The interesting question is in fact a two-way street. Familiar enough, with its accusatory hint of idealism and intellectualizing elitism, is the query, In what sense was Marx a Hegelian? But more tantalizing, more science fictional and counterfactual, is its echoing alternative: In what sense was Hegel a Marxist? The sharing of the dialectic is of course the easy way out, in a speculative dilemma calculated to open up fresh answers and unexpected new problems. I will only take on one of them here—namely, what Hegel might have to tell us about the possibilities, and also the limits, of Marxist literary criticism, an issue that may seem as remote today as literature itself (and the theorizing criticism of it).

Haun saussy opens his influential discussion of past and present conceptions of comparative literature, “exquisite cadavers Stitched from Fresh Nightmares,” by linking them in an apparently historic claim to victory: “Comparative literature has, in a sense, won its battles” (3). The ambiguous nature of that claim, and the real subject of Saussy's ensuing discussion, is indicated, however, by the qualifying phrase “in a sense.” In another sense, Saussy implies, the achievements of comparative literature remain open to debate. For, despite the widespread adoption by national-literature departments of comparative literature's theoretical methods of inquiry, comparative approaches to literature continue to be considered inessential or secondary to the defining aim of national-literature departments—investigating and describing the reality of historically grounded national traditions and identities. Saussy's “sense” of victory is thus snatched from the jaws of an unapologetic sense of defeat:

What it is to be gendered remains a disputed topic in feminist philosophy, not to mention in the quotidian struggle over gender categories as they are lived and questioned outside the academy. In this paper I want to explore what contemporary work in analytic feminist philosophy can tell us about how the “categories we live by,” or the categories that organize our social lives and constitute our identities, can sometimes render life unlivable because of their restrictive or oppressive effects (Kapusta; Ásta Sveinsdóttir, “Metaphysics”; Butler, Undoing 4 and Notes). The phrase “categories we die for” captures this ambiguity. On the one hand, many of us have died, and continue to, for gender categories that we couldn't, or refused to, live up to. Think of the violence done in the name of normative and regulatory gender ideals to gender nonconformists—those who do not find a place in gender binarism (“man/woman”) or sexual dimorphism (“male/female”). Queer populations continue to be vulnerable to marginalization, pathologization, and aggression for not doing their gender, sex, or sexuality “correctly” (i.e., heteronormatively or cisnormatively). In this sense, social categories and norms can ruin lives, and we ought to argue against their restrictive regulation. On the other hand, we are also willing to stand behind, defend, and even sacrifice ourselves for gender categories that promise to make life more livable, flexible, and sustainable for those we cherish (Kapusta; Butler, Undoing). When we fight for the recognition of categories like “genderqueer,” “trans∗,” and “agender” we seem to be saying that these are categories worth dying for (a further issue, we will see, is whether binary gender categories like “man” and “woman” per se are worth dying for, or whether the effort to make these existing categories more inclusive is). The contemporary struggle to expand the compass of gender terms and concepts, to expand the sense of the livable, seeks to make categories more inclusive. When we mobilize for trans∗ inclusiveness, gender variance, intersex visibility, and more, we are fighting for categories to be protected, in law and in life. So, to speak of “categories we are dying for,” as I will, implies both a punitive sense (“categories due to which many of us die”) and a positive sense (“categories worth dying for”). Depending on their uses and effects, gender categories can make or break one's life.

Marx's early article “for a ruthless critique of everything existing” was written as a letter to arnold ruge, a young hegelian, in September 1843 and then printed in the Deutsch-Französischen Jahrbücher in 1844. It is one of several letters that Marx wrote to Ruge during that period on the need to upend philosophical authority. Translated into English, the essay is often taken to be an exuberant and ironic prefiguration of the writings that came to be known as the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. The essay's title is taken from Marx's letter, in which he remarks that we must undertake “die rücksichtlose Kritik alles Bestehenden”—the ruthless critique not of “everything existing,” exactly, but of everything established, even institutionalized as the establishment over time.

