1New Materialisms

Abstract

Abstract This review of new work in the new materialisms in 2020 picks up a thread of inquiry outlined in the previous year: how to understand how human persons may live, act, and find political efficacy in a relational and intertangled material world. Each of the monographs reviewed offers a different approach to understanding how persons find agency from within the intertanglements of things. Along the way, they address questions of embodiment, of race and of gender, of the materiality of language, of the role of the imagination, of the philosophy of history, and of critical method. Following the introduction, the first three sections are 1. Lo! A Shape!; 2. Militant Vegetables; and 3. Blackness and Plasticity. Each of these offers a distinct account of human ontology, accounting both for the ways the self is moved by its world and the ways it acts within it. The last three sections are: 4. Strange Words, Strange Matter; 5. Disappearing Things; and 6. Four Degrees of History. Each of these considers a monograph which synthesizes new materialist theory with frameworks from related fields in order to offer new perspectives on human action, freedom, or thought.