Please join us for a book launch on Friday September 20th from 3-5 pm.
We will discuss Domenico Losurdo’s Western Marxism: How It Was Born, How It Died, How It Can Be Reborn, whose English translation was just published by Monthly Review Press. Edited by Gabriel Rockhill, it includes an introduction he co-authored with Jennifer Ponce de León, as well as a previously unpublished talk by Losurdo.
In this book, the late Marxist philosopher and historian Domenico Losurdo sets forth a trenchant critique of the Western left intelligentsia, providing a fresh and challenging perspective on thinkers affiliated with the Frankfurt School, French Theory, and operaismo, as well as Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt, and Slavoj Žižek, among others. More information can be found here: https://monthlyreview.org/product/western-marxism/
Location:
University of Pennsylvania
Fisher-Bennett Hall, Room 401
3340 Walnut St.
Philadelphia 19104
Speakers:
Dr. Hashim bin Rashid is a scholar of global agrarian politics, social movements, and rural-urban transformations. His current book project, The Agrarian Question in West Punjab, investigates how agrarian change in North India in the colonial and postcolonial periods has shaped agrarian. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy and Millennial Asia, as well as in multiple edited collections, including Towards a People’s History of Pakistan; Marginalization, Contestation and Change in South Asian Cities; and Climate Justice and Migration: Mobility, Development and Displacement in the Global South. He is faculty in the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Immanuel Ness is the author of Migration as Economic Imperialism (2023); Southern Insurgency: The Coming of the Global Working Class (2015), Organizing Insurgency: Workers Movements in the Global South (Pluto, 2021), and Ours to Masters and to Own: Workers' Control from the Commune to the Present (co-authored with Dario Azzellini, Haymarket, 2011). He has also edited multiple collections, and is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Labor and Society. He has co-edited many collections, including Sanctions As War: Anti-Imperialist Perspectives On American Geo-Economic Strategy; Choke Points: Logistics Workers Disrupting the Global Supply Chain; and Global Rupture: Neoliberal Capitalism and the Rise of Informal Labour in the Global South. He is Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College, CUNY and Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg.
Dr. Jennifer Ponce de León is the author of Another Aesthetics Is Possible: Arts of Rebellion in the Fourth World War (2021) and co-editor of Puto and Other Plays by Ricardo A. Bracho (forthcoming). Her essays have been published in American Quarterly, Philosophy Today, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, e-misférica, and elsewhere, and she is currently co-editing an anthology on Latino/a/x Marxisms. She is Associate Director of the Critical Theory Workshop and co-editor, with Immanuel Ness and Gabriel Rockhill, of the book series Anti-Imperialist Marxism. She is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is also faculty in Latin American and Latinx Studies and Comparative Literature.
Dr. Gabriel Rockhill is Founding Director of the Critical Theory Workshop / Atelier de Théorie Critique, Professor of Philosophy and Associate Director of the Cultural Studies Program at Villanova University, and Research Associate at the Laboratoire d’anthropologie politique – LAP (EHESS Paris). He has published ten books, including most recently Requiem pour la French Theory with Aymeric Monville (Éditions Delga, 2024). He is currently completing Who Paid the Piper of Western Marxism?, the first volume in the Intellectual World War trilogy under contract with Monthly Review Press. He is co-editor of the World Marxist Review and of the AIM—Anti-Imperialist Marxism book series, and his more public-facing writings can be found in venues like Monthly Review, LA Review of Books, New York Times, Libération, and Counterpunch.
This event is free and open to the public. It is co-sponsored by the Critical Theory Workshop (CTW).
The CTW will host on online book launch for Western Marxism featuring Radhika Desai, John Bellamy Foster, Ali Kadri, Jennifer Ponce de León, and Gabriel Rockhill. Details will be posted soon on the CTW’s website (https://criticaltheoryworkshop.com/) and social media.
Please contact Jennifer Ponce de León (poncej@english.upenn.edu) with any questions.