New Left Review 132 November/December 2021

Rahmane IdrissaMapping the Sahel International forces crowd the military bases of the Sahel, whose fragile ecosystem provides the latest front in the ‘war on terror’. Rahmane Idrissa, historian of the region, situates the fluid relations between farmers and herders, conquerors and marabouts in its longue durée. Perry AndersonEdgerton’s Britain In The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, David Edgerton takes aim at narratives of Ukania’s secular decline that would foreground its extraverted economy and capitalist-aristocratic ruling class. How coherent is his alternative? Kheya Bag & Susan WatkinsStructures of Oppression The notion of ‘caste’ has gained currency as a descriptor of America’s racial order. Sketch for a systematic comparison of African-American and Dalit predicaments, querying the analogies, in an engagement with Sujatha Gidla and Alan Horn’s ‘Caste, Race—and Class’ in NLR 131. Julian StallabrassSublime Calculation Aesthetics and politics of computer-generated installations at LUX: New Wave of Contemporary Art on the Strand. Immersive, hypnotic: a rapture for techno-capital? Dylan RileyOn Harvey’s ‘Rate and Mass’ A critical rejoinder to David Harvey’s reflections on the Grundrisse in NLR 130. If capital automatically responds to a falling rate of profit by seeking out a larger mass of labour, how does that square with the facts of the business cycle? David HarveyReply to Riley Responding to Dylan Riley’s critique, Harvey extricates Marx’s double-edged law of profit—a falling rate and rising mass—from discussion of capitalist counter-measures. Competitive innovation, Eastern massification and the pay-offs for capital of speculative infrastructure spending. Patricia McManusParsing the Personal Transformative programmes for literary criticism as radical ‘aesthetic education’—and the methodological and material obstacles they may encounter. Patricia McManus continues the discussion begun by Francis Mulhern, Lola Seaton and Joseph North. Alain SupiotFoucault’s Mistake If the pandemic has reasserted the priority of preserving life through the legal mechanisms of the state, what are the implications in societies governed by the normalizing logic of the spontaneous market? REVIEWS HELL WITH THE LID OFF Tom Mertes on Gabriel Winant, The Next Shift. Ethnographic study of deindustrialization and the rise of the health-care sector in Pittsburgh. LIBERALISM’S WARRING SOULS Tor Krever on Jennifer Pitts, Boundaries of the International. Formation of international legal theory in Europe’s encounters with its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Others.