For Mixtape # 9 we asked a few of our colleagues what recent academic monographs were on their summer reading list. What insights are they taking into the new academic year? What should we put back on the shelf?
Farah Bakaari: Ainhehi Edoro, Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think, (Columbia University Press, 2026); Alexander Fyfe, Writing the Noncolonial Self: Modern African Literatures and the Politics of Subjectivity, (University of Virginia Press, 2026).
There is so much exciting scholarship coming out of African literary studies, which has been enormously energizing for me. For today I want to recommend two recent monographs that came out earlier this year. First, Ainhehi Edoro’s Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think (Columbia University Press, 2026), which offers a tour de force study of the politics and poetics of the forest in African literature. From Tutuola’s “endless forest” to Achebe’s “evil forest” to Okorafor’s “aquatic forest,” Edoro’s book shows how in African fiction, the forest is both a physical space and a conceptual apparatus, both real and mythological. It is an archive of indigenous forms of knowledge,a diagnostic method by which to theorize modernity and its spatialization of violence, a zone of exception and a site of worldmaking, a literary device and a method of literary criticism. As such, these novels’ engagement with the forest attune us to the ways in which the forest emerges as a “repository of knowledge and power in African storytelling.” Edoro terms the method she develops for this kind of reading “literary archeology,” which seeks to excavate the ways in which the African novel registers the dynamic status of the forest as “spatial signature that reveals the political and ontological assumptions embedded in fictional worlds.”
The second book I want to recommend is Alexander Fyfe’s Writing the Noncolonial Self: Modern African Literatures and the Politics of Subjectivity (University of Virginia Press, 2026). Beginning with the Makerere Conference moment, itself a contested story about beginnings, and ending with debates about the end of the novel in African cultural production, Fyfe brings us back to the literary as a practice of self making, one that is inextricable from and co-constitutive with non-colonial forms of subjectivity. And yet, the book puts pressure on African literary studies’ attachment to the subject when considering what happens in African literature. A favorite chapter of mine is the one on Susan N. Kiguli and Malika Ndlovu poetry, where Fyfe shows how their use of the lyric verse supplants the intelligible liberal subject usually affirmed in the lyric poetry but rather as “a subjective practice that allows an unsanctioned mode of existence within that environment.” Here, too, the corpus under consideration cuts across a wide range of periods, regions, and literary traditions as well as genres and languages. And for Fyfe this heterogeneity is precisely the point for “[i]f these sets of texts have generally been studied separately, and by different groups of scholars, this has more to do with modes of reading that seek aesthetic and political commensurability, rather than a lack of comparability between the subjective practices that the texts undertake.” In both Fyfe and Edoro one walks away with renewed understanding and deepened appreciation of so many African literary works that you might have thought have long been critically exhausted.
Farah Bakaari is an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and the editor-in-chief of Mid Theory Collective.
Sophia Mao: Ju Yon Kim, Paper Performance: Suspicion and Asian American Archives, (Stanford University Press, 2026).
I recently read Ju Yon Kim’s monograph Paper Performance: Suspicion and Asian American Archives which approaches American government paperwork and procedures as racial performances. Procedures used to manage “suspect” Chinese, Filipino, and Japanese populations, as Kim shows, “evoke practices…such as role-playing, scripting, staging, and spectatorship” (6). Paper Performance is the result of 15 years’ worth of archival research and analysis, and I was stunned by how much her book covers: not just re-introducing us to key moments in Asian American immigration and colonial history like Chinese Exclusion and Japanese American internment, but also by how it bridges genre. Kim applies a performance studies approach to historical documents, gesturing in her coda to the ways that Asian Americans’ relationship to paper documents is a trope and tension in theatrical performances and literary works. An optimist at heart, my instinct would have been to look for the ways that Asian Americans transcend paper documentation—but Kim is careful to underscore that paper performance is about how Asian Americans have survived within paper in the midst of government exclusion, incarceration, and surveillance. She gives us masterful close readings of how this unfolds, such as the ways that an interrogation around Chinese immigration in the 19th century is mediated, but also muddied, through the interrogated, the interrogator, a translator, and a stenographer; how Japanese Americans’ anxieties around administering and answering the loyalty questionnaire during WWII began to mimic official government entities. A good reminder: we play with the parts we are assigned.
Sophia J. Mao is an assistant professor of literatures in English at Bryn Mawr College, with research interests in contemporary Asian American literature and affect theory. Outside of reviewing books, Sophia enjoys ranking different potato chip brands.
William C. Palmer: Jennie Lighweis-Goff, Captive City: Meditations on Slavery in the Urban South (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024).
Jennie Lighweis-Goff’s Captive City: Meditations on Slavery in the Urban South offers an intellectual travelogue through the streets and inhabitances in history’s archive along the Southern Littoral, a coastal geography focused on Baltimore, Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans. Lightweis-Goff follows the edges of the southern continental U. S. to reinvestigate subjects left to the past’s margins. Lightweis-Goff meditates–and walks and rides and drives–along with individuals at once awash in and washed away by the ebbs and flows of sociocultural memory. Captive City is thus an antidisciplinary text. Such an assessment is not meant to suggest it is undisciplined–the care with which the author treats the subjects in the study is impeccable–but to advocate for it as a model for more imaginative intellectual writing and theory in an era in which categorizable work has a smoother path to wide readership. Rather than analyzing figures frozen in amber at a distance, Lightweis-Goff composes beside them. For instance, one prominent figure of contemplation, Dolly, escaped from domestic enslavement on the Manigault plantation near Charleston. Her story comes to us through a restrictive medium, fugitive slave advertisements, and yet she is brought back to life through Lightweis-Goff’s imaginative characterization of her as a mobile, cosmopolitan subject not conscribed to the edges of domestic servitude but immersed within the rural-urban binary on South Carolina’s coast. If visiting a plantation is akin to viewing a grave, meditating in a captive city often involves writing (and riding) with ghosts.
William C. Palmer is an Assistant Professor of English at Andrew College in Cuthbert, Georgia where he is the Faculty Coordinator for Spire Light: A Journal of Creative Expression. He spends many of his waking hours traversing Highway 82 with his partner and pets.
Matthew Seybold: Britt Paris, Radical Infrastructure: Imagining The Internet From The Ground Up (University of California Press, 2026); Sarah Brouillette, Content Machines: Reading and Writing in the Platform Era, (Duke University Press, 2026); Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide To Life After AI, (Verso, 2026).
If you don’t like it, just leave. If you frequently produce, or merely encounter, media criticism on the internet, you are familiar with this objection. It is the residue of a Chicago School imaginary: an illusion that when the market is free enough, the consumer becomes king. This is “zombie economics,” as John Quiggin memorably dubbed it, a theory of consumer power which it rendered incoherent by even the slightest interrogation, but which is nevertheless reliably reanimated every time users object to autocratic changes to the terms of service, privacy agreements, content moderation policies, functionalities, or ownership structures of their digital platforms. It was a constant refrain when Elon Musk purchased Twitter, whenever Meta disbands teams tasked with improving safety, Alphabet sunsets a popular Google product, and when frontier AI developers rewrote their mission statements under pressure from the federal government. Those who object are told to vote with their feet, with their attention, with their clicks, with their dollars. And if they lack either the self-control or the fiscal independence to cast such votes, well, whose fault is that, really? Maybe you should worry about you before you tell a hyperscaler what it should do.
On the one hand, this objection is absurd. The business model of hyperscaling is founded upon, and solely upon, the accumulation of market power and, eventually, monopoly (or at least oligopoly) status. On the other hand, in the last two years we have seen a surge of previously terminally online people doing exactly as they have been told: leaving platforms. Damn the consequences. Dumbphone sales were up 25% last year. Gen Z is ditching dating apps for the novel practice of standing around and gawking at each other. Engagement and growth metrics are down two years running on X, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and, yes, even TikTok. Tech-free classrooms are all the rage with faculty, and students are not only embracing the trend, but pushing their institutions towards more NeoLuddite policies like the “right to refuse” to use Generative AI and computing bans in select study spaces.
But as much as I welcome these trends, regard them as politically savvy, and participate in several of them myself, I tend to agree with my colleagues who argue that over the long run abstinence and abolition are not what we should agitate for, but rather for socialization of communications infrastructure, stricter regulation of algorithmic media, and labor control of the tools which are currently being described as “AI.” After all, there is no reason why social media aggregation must produce alienation and addiction. There is no reason why schools must divert ever larger portions of their budgets to software developers who simultaneously lobby for the defunding of public education. And there is no reason why universities cannot themselves develop and distribute learning management systems, large (or small) language models, and agentic tools on far more ethical and sustainable terms than Silicon Valley start-ups.
