Politically Red

Eduardo Cadava is Philip Mayhew Professor of English at Princeton University. His books include Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History, Emerson and the Climates of History, and Paper Graveyards.  Sara Nadal-Melsió is a New York City-based Catalan writer, curator, and teacher. Presently writer-in-residence at the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia, she has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, SOMA in Mexico City, and New York University. Her essays have appeared in various academic journals, edited volumes, and museum catalogs. She is the co-author of Alrededor de/ Around, and the editor of two special issues on cinema, The Invisible Tradition: Avant-Garde Catalan Cinema under Late Francoism and The Militant Image: Temporal Disturbances of the Political Imagination. She has recently cocurated a show on Allora & Calzadilla for the Fundació Tápies in Barcelona and has written a book essay about it, To Be All Ears, To Be in the World: Acoustic Relation in Allora & Calzadilla, as well as edited a companion volume on the Puerto Rican crisis, A Modest Proposal: Puerto Rico’s Crucible. Her book Europe and the Wolf: Political Variations on a Musical Concept is forthcoming from Zone Books.

Introduction: "The Red what reading did ..." 9
I. Politically Read 29
II. Multiplicity 43
III. Massification 51
IV. General Strike 59
V. Rosa's Casket 71
VI. Panoramas of Violence 89
VII. Depositions 97
VIII. Theological Figurations 117
IX. Messianic Promises 125
X. Benjamin's Boxes 133
XI. An Unusual Pedagogy 145
XII. A Ship of Fools 151
XIII. Communal grief 169
XIV. A Red Ray; or, Sociology's Supplement 177
XV. The Shibboleth of Race 195
XVI. The Hammer of Social Revolution 221
XVII. The Leviathanism of the Vanquished 227
XVIII. Angelus Novus: A Militant Emblem 233
XIX. The Second Comet 247
XX. To the Planetarium 263
XXI. A Red Common-Wealth 285
Acknowledgments 335
Notes 338
List of Illustrations 386
Index 388