Black Box ― A Record of the Catastrophe

The work of eminent writers—Richard Dyer, Silvia Federici, Ursula K. Le Guin—as well as a host of new thinkers illustrate continuity and rupture in ongoing theoretical and cultural critique

This volume contains an eclectic but accessible collection of reportage, interviews, letters, fragments, and theoretical responses from some of the brightest new—as well as a few established—minds in critical theory. Its authors have sent dispatches from American prison yards, the shipping graveyards of India, fatal overseas drone strikes, roads crisscrossing the Mississippi delta, childhoods in revolutionary Zimbabwe, and kitchens where undocumented workers wash dishes. As the serial disasters of capitalism’s current crisis—economic, political, environmental—continue to batter the world, Black Box: A Record of the Catastrophe is a device for recording, analyzing, and transmitting events as they happen. It offers neither dire predictions nor false hopes; instead, it embraces the mystery of what might transpire. Contributors include scholars (Nina Power, Silvia Federici, Sami Khatib, Chris O’Kane, Tanya Erzen), cultural critics (Richard Dyer, Charles Mudede), authors (Ursula K. Le Guin, Miranda Mellis), poets (Emily Abendroth, Cathy Wagner, Alli Warren), and many others.

The Black Box Collective is composed of poets, journalists, academics, metaphysicians, artists, and strategists who gather regularly at a retired dairy farm in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains north of Seattle to explore themes of consciousness, community, and circulation of the communizing current—and to discover and assemble a critique that will wake us from the dream world that is seamlessly reproduced by capitalist culture. They are based in Seattle.