Eduardo Cadava explores Walter Benjamin's unique perspective on history as articulated through photography, emphasizing the interplay between images and historical narrative. The book delves into themes such as the impact of technology on history, the dynamics of reproduction and mimesis, and the tension between memory and forgetting. By examining Benjamin's motifs, Cadava provides a framework for understanding how new media can reshape our comprehension of historical action and insight, revealing the profound connections between visual representation and linguistic expression.
Exploring the intersection of photography with art history, politics, and philosophy, this collection of essays delves into the significance of images in contemporary society. It offers insightful reflections on how photography shapes and reflects cultural narratives, inviting readers to reconsider the role of visual representation in understanding the world.
How reading and writing are collective acts of political pedagogy, and why the struggle for change must begin at the level of the sentence. “Reading is class struggle,” writes Bertolt Brecht. Politically Red contextualizes contemporary demands for social and racial justice by exploring the shifting relations between politics and literacy. Through a series of creative readings of Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Walter Benjamin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Fredric Jameson, and others, it casts light on history as an accumulation of violence and, in doing so, suggests that it can become a crucial resource for confronting the present insurgence of inequality, racism, and fascism. Reading between the lines, as it were, and even behind them, Cadava and Nadal-Melsió engage in an inventive mode of activist writing to argue that reading and writing are never solitary tasks, but always collaborative and collective, and able to revitalize our shared political imagination. Drawing on what they call a “red common-wealth”—an archive of vast resources for doing political work and, in particular, anti-racist work—they demonstrate that sentences, as dynamic repositories of social relations, are historical and political events.
