New Materialisms

“New Materialisms... [is], in the truest sense, [a] timely volume; [it] ... illuminates and reflects contemporary compulsions in critical theory while making important contributions to transdisciplinary feminist and queer posthumanist inquiry, a minor arc of theory that nevertheless has an extensive history in feminist studies of science, technology, and epistemology, as Sara Ahmed (2008) has argued elsewhere.” - Women's Studies Quarterly

“The essays collected here—authored by leading political theorists and feminist and cultural critics—examine the ‘choreographies of becoming’ and move beyond constructivism and humanism to track processes of de- and re-materialization. The effect is to scramble habitual categories of thought—active versus passive, inert versus animate, political versus ontological, causality versus spontaneity—and force us to think materiality. As the editors put it, ‘materiality is always something more than “mere” matter: an excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders matter active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable.’” - Bonnie Honig, author of Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy

“This is a strong and timely collection, one that could very well direct future discussions of the ‘new materialisms’ toward an experimental, process-oriented, and politically-engaged ‘new ontology.’” - Ellen Rooney, Brown University

“New Materialisms is an extraordinary and in fact interdisciplinary collection in its own right. . . . [T]he work coming out of the material turn is mind-blowing work, both in scholarly and in artistic research, and in art”. - Iris van der Tuin, Women's Studies International Forum

“New materialisms offer democratic theory an important opportunity to
regard its own parameters and function – what can be hoped for and why.
And Coole and Frost’s volume offers a new view of the human (and the
thing) that are well worth regarding. . . .” - Andrew Poe, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy

“Overall, the volume makes a convincing case for the renewal of materialism, in terms of both its theoretical purchase and its radical political potential. It shows, in ways that are often exemplary, that there are rich, and sometimes surprising, resources in the philosophical tradition for renewing materialisms.” - Keith Ansell Pearson, Radical Philosophy