LARB’s Best: Humanities

LARB’s Best: Humanities

LARB’s Best: Humanities
We compiled this far from comprehensive list of our favorite pieces from the LARB humanities section with Merve Emre, Evan Kindley, and Lee Konstantinou, the brilliant editors who have helped shape it. These pieces demonstrate the sustained and sustaining strength of a discipline in perpetual crisis. They don’t disprove its predicament — where are the jobs? what is the role of criticism in a world whose inequities are so manifestly obvious? — but they deftly tie the “life of the mind” on dazzling display here to the material conditions under which we now live. Collectively, these essays explore some of the most significant movements in the humanities in the past ten years (affect theory, afropessimism, computational analysis), as well as the institutions that inform them (academia, publishing, and above all white supremacy). We’re proud of the variety of views and voices compiled here and are especially grateful to the number of non-tenured writers who have used our platform to reach an audience beyond the paywall. They’ve made a modest honorarium and, to us, a major contribution.

— Anna Shechtman and Katie Fitzpatrick


 




 

This digest is part of our year-round celebration of our 10th anniversary. To celebrate with us, please visit our anniversary page!