Object Lessons

"[Wiegman's] book left me reeling in the best possible way, precisely because it focuses in on the affective life of our critical impulses. Wiegman peels back the veneer on our investments in a variety of politics - feminist, anti-racist, imperialist, queer - leaving us to confront why we show up to struggle with our work. This book gave me the gift of recognizing conflict and incommensurability as powerful sites from which to continue to passionately invest in politics." - Naomi Greyser, Feminist Studies "This brilliant, commodious book gives us a name for that fast-moving conceptual traffic arrayed across the academic galaxy from the 1970s to the present; as a strategy for naming, Object Lessons brings about 'identity knowledges' as a rethought object of desire and destination, its political commitments pursued to the bone, in the immediacy of its institutional arrangements. The reader will not want to miss Robyn Wiegman in this quite stunning and masterful outcome." Hortense Spillers, Vanderbilt University "This book is as incisive in its articulation of the stakes involved in post-Civil Rights academic field formations as it is responsive to the affective investments shaping specific fields' modes of self-governance and self-reinvention. What do we want from identity knowledges - and what do they offer us? In the incongruent spaces opened up by these questions, and against the non-synchronized discourses marked by political obligations, institutional structures, and methodological ambitions, Robyn Wiegman narrates what she calls object lessons with inimitable intensity, agility, and imagination. If visionary thinking about identity studies is an art, she has given us a brilliant master-class performance." Rey Chow, author of Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture