code Hollywood and (briefly) the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s. If you were interested in this episode and want to learn more about queer representation in US popular culture, check out Margaret Galvan’s episode on Visibility. Laura Stamm is Assistant Professor of Health Humanities and Bioethics and Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for Department of Medicine at University of Rochester. She completed her PhD in Film and Media Studies and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Stamm's research interests broadly focuses on LGBTQ+ health, transgender studies, and medicine in visual culture. Beyond the book discussed here, her work has recently appeared in the edited collection New Queer Television: From Marginalization to Mainstream (Intellect Press, 2024) and Synapsis on “From the Clinic to the Talk Show: Narratives of Trans History in Framing Agnes.” The image for this episode shows photographs by Rob Corder of photographs by Peter Hujar of two queer artists, the sculptor Louise Nevelson and the writer, photographer, film maker, etc., David Wojnarowicz. Left: Peter Hujar, "Louise Nevelson (II), 1969". Gelatin silver print (1934-1987) Morgan Library. BAM Right: Peter Hujar, "David Wojnarowicz", 1981. Gelatin silver print (1934-1987) Menschel Collection. BAM Photos by Rob Corder. We do not own these images, but we do like them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of High Theory, Faye Raquel Gleisser tells us about Risk. A calculable danger in economics, athletics, sociology, or healthcare, risk has become a socially constructed danger that changes who we are and how we move through the world. Faye asks us to think about how risk management and risk literacy shaped the conceptual and performance work of American artists in the late twentieth century. Who is at risk? Who is safe? And how do we know? Faye’s book, Risk Work: Making Art and Guerrilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967–1987 (U Chicago Press, 2023) studies how artists in the US starting in the 1960s came to use guerrilla tactics in performance and conceptual art, maneuvering policing, racism, and surveillance. As US news covered anticolonialist resistance abroad and urban rebellions at home, and as politicians mobilized the perceived threat of “guerrilla warfare” to justify increased police presence nationwide, artists across the country began adopting guerrilla tactics in performance and conceptual art. Risk Work tells the story of how artists’ experimentation with physical and psychological interference from the late 1960s through the late 1980s reveals the complex and enduring relationship between contemporary art, state power, and policing. Drawing on art history and sociology as well as performance, prison, and Black studies, Gleisser argues that artists’ anticipation of state-sanctioned violence invokes the concept of “punitive literacy,” a collectively formed understanding of how to protect oneself and others in a carceral society. Faye Raquel Gleisser is an associate professor of art history at Indiana University and curator, whose work focuses on three main subject areas: art and tactical intervention; the racial logics of archives; and curatorial ethics and canon formation. By bridging curation, art history, and performance studies, she investigates histories of art that challenge intertwined anti-Black societal structures and patriarchal, white-centering notions of value that have long limited the canon of “American art.” She approaches art as a material manifestation of sociopolitical conditions and artists as theorists of power and social encounter. In the episode Faye names several artists including Asco, Chris Burden, the Guerrilla Girls, Tehching Hsieh, and Adrian Piper. This image for this episode is a photograph by Harry Gambota Jr. titled First Supper (After a Major Riot), 1974 that documents a performance by the Chicano art group Asco in Los Angeles. See the Artsy page about the photograph for more about the art and the artist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

High Theory returns with a series of haunting concepts, places, and figures from our former guests. We asked folks to call in with something spookworthy (neologism!) from their fields – real or imagined specters, scary ideas, anything that could haunt, disorient, unsettle, horrify. And we got a full seance worth of ghosts. Listen if you dare! This episode features (in order of appearance) Abhishek Avtans on the Churail. He kindly gave us a transcript (we hope to have more transcripts soon!). You can hear more from Abhishek in his episode on Apabhraṃśa. Angelina Eimannsberger on the Reader. You can hear more from Angelina in her episode on JVN. Travis Chi Wing Lau on Mad Studies. You can hear more from Travis in his episode on Experimental Life. Mackenzie Cooley on the Scientific Revolution. You can hear more from Mackenzie in her episode on the Animal. Farah Bakaari on the Nation State. You can hear more from Farah in her episode on the Trace. Emma Heany on Communism and Empire. You can hear more from Emma in her episode on Sexual Difference. Sheila Liming on Nowhere and Forever. Sheila reads an excerpt from her article in progress on the contemporary gothic, under the working title, "Out of Time: Anti-Immediacy in Mark Jenkin's Enys Men.” You can hear more from Sheila in her episode on the Party. Sritama Chatterjee on Nature and Wilderness. You can hear more from Sritama in her episode on Off-Shore Aesthetics. John Linstrom on Liberty Hyde Bailey’s Haunted Houses. You can hear more from John in his episodes on Nature Study and Ecosphere. The image for this episode features creepy red creatures on a dark green field. It was made by Saronik Bosu. Boo! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of High Theory, Mackenzie Cooley talks about animals. The animal lies at the center of science and the human, from imperial conquest and Enlightenment thought to the creatures on our dinner plates and beside us at the table. The practices of animal breeding and the politics of making life are, in Mackenzie’s account, key to understanding the history of race as a concept and term that emerged in the Early Modern World. For more animal encounters, check out her book The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance (Chicago UP, 2022). In it, Italian horses and Mexican dogs provide examples of controlled breeding before eugenics, helping us see how human difference was understood in the colonial encounter, and illuminate undertheorized notions of generation and its discontents in the more-than-human world. Tag dog and Bartolomé the cat sometimes participate in the making of High Theory, but the podcast is not necessarily pitched to non-human ears. If you want radio for animals, listen to Bad Animals on WFMU. Mackenzie Cooley is Assistant Professor of History, Director of Latin American Studies at Hamilton College. She is an intellectual historian who studies the uses, abuses, and understandings of the natural world in early modern science and medicine. And she has two Newfoundland dogs. The image accompanying this episode is a painting of a Newfoundland Dog by Charles Henry Schwanfelder (1812), from the collection of Temple Newsam House, Leeds Museums and Galleries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices