3New Materialisms

Abstract

This review considers work in the field of new materialisms, bearing in mind the wide range of approaches that make up the broader ‘material turn’ in critical and cultural theory but focusing in particular on the feminist new materialist conversation that draws on the work of Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, Samantha Frost, Rosi Braidotti, and others. It notes the new materialisms’ continued heterogeneity and describes a turn to method in the field, one that enables a vibrant dialogue between applied and theoretical scholarship. The pieces reviewed share an engagement with that trend. They also illustrate two important problems that the field has engaged with in 2019. The first question concerns the new materialisms’ politics of citation, and the need for a decolonial practice that engages with indigenous and non-western thought. The second is the question of a new materialist ontology: how to reconcile the tension between ‘flat’ and differentiated, subject-oriented accounts of agency, significance, and value. The new materialists this review follows seek a middle ground, one that allows them to emphasize the political stakes of human and more-than-human relations. Following the introduction, sections are: 1. New Materialist Practice, Feminist Ends; 2. Indigeneity and the New Materialisms; 3. Sensation in a Material World; 4. A Cartography of the New Materialisms; 5. Reading's Situation; 6. Exclusion and Activist New Materialism; and 7. The Things We Imagine.