Books by Maxwell Woods
Routledge, 2022
On the Chilean Social Explosion uses the methods of literary, cultural, and subaltern studies to ... more On the Chilean Social Explosion uses the methods of literary, cultural, and subaltern studies to examine what cultural foundations and practices gave rise to this political uprising.
On 18 October 2019, Chile exploded into a series of nationwide protests that placed the socio-political order of neoliberalism, settler colonialism, and patriarchy under structural crisis. In March 2020, however, the quarantining measures taken in response to the COVID-19 pandemic put this grassroots rebellion on pause. The author explores and analyzes these five months which have come to be known as the Chilean social explosion [estallido social].
This book will be of value to researchers of cultural studies, cultural and radical politics, resistance and protest, subaltern studies, and Chilean and Latin American politics. It will also interest a broader audience concerned with social movements, grassroots organizing, and expressions of dissent across the world.
Papers by Maxwell Woods
cultural geographies, 2022
Developing thoughts on exposure in cultural geography, literary studies, and mobilities research,... more Developing thoughts on exposure in cultural geography, literary studies, and mobilities research, this article aims to provide a more comprehensive account towards the publicness of public space. What would happen if we assessed publicness not by degrees of openness and inclusion, but through the nexus of vulnerability and complicity that is fundamental to the notion of exposure? To grasp such an intrinsic dualism, our perspective goes towards public transport, where experiences of exposure are intensified by its specific conditions of encapsulation and movement. We illustrate this perspective drawing from the autobiographical chronicles of the Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel, in order to then propose a 'learning from' the case of public transport for a rethinking of publicness. Specifically, we argue that exposure provides new insights on agency, power and vulnerability as part of a more processual notion of public space.
Cultural Politics, 2019
Recent criticisms of regionalization and urbanization in the Anthropocene have argued that actors... more Recent criticisms of regionalization and urbanization in the Anthropocene have argued that actors are increasingly producing uninhabitable spaces, in which oppressed and marginalized groups are either left to die or forced into a rootless existence of constant displacement. Through an examination of the cultural politics of current discussions of uninhabitability in the Anthropocene, this article argues against the logic of un/inhabitability—demonstrating its necessity to imagine itself against a subhuman other that was embodied, at least in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in the anti-Semitic representation of Jews—and proposes that the conceptual framework of in/hospitability can be substituted in a way that both maintains the logic of un/inhabitability’s beneficial aspects—its illumination of the inequitable distribution of environmental harms in the Anthropocene and of the relationship between cultural formations and dwelling—and abandons its problematic underpinnings. In this way, the embrace of in/hospitability recommends not a rejection of the logic of un/inhabitability but its development through productive critique.
Cultural Studies, 2020
This article explores the decolonial foundations at the beginning of punk in the United States an... more This article explores the decolonial foundations at the beginning of punk in the United States and England during the 1970s and 80s. More precisely, it investigates the work of Bad Brains and John Lydon (both during his time with the Sex Pistols and Public Image Ltd.) to see how they staked out a particular decolonial position from within punk. This article's argument is triple. First, I argue that Bad Brains struggled with the tension of placing their identity as Black men formed through a decolonial engagement with Rastafari and reggae into dialogue with a punk community dominated by white, middle-class musicians. The case of Bad Brains demonstrates both how decoloniality formed a part of punk's foundations and how white members of punk rejected this mode of thought. Second, the patriarchal masculinity underlying Bad Brains's mode of Rastafari-one that was explicitly homophobic and misogynistic-demonstrates how discourses of decolonization themselves can serve to further the oppression of colonized subjects. In other words, some forms of decolonial agency exceeded the representational capacity of Bad Brains's discourse of decolonization, becoming in effect what I call a decolonial excess. Third, I argue that John Lydon attempted to construct a vision of punk decoloniality based on such a decolonial excess. What emerges with this discourse, however, is that Lydon failed to fully recognize the relationship between such a decolonial excess and the politics of decolonization. As such, if this article on the one hand examines the historical
Cultural Dynamics, 2020
Although Latin American decolonial thinking has always maintained an interest in taking the theor... more Although Latin American decolonial thinking has always maintained an interest in taking the theories and practices of the communities of Latin America's colonized peoples seriously, the theorization of communality and communal systems has been a new focus of the last two decades. That is, the academic decolonial dedication to diversity and difference has recently been imagined as a pluriverse of communal systems. As such, this decolonial group of thinkers has been effectively demanding that the radical theories of communality produced by Indigenous communities of the Global South be taken seriously as real and viable alternatives to capitalism and representative democracy. Nevertheless, a critical engagement with Latin American decoloniality reveals a serious oversight in communal-oriented decoloniality: it fails to engage in a serious manner the millions throughout the world who are not or are perceived as not part of any community or are exiled from their community. To demonstrate this threat within the communal-oriented vision, one can look to another (de)colonial context ubiquitously overlooked in Latin American decolonial thought: Ireland. More precisely, as a reading of James Joyce's Ulysses reveals, the communal-oriented Irish anti-colonialism of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries contained a common mode of modern anti-Semitism: Jews belong to no community and uproot and hollow out the life of any community they encounter. This article argues that although the pluriversal vision of communal-oriented decoloniality is explicitly opposed to the denigration, dismissal, or rejection of any community, it can still be characterized by this other mode of othering: the denigration, villainization, and oppression of persons who are perceived as embodiments of anti-communality.
