Description
Book SynopsisRaymond Williams was “by common consent” one of the “two most commanding intellectual figures in the New Left that emerged in Britain at the turn of the sixties,” the other being Edward Thompson. Williams published in 1961 a text entitled “The Future of Marxism.” In that essay, Williams has some remarkable things to say about imperialism, the successes of actually existing socialism, balanced against its failures, and the continued relevance of socialism as the horizon of human liberation. He also makes a characteristic methodological point: “the relation between systems of thought and actual history is both complex and surprising.” The future of Marxism, that is to say, will not depend on dogma, but will instead rest on historical developments, on how well are able to actualize Marx’s ideals in our own unique conjuncture. This volume takes up the challenge of reading and extending Williams’s thought in light of the actual history that has occurred since his passing but with the same ideal of socialism as its guiding horizon.
If there is one thread visible throughout all of Williams’s work, it is the felt presence of a living, thinking individual, of a person continually testing ideas in experience in order to see whether they fit the world they are meant to describe. The aim of this volume, timed to coincide with what would have been Williams’s 100th birthday, is to test his ideas in our own experience and to engage Williams’s work in ways that move past the familiar terrain that has grown around it. We now know that “experience” is a dangerous category, that “community” can be hijacked by the right as much as the left, and that “tradition” contains as much conflict as commonality. Those committed to Williams’s work can easily find textual arguments or developments across his career to answer these charges, and they have. What our volume offers is a set of arguments by younger scholars influenced by Williams’s writings that moves past some of these debates, extending Williams’s work into the 21st century, testing and weighing his ideas in light of recent developments and contemporary intellectual culture. In doing so, we treat Williams’s thought as one of those “resources of hope,” which he famously suggested would sustain us.
At a time of deepening inequality and austerity and growing rightward reaction, and yet simultaneously, and with seeming dialectical necessity, a renewed investment in socialism, Williams might be exactly the kind of figure we need.
Trade ReviewEvery generation needs to reread Raymond Williams, both to rescue the work from conservative attempts to limit its radicalism and as still one of our most dependable guides to a left critical knowledge movement. Raymond Williams at 100 delivers a moveable feast of today’s best critics making Williams newly relevant for familiar and new readers of Williams.
-- Stephen Shapiro, professor of English and comparative literary studies, University of Warwick
A fascinating collection of essays affirming the massive achievement of Raymond Williams whilst also challenging us to think harder about his legacy. These lucid essays are respectful yet critical of Williams’s influence across many fields and disciplines and, appropriately, take very seriously Williams’s indefeasible relation to Marxist thinking. Indispensable reading for anyone interested in Williams’s unique and uniquely important work.
-- Paul Smith, Professor of Cultural Studies and Global Affairs, George Mason University
Autocratic rule has become more transparent across Western societies, so this collection of essays on the work of Raymond Williams (1921–88) is all the more necessary. The eight fine essays Stasi has gathered outline how Williams’s work is relevant to today’s in late capitalism. The essays draw mostly on the issue of the “affective,” of how art and culture produces “meaning” for individuals. The essays are collected in two sections—"Keywords" and "Knowable Communities"—each with four essays. “Keywords” focuses on Williams’s conceptual vocabulary, and the essays examine such concepts as mediation, “long politics,” and structures of feeling. “Knowable Communities” focuses on the need to examine cultural objects through a democratic understanding of cultural literacy. Each contributor recognizes “late capitalism,” but late capitalism refuses to recognize itself. Williams’s evocation of the “affective” is used as a critical tool in most of the essays—e.g., how the concept of the “affect” might be used as both a political and a pedagogical tool to investigate the experiential. The collection asks the reader to “re-normalize" the normal in late capitalism. There are no answers, just avenues of investigation. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.
* Choice *
The strength of the collection issues from its reading of Williams beyond earlier phases of critique and defense. It doesn’t attempt to outline or summarize Williams’ development, and assumes familiarity with his work. It allows a pathway into it by focusing on some key conceptual categories[.]
* Australian Book Review *
Table of ContentsIntroduction by Paul Stasi
Part I: Ways of Seeing
1: “Mediation Metabolized” by Anna Kornbluh
2: “Inexplicable goodness: Raymond Williams, Charles Dickens and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness” by Paul Stasi
3: “Structures of Feeling: Legacy and Genealogy” by Thomas A. Laughlin
4: “Television and Other Popular Images from the 1960s to Now” by Daniel Worden
Part II: Home and the World
5: “Raptores orbis: Literacy, Welsh Anti-Imperialism, and ‘Literatures of the World’ in Late Raymond Williams” by Daniel Hartley
6: “Stuart Hall’s Raymond Williams” by Asha Rogers
7: “Structures of Feeling, Late Capitalism and the Making of African Literature in the Global Literary Marketplace” by Madhu Krishnan
Part III: Human Liberation
8: “‘A Contribution to a Different Kind of Politics’: Culture and Society, Future Orientation, and “Operative Theory” by Mark Allison
9: “Outflanked at Every Turn: Re-reading The Long Revolution” by Sarah Brouillette and David Thomas
10: “Renewal and ‘The Learning of Desire’: The Untimeliness and Presence of Raymond
Williams’s Conception of Utopia” by Mathias Nilges
