Our series of shared excerpts continues with a fourth installment focusing on issues of representation and decolonization. The late Senegalese artist and poet Issa Samb questions the “representativeness” of race and art in a 1989 text reprinted in his monograph WORD! WORD? WORD!; art historian Nomusa Makhubu writes about depictions of South African eco-racism in Uriel Orlow’s monograph Theatrum Botanicum; artist Pedro Neves Marques looks toward alternative Indigenous science fiction in the anthology Futurity Report; artist and theorist Denise Ferreira da Silva identifies the disco’s black light as a device for Black feminist thought in Otobong Nkanga’s monograph Lustre & Lucre; media theorist Andrea B. Braidt turns to queer subjectivity and affect in the anthology On Productive Shame, Reconciliation, and Agency; and art historian T. J. Demos links global geopolitics and visual culture in Against the Anthropocene.

Our third packet includes art-historical chapters from Sven Lütticken’s Cultural Revolution: Aesthetic Practice after Revolution and Josephine Berry’s Art and (Bare) Life: A Biopolitical Inquiry; “On Passive Resistance,” a conversation between Vanessa Joan Müller and Cristina Ricupero in New Ways of Doing Nothing; and Mark Fisher’s “We’re Not All in This Together: Public Space and Antagonism in the Wake of Capitalist Realism” from Caring Culture: Art, Architecture and the Politics of Public Health, edited by Markus Miessen and Andrea Phillips.

The second packet includes chapters from Hubert Fichte’s The Black City: Glosses, Ingo Niermann’s Solution 295–304: Mare Amoris, and Charlotte Birnbaum’s Bon! Bon! On the Charms of Sweet Cuisine, as well as the introduction to Red Love: A Reader on Alexandra Kollontai, edited by Maria Lind, Michele Masucci, and Joanna Warsza. 

The first selection of Social Distances includes María Belén Sáez de Ibarra’s “Cosmopolitics of the Living” from What about Activism?, edited by Steven Henry Madoff; Martin Herbert’s “On and Off the Grid: Agnes Martin,” from Tell Them I Said No; as well as Fernando García-Dory’s “Inside Us: A Dinner as an Aesthetic and Agro-political Excursion” and Chris Fite-Wassilak’s “Species of Specialties: St. Louis’s Provel Cheese”—both featured in Politics of Food.