Contending Modernities, 2020
Social and Cultural Geography, 2019
This article argues that punk urbanism is best understood as the attempt to paradoxically conceiv... more This article argues that punk urbanism is best understood as the attempt to paradoxically conceive of and organize cities as unorganizable, contested, and heterogeneous spaces; the consolidation of a stable and coherent urban community is challenged within punk urbanism by the constant disruption of any identifiable and stable urban meaning. More precisely, sections of London punk in the 1970s revealed that a cultural geography based around a coherent urban meaning creates an 'other' that does not accord to and that is subsequently (attempted to be) eliminated or contained by the policing of that dominant urban meaning. In contrast to common theories of insurgency that seek to organize urban 'others' into an identifiable and affirmative collective identity-instead of being a mere negative of a hegemonic urban meaning-that will then replace the dominant culture of an urban space, punk seeks to maintain the moment when that 'other' interrupts and undermines that dominant urban culture. In other words, punk urbanism proposes what is usually identified as an urban 'crisis' as a new form of collective urban life.
Alienocene, 2022
Chile has rejected a proposed constitution that reflected the demands of anti-neoliberal, feminis... more Chile has rejected a proposed constitution that reflected the demands of anti-neoliberal, feminist, decolonial, and environmentalist social movements of the past decades. Where do we go from here?
Following Hurricane Katrina, critics noted that most neighborhoods of New Orleans which failed to... more Following Hurricane Katrina, critics noted that most neighborhoods of New Orleans which failed to recover had previously been heavily populated by African-Americans and the working classes. Josh Neufeld's graphic novel, A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge (2009), which depicts the experiences of six New Orleans residents during and after the storm, reflects this theorization. For instance, of Neufeld's characters only one, a rich white resident whose home lies on high ground, avoids flooding and displacement. A.D. presents a geography in which wealthier, white neighborhoods are less vulnerable to extreme climate events than African-American and/or lower-income neighborhoods. Yet this misses a key characteristic of the emerging geography not only of contemporary New Orleans but of the world of climate change in general: post-catastrophe recovery is becoming a function of who can afford it, not of who is most affected by the disaster. In the case of New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina provided white urban capital the opportunity to engage in one of the largest urban renewal programs in American history: the socioeconomic footprint of African-Americans and the poor was reduced in order to consolidate the world of the white middle-and upper-classes. In addition to Neufeld's narrative, which represents the emerging geography of climate change as one in which a white, monied world is spared the forces of the Anthropocene and made the de facto center of power, I argue that the United States' unequal geography of climate change is created through de jure political decisions and urban planning.
Environmental urban design is often conceptualized in terms of a harmonious organic order in whic... more Environmental urban design is often conceptualized in terms of a harmonious organic order in which all parts, natural and artificial, are integral elements of a living, interconnected system. In addition to being connected to anti-democratic politics, this mode of urban design has been delegitimized by the emergence of the Anthropocene, our current human-dominated geological epoch in which the natural domain has been subsumed within the human. In other (urbanist) words, urbanization becomes planetary in its scale, razing the properties formerly distinguishing city and nature. Environmental urban design in the era of the Anthropocene and planetary urbanization is called upon to develop a sustainable non-organicity that confronts the ‘second nature’ created by humans composed of brownfields, railways, mines, power stations, financial centers, and pipelines. In the United States, Landscape Urbanism has recently developed design practices to do just this and regenerate cities, but little has been done to reconceptualize the program of environmental urban design. A reading of the poetics of Vicente Huidobro in light of the Anthropocene and planetary urbanization fulfills just this task. In his poem, Ecuatorial (1918), Huidobro imagines a new global spatial order defined by natural landscapes being transformed into and juxtaposed next to built environments and tied together by new technologies of communication and transportation. In short, the poem demonstrates an urbanized, global, non-organic spatial order so often (rightly) attacked by environmental urban design. Yet it is my contention that in this poem Huidobro conceptualizes planetary urbanization and anthropogenic transformation of the landscape as the creation of a non-organic, second earth. Huidobro’s poetics provide a framework within which we can begin to discuss global, urban regeneration in the Anthropocene. Confronted with the need to imagine a new urbanized earth created under the threat of planetary destruction, Huidobro posits a poetic solution.
Drafts by Maxwell Woods
The so-called ‘end of nature’ or Anthropocene is more properly what Ulrich Beck terms the societa... more The so-called ‘end of nature’ or Anthropocene is more properly what Ulrich Beck terms the societalization of nature: the natural world has become a historical product and part of society. Threats to nature are no longer threats to something alien, but to society itself. Catastrophic climate change perfectly exemplifies this. Science is thus in crisis: with nature societalized, it is no longer an autonomous field investigating the objective functioning of the material world - it is forced into politics. Bruno Latour addresses this crisis in Politics of Nature (2004). Latour argues that the sciences must abandon their perceived autonomy from society and help determine which non-human elements should be taken into account when making political decisions. Embedded in this argument is an unacknowledged pedagogy: the sciences teach what to ‘take into account.’ As Michel Foucault’s work has demonstrated, however, sciences in many ways restrict what is taken into account rather than expand it. While I concur with Latour’s de-autonomization of the sciences, I propose a return to the Allegory of the Cave, which Plato uses in The Republic to explain the relationship between science and pedagogy, to argue for a science of the Anthropocene that engages the Socratic method and seeks to transform how one takes into account in addition to acting as the means by which one takes into account. I thus argue that the ‘end of nature’ demands the entwinement of de-autonomized sciences with a maieutic pedagogy of liberation.
Although it is widely accepted that modernism is a phenomenon of urbanization, these two categori... more Although it is widely accepted that modernism is a phenomenon of urbanization, these two categories have tended to be separated in the classroom. Modernism is relegated to courses in art history, literature, and music while urbanization is housed in geography, political science, history, and urban planning departments. By linking modernism with urbanization, however, one can develop a course that attracts students from a wide variety of backgrounds and disciplines, applies to students’ immediate environments, and opens up research opportunities for students from a wide variety of fields. Such a course accomplishes this in four different ways. First, such a class must address the global, diverse, and comparative dimensions of modernism, since urbanization is a worldwide phenomenon that varies in its local instantiations. For instance, cities exist in both Latin America and Eurasia, but urbanization and modernism in Santiago de Chile differ significantly from urbanization and modernism in Moscow. Second, as urbanization concerns the movement from country to city, the course would be forced to move between the two regions. One does not study solely urban or rural areas, but travels between these domains. Third, to talk about urbanization one must include discussions of politics, economics, urban planning, architecture, communications and advertising, and engineering in addition to literature, theory, and history. By linking modernism to urbanization, students from a wide range of disciplines are included in the conversation. Lastly, such a framework can extend beyond the classroom to field trips within one’s own urban and/or rural regions by asking students to analyze how modernism has affected their own built environments. By relating modernist texts to urbanization, one can attract students from a wide range of backgrounds, fields, and institutions, and apply the study of modernist texts to students’ immediate environments.
