“Petrus Liu’s scholarship on the geopolitical material conditions of queer theorizing is unparalleled. In this magisterial book, he dispenses with endless rumination on the liberal subject, instead training our attention on the relationship between a queer theory that functions as American area studies and the Cold War and its ongoing realities. He profoundly reorganizes what queer theory was, is, or could be, while illuminating queer horizons of struggle that are intimately, not peripherally or derivatively, interlaced with internationalist anticapitalist movements. A tour de force!” - Jasbir K. Puar, author of The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability
“Challenging queer theorists and Marxists alike, The Specter of Materialism sparkles with brilliance. It introduces a whole new transnationalist decolonial materialist queer theory that will deeply impact all of those who care about social inequality and how to address it.” - Lisa Rofel, author of Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture
"Petrus Liu’s The Specter of Materialism is intellectually courageous and theoretically sophisticated, advancing both queer theory and Marxist thought. This review has only scratched the surface of this paradigm-shifting work. Scholars of queer theory, gender and sexuality studies, Marxism, and China Studies will all find this book indispensable for their fields." - Wenqing Kang, Modern Chinese Literature And Culture
"Petrus Liu’s latest book, The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus, will be of interest to readers who wish to grapple with capitalism as a ‘moving totality', an ever-changing process of accumulation and dispossession." - Matt Brim, Journal of Working-Class Studies
"It would be a disservice to limit this book to readers in Asian Marxist cultural studies and Chinese queer studies. The book speaks to audiences beyond its immediate fields. Liu offers an instructive, imaginative study in bringing together objects, areas, theories and histories." - Mingwei Huang, The China Quarterly
"As a critique of contemporary queer theory—in particular its provincialism—The Specter of Materialism is a resounding success. It points to the US-centrism of the field, its inability (or unwillingness) to deal with class, and its (inadvertent) collaboration with the politics and epistemologies of neoliberalism. These are long-standing flaws in the field, and Liu compellingly reveals how a materialist paradigm can better illuminate them as symptoms of the same ailment, namely queer theory’s lack of materialist grounding." - Samuel Clowes Huneke, LARB
"The Specter of Materialism is a major intervention into its announced three arenas of inquiry: queer theory, Marxism, and China. ...The product of many years of thinking and refining, Liu here extends the inquiry into asking and answering two questions: why does queer theory in China and elsewhere need Marxism, and why does Marxism need queer theory and China? These, as he shows, are intertwined problems of a global materialist history of capitalism that haunt our present, and they are problems of how to think from China about the world we currently inhabit. ... We would do well to follow Liu’s lead." - Rebecca Karl, Chinese Literature
"Petrus Liu’s work constitutes an indispensable force in both queer studies and Chinese studies." - Flair Donglai Shi, Asian Studies Review
"Together with his previous book Queer Marxism in Two Chinas, Petrus Liu’s The Specter of Materialism makes a major and invaluable contribution to creating a truly global queer Marxism. . . . Queer Marxists have a lot to learn from Liu about China’s central place in the spheres of geopolitics, economics, gender and sexuality. At the same time, queer Marxists will enthusiastically welcome his insistence that queer studies need to be far more materialist." - Peter Drucker, Dialogues in Human Geography
"Petrus Liu’s book comes as a welcoming intervention in the field and at least makes two significant advancements. First, this book makes material concerns central to the theorizing and researching of gender and sexuality both in China and globally. . . . Second, this book makes a spatial-epistemological intervention. By shifting attention to China, I think Liu envisions a move to provincialize queer theory and offer gendered and sexualized communities in China as epistemology rather than data for a universalized queer theory." - Ian Liujia Tian, Dialogues in Human Geography
"For a scholar interested in gendered labour and labour activist networks, with negligible training in textual analysis, this book comes as a reassurance that engaging with materiality as the central question in the global south is a worthwhile project. . . . Petrus Liu presents us with an interconnection between literature, Cold War and gender mainstreaming to argue that the accumulation of capital is followed by dispossession and precarity." - Mitaja Chakraborty, Dialogues in Human Geography
"How can a global queer Marxism address these issues of materiality that, increasingly, does not promise any future at all?. . . This is where I find Liu’s project most timely, insightful, and generative. In a truly postdisciplinary manner, The Specter of Materialism takes us to the very material and social processes of structuration, to that what hurts us, what we feel in their spectral presence, even if the perceptibility of these hauntings has been overshadowed by neoliberal politics of representation, spectacles of equality, and identity politics." - Gediminas Lesutis, Dialogues in Human Geography
"A groundbreaking work. . . . This book offers insightful interventions that carry substantial significance." - Charlie Yi Zhang, Journal of Asian Studies
"Liu’s study offers a rethinking of how some parts of existing bodies, labor processes, social formations, or cultural phenomena may be partially subsumed into new ones while at the same time leaving behind spectral vestiges of their earlier formations. Liu’s project is interested in tracing that process of partial subsumption while at the same time examining its limits." - Carlos Rojas, Prism
"The Specter of Materialism is a pioneering work that charts a new path for queer materialist analysis." - Pushpraj Singh, Capital & Class
"A valuable contribution to queer studies in a new historical and geopolitical context and will be of great interest to scholars in gender and sexuality studies, China studies, Marxism, and political economy." - Wei Wei, Pacific Affairs
