This seminar investigates material conditions and contradictions in and as cultural processes. In the mid-twentieth century, Raymond Williams argued for understanding culture as a process that operates within the means of production in relation to specific social relations and historical conditions. Over the past decade, emerging scholarship on print culture, media archaeology, and material culture has also propelled comparatists to think with objects and things. In light of this material turn, it is critical to revisit and revamp the discourse of cultural materialism, to periodize the tensions between the base and superstructure on the one hand, and on the other, to ground the entanglement between culture and its material aspects at our current moment of capitalist development. As sociologist Nicholas Thoburn has observed, the organization of warehouses for prodigious online retailers like Amazon now mirrors that of book organization, with every commodity assigned an equivalent of an ISBN. Meanwhile, capital’s drive toward rationalization has also impacted the art world. According to the late art theorist Marina Vishmidt, the pervasive logics of risk and speculation today have made finance and fine art ideal partners in creating and hoarding increasingly rare objects and experiences. Rather than capitulating to technological determinism or its negative–markets that produce and prey upon nostalgia–we propose that these transformations call for a new cultural materialism. This approach would critically engage with the base-superstructure dialectic across literature, art, and media. 

In particular, this seminar seeks to explore the tensions between objects and people, things and makers, ideology and practice, as well as aesthetic experiences and material mediation. We draw upon theories and writings from the Frankfurt School (the culture industry through and beyond Theodor Adorno; Walter Benjamin’s obsession with collecting), contemporary scholars on the left (Fredric Jameson on kitsch and cultural nostalgia; Anna Kornbluh on the cultural politics of “too late capitalism”), and historical materialists who anatomize cultural processes (Louis Althusser on the conditions of capitalist reproduction; Alfred Sohn-Rethel on intellectual and manual labor). 

We seek papers that historicize and advance our understanding of culture and materiality. Submissions that address the following topics or focus on the Global South are especially welcome.  

Possible topics or keywords:

• Cultural institutions, culture industry, cultural policy


• Behind-the-scenes, props, stage design, media infrastructure


• Mundane objects, kitsch, second-hand culture


• Craftship, small producers, mass reproduction


• Libraries, bookstores, museums, world expos


• Hoarding and possessing; curating and exhibiting


• Capital, commodities, and finance in literature, film, and art