Book Reviews by Maxwell Woods
A contracorriente, 2021
In Edward Said's The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), "culture" is defined as: "a system o... more In Edward Said's The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), "culture" is defined as: "a system of discriminations and evaluations… [with which] a particular class in the State [is] able to identify…; and it also means that culture is a system of exclusions legislated from above but enacted throughout its polity, by which such things as anarchy, disorder, irrationality, inferiority, bad taste, and immorality are identified, then deposited outside the culture and kept there by the power of the State and its institutions" (11). This definition proves useful insofar as it allows Said to distinguish culture and politics as two distinct fields while simultaneously demonstrating how even ostensibly "apolitical" cultural products and practices serve to enable and legitimize a political system, since they structure the system of values upholding said political system. Nonetheless, Said's interpretive framework remains largely dominated by the centrality of State politics, critically following Matthew Arnold's argument that "culture is potentially nothing less than the power of the State" (10), thereby leaving us unprepared to understand the relationship between culture and alternative insurgent political visions dedicated to autonomy from the State and capitalism that have been developing over the past decades. That is, following the politics of autonomy that have been theorized by Ana Dinerstein, Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, John Holloway, Raúl Zibechi, and many others, one is The Book in Movement 261 left asking: What is the relationship between culture and the politics of autonomy? What is the relationship between culture and radical politics when our discourse is not centered around the State? This is where Magalí Rabasa's marvelous 2019 work, The Book in Movement comes in: her work is dedicated to exploring the possibilities for a cultural project linked to the politics of autonomy. More precisely, she examines how independent small presses throughout Latin America are currently developing culturalorganizational practices with which to promulgate and popularize a culture, political theory, and material praxis of autonomy. Although the book therefore inevitably speaks about the political commitments of the practitioners of the radical small presses, what might be more compelling is her exploration of how an attendant culture is emerging that serves to support the objectives and motives of autonomous social movements across Latin America. In an introduction, four chapters, and an epilogue, Rabasa makes a profound, insightful, and highly needed intervention in the current discussions of autonomous politics from the fields of cultural studies and book studies, one that will likely make waves in other disciplines including, but not limited to, literary studies, political theory, Latin American studies, communication studies, and sociology. It is therefore to be expected that in the near future it will become an essential point of contact for discussions on the relationship between culture and the politics of autonomy. The Book in Movement opens with an introduction outlining the theoretical stake of Rabasa's project: the role of independent book publishing within the politics of autonomy. As Rabasa defines the politics of autonomy: popular movements and experiments with autonomous politics are defined by their practices, including self-organization, horizontalism, cooperativism, and mutual aid. In this way, the twenty-first century movements…are characterized by their shift away from programmatic and top-down approaches to political organizing and privilege dialogue and communication as their basic modes while working from the everyday to build prefigurative politics. (5) For Rabasa, the politics of autonomy is dedicated to a recognition of "the limits of the revolutionary potential of a state project" (27), and the subsequent development of novel, prefigurative, and egalitarian modes of political praxis and theory outside the structures of the State and capitalism. As Rabasa argues in the introduction, the "shifting network of small presses" she analyzes-a network dedicated to the production of "low-cost books," "an autonomous political perspective," "collective forms of organization," and "engagement in local and transnational political networks of presses, writers, and movements"-is the cultural actualization of this autonomous political framework
Social and Cultural Geography , 2018
Book review of Astrid Bracke's "Climate crisis and the 21st-century British novel."
Social and Cultural Geography, 2019
Review of Elizabeth Kryder-Reid's "California Mission Landscapes: Race, Memory, and the Politics ... more Review of Elizabeth Kryder-Reid's "California Mission Landscapes: Race, Memory, and the Politics of Heritage" (2016).
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Books by Maxwell Woods
On 18 October 2019, Chile exploded into a series of nationwide protests that placed the socio-political order of neoliberalism, settler colonialism, and patriarchy under structural crisis. In March 2020, however, the quarantining measures taken in response to the COVID-19 pandemic put this grassroots rebellion on pause. The author explores and analyzes these five months which have come to be known as the Chilean social explosion [estallido social].
This book will be of value to researchers of cultural studies, cultural and radical politics, resistance and protest, subaltern studies, and Chilean and Latin American politics. It will also interest a broader audience concerned with social movements, grassroots organizing, and expressions of dissent across the world.
Papers by Maxwell Woods
Drafts by Maxwell Woods
Book Reviews by Maxwell Woods
On 18 October 2019, Chile exploded into a series of nationwide protests that placed the socio-political order of neoliberalism, settler colonialism, and patriarchy under structural crisis. In March 2020, however, the quarantining measures taken in response to the COVID-19 pandemic put this grassroots rebellion on pause. The author explores and analyzes these five months which have come to be known as the Chilean social explosion [estallido social].
This book will be of value to researchers of cultural studies, cultural and radical politics, resistance and protest, subaltern studies, and Chilean and Latin American politics. It will also interest a broader audience concerned with social movements, grassroots organizing, and expressions of dissent across the world.