Try as we might, kant conclusively explains in his “exposition” of “space” in the critique of pure reason's “transcendental Analytic”—the opening section of that inaugural work, in which Kant demonstrates the fundamental, “practical” necessity of its guiding, “theoretical” premises—we cannot imagine, let alone perceive, any external “matter” or object without first representing it to ourselves as occupying space. Objects are individual, distinct, exactly because they are material—whether empirically experienced or merely imagined as such—and the always impure, partly intellectual, partly empirical basis of their apprehension indicates that objects cannot themselves be the basis of their spatial perception by us. A less “philosophically” descriptive, somewhat more contemporary, but certainly contemporarily more recognizable analysis of the same intellectual procedure may be recognized in Marx's upending account of the things we perceive and value as “commodities.” As on Marx's analogous terms, “commodities form the presupposition” of the “circulation” of “values” (that “produces exchange value”) and not the other way around, and thus have “constantly … to be thrown into [circulation] anew from the outside, like fuel into a fire,” so no number and variety of objects or quantity and quality of the general object we call “matter” could ever suffice to account for space, the indispensable basis of their own conception as phenomenal, material objects (Grundrisse 254-55). While Kant deduced that no knowledge, and no possible access to knowledge, would result from the solipsistic wish to make space itself an object of spatial perception—or, for that matter, of pure (immaterial) speculation, that is, the wish to spatialize or idealize a “real,” or nonperceptual, reality of space—Marx deduced, conversely, that, without “standing in any connection to [the] commodities” that “mediate” it, “circulation” itself—the basis of valuation—would “flicker out in indifference,” “d[ying] out with money” or, rather, taking money along with it, destroying the abstracted “economic existence” of this essential while “non-substantial form of wealth” precisely by reducing it to an object “with only its metallic existence left over” (255).

Africanist studies conventionally restrict considerations of space to its physical dimensions. affective representations in literary writing oppose the village to the city, imbuing the village with comprehensible, but rarely historicized, routines. Until disturbed by uninvited and troubling ideas, institutions, and individuals from unknowable distances and places, the village nourishes existential certainty and sustains spiritual balance. In contrast, the corrupting, bewildering city signals instabilities of all kinds, even in the social sciences. Across the disciplines, while organic production and genuinely reciprocal relations dominate in the village, the insatiable city absorbs without giving back and never offers spiritual renewal. The village half of the spatial dyad represents what is truly African, and folklore, or orality in general, holds Africa's romance together. Its schematic character notwithstanding, the predisposition toward construing space as little more than the thin cover of more vital substances that facilitate self-understanding has produced enduring parameters for interpreting African expressive forms. With convivial marketplaces and festivals, evil forests and sacred groves, village squares and humble homesteads, depictions of the village in novels set at the beginning of colonization have fixed, perhaps permanently, perceptions of the African cultural past in reader's imaginations, and efforts to read these narratives have generated useful, axiomatic insights about meanings of traditional, everyday African life and its ritualized calibrations of the movement of time, its reifications of the social compact, and its coded references to the society's cosmic bearings. he African city has not been that fortunate.

Had shahrazad lived today she might have been on the first boat of middle eastern refugees to europe, posits the theater director Mahmoud al-Hurani in his new play 1001 Titanics. First performed in September 2015 by the Arab Puppet Theatre at the Metro al Madina Theater in Beirut, the play toured in Lebanese refugee camps throughout the fall. In al-Hurani's play Shahrazad tells the tale of a skinny boy named Ahmad, a refugee driven by the fall of rockets from his quaint village to an unnamed Arab metropolis symbolized by the paper cutout of a skyline of high rises. The production relies on silhouette, puppetry, and mime to tell its story. In one climactic scene, two characters play cards over an upturned fan, and when a cutout of a missile drops to the stage their cards are blown into oblivion.

In his fascinating study of accra, ato quays0n quickly alerts his reader to the idea that one must not separate ways of knowing shakespeare from ways of knowing Accra. “Reading” the city as a literary critic, but much more, Quayson gives a discursive framework to his historical account of the material, social, and esoteric life of the city. Underlying the text is an implicit argument with other prominent accounts of African cities, which take a more utopian view and present these cities as mapping the innovative, exciting, and creative possibilities of urban space for the rest of the world. Quayson's mode of history is explicitly linked to storytelling in a number of ways beyond his disclosure that “[t]he retelling of Accra's story from a more expansive urban historical perspective is the object of Oxford Street” (4). From the start, it is also clear that his approach will utilize a broadly Marxian framework, which is to see (city) space in terms of the built environment as well as the social relations in and beyond it: “space becomes both symptom and producer of social relations” (5). But ultimately Quayson's apprehension of his city is Marxian because it recuperates ideas, desires, and creativity from the realm of the unique or inexplicable, of “genius,” to effectively insert them into various systems of production or into spaces that lack them. In so doing Quayson enhances, not hinders, our appreciation of those forms of innovation. Also Marxian is his employment of the “negative,” which refers to the way he splits apart many of the accepted relations between things in the scholarship on the development of the city, the postcolonial African city in particular, and pushes beyond the evidence of the “booming” or “creative” city. Quayson thus binds a more philosophical method of reasoning to his analysis of urban social relations while he straddles different disciplines. His work is illuminated when we locate a personal impulse, which we will track through the autobiographical narrative, to intervene not just in the ways the city is understood but also in the ways it is actually developing.

I first encountered ato quayson's transcendent account of accra and its enigmatic oxford street in 2009, a full five years before it was published as a book. In August of that year the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) held its fifth biennial conference in the Ghanaian capital. This was ASWAD's first conference on the continent, and it drew an impressive array of scholars from all over the world to a country that has long been a focal point of the diaspora's engagement with its African past and present. Because of its location, the conference attracted an especially large contingent of scholars who work on Ghana, among them quite a few historians, including me. Just when it seemed that the atmosphere of intellectual exchange could not get any headier, Quayson invited a small group of us to join him on a bespoke tour of Accra that heralded the arrival of Oxford Street in 2014.

If you have to explain a proverb, it is too esoteric for popular use; but if it is too mundane and obvious, it will not circulate or gain notoriety. It should be witty and rhythmic but obscure; it should attract new meanings and move among various contexts and genres, taken up by listeners who recirculate it in new media to new audiences. Effective proverbs use indirection as a performance strategy, provoking new interpretations and lubricating social circulation across disparate spaces (Yankah).

Two decades ago the late doreen massey, a feminist geographer, made a clear, rich, and generative argument about what she referred to as a progressive, or global, sense of place, one that emphasized process, that admitted of multiplicity and heterogeneity while recognizing the power geometries that produced hierarchical difference, and that rejected an insular and bounded sense of place in favor of a relational analysis. In Space, Place, and Gender, Massey based her analysis on a brief example, no more than a few paragraphs long, in which she read her own “pretty ordinary” street, Kilburn High Road, in northwest London (152-54). Her critical vocabulary offered a way of thinking about place that was not self-enclosing but outward-looking: what gives each place its fingerprint, she asserted, is the constellation of global flows, the social relations that overlap in one space—patterns that are always changing.

It is of inestimable value to see one's work through the eyes of others. the book that is written is not the one that is read, especially when the readings, like those by the contributors to this cluster, come from different disciplinary perspectives. Whether it is Carina Ray's interpretation of a transnational African cosmopolitanism, Jesse Weaver Shipley's rhythmic repetitions as if of a jazz symphony, Adélékè Adéeko's rememory of other African cities, Anjali Prabhu's detection of autobiographical evasions, Alissa Trotz's invocation of South-South dialogue, or the urban analogs to Accra that Paul Lemos Horta sees in the 1001 Nights, for me each reading of Oxford Street, Accra has been an epiphany.

“Contre-jour” is the opening section of the coauthored book tourner les mots: au bord d'un film (2000), by the franco-maghrebian philosopher Jacques Derrida and the Franco-Egyptian filmmaker and poet Safaa Fathy. Tourner les mots is about their experience of film generally and, in particular, about their collaboration on Fathy's 1999 film D'Ailleurs, Derrida, released in an English subtitled version as Derrida's Elsewhere. One meaning of the word tourner in the book's title is “to film.” But the word also shares with the English turn a wide range of meanings and associations, including “to turn,” “to revolve,” “to depend on,” “to shape or form,” “to consider,” and “to trope.” Thus Tourner les mots refers to cinematic practice (le tournage ‘filmmaking,’ ‘the shoot’) and to the relation between cinema and language (les mots ‘words’).