Three books I read this Summer I found enormously helpful for thinking through what digital media after the age of hyperscale might look like. Britt Paris’s Radical Infrastructure: Imagining The Internet From The Ground Up is, as the subtitle suggests, an alternate history that asks, among other things, for users to give up the aspiration for all platforms to be “frictionless” in exchange for greater functionality, customization, and/or security. Sarah Brouillette’s Content Machines: Reading and Writing in the Platform Era extensively catalogs the extractive and deteriorative impacts of platforms on literary fiction, but keeps always at the front of her narrative what draws creators to the technofeudal architectures of Audible, TikTok, and WattPad: their desire for sociality through decommodified culture. And, finally, Cory Doctorow’s The Reverse Centaur’s Guide To Life After AI argues, among other things, that intellectual property is an ineffectual basis upon which to burst the bubble and push back the tide of exploitative AI. Investors flocked to AI developers because of their (deceptive) promises to disempower organized labor, and organized labor power is the means by which those investors will be compelled to abandon this (just the most recent) dream of an automaton which frees capital from the labor theory of value. While, in order to make their arguments, all these books must narrate histories that may infuriate and depress readers, as is the case for every attempt to periodize our present, readers can also find in them emphasis on how things get built, on how collectives get organized, on how movements get started, and on how the decadent are defeated. Read them without despair. And, if you can afford to, read them in print. If not for the sake of the authors and the presses, then for the sake of your own privacy and neuroplasticity.
Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, resident scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Stuides, & host of The American Vandal Podcast. He thinks, as Mark Twain does, that banning books is usually self-defeating, but destructively scanning books is evil beyond words.
Asheesh Kapur Siddique: Amanda Anderson and Simon During, Humanities Theory, (Oxford University Press, 2025).
The book that I would like to recommend is Amanda Anderson and Simon During’s Humanities Theory. At a time of attack and disillusionment among humanists, this very short book offers a powerful set of provocations for thinking about what the humanities do in the university and in the world, and how our efforts to understand both meaning and value are immensely powerful both epistemically and socially. In particular, I want to highlight Anderson’s formulation of the powerful work that contemporary humanist critique does in the world, both in its “moral-anthropological” character (by posing the question of who is harmed in the world and how?) and its “anticipatory-utopian” element (by asking how this harm might be redressed and what a just future might look like).
Asheesh Kapur Siddique is associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the author of The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Conquest, and the Making of the Early Modern British World (Yale University Press, 2024).
Bekah Waalkes: Trevor Paglen’s How to See Like a Machine: Images after AI (Verso, 2026).
One of the best books I read this summer was Trevor Paglen’s How to See Like a Machine: Images after AI. Paglen is an acclaimed artist and writer, who began creating AI models in the 2010s, back when he thought the images generated by such models might become a button on Photoshop, nothing more. Now in 2026, he argues that the advent of generative AI has led to a revolution in visual culture itself. This revolution requires new theorization: Paglen moves away from “the concept of representation and toward the concept of activation. Instead of asking what these technologies say about the world, I want to ask what they do.” There will be no citation of Walter Benjamin in the essays of How to See Like a Machine, that staid companion to every grad school seminar discussion about technology. Instead, Paglen leans on his technological expertise and many historical examples as he demonstrates how computer vision—technologies designed not to mimic human perception but to automate and extract for profit —has remade human perception and cognition in its own image. One particular highlight of the book is ‘The Society of the Psy-Op,’ a chapter in three essays about manufactured hallucinations, including UFO psyops, the development of ELIZA (an early AI chatbot therapist), the MKULTRA project on ‘brain warfare’ (Allen Dulles’ charming term), and the CIA’s work with magician John Mulholland during the Cold War. As Flock cameras multiply across the US, as universities leap to incorporate AI into curriculum, as deepfakes influence users across the world, I recommend Paglen’s book to anyone curious about what the rise of generative AI means for our world, for our shared reality.
Bekah Waalkes is a postdoc at Boston College’s Institute for the Liberal Arts, where she researches contemporary literature, attention, and the novel. Outside of the world of books, her favorite pastime is cloud watching.