Critical Inquiry

"The voice of an orator, or documentarian, enlists and reveals desires, lacks, and longings. It charts a path through the stuff of the world that gives body to dreams and substance to principles. Speaking, giving voice to a view of the world, makes possible the necessary conditions of visibility to see things anew, to see, as if for the first time, what had, until now, escaped notice."

From our Autumn 2008 issue, read Bill Nichols's "Documentary Reenactment and the Fantasmatic Subject": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/595629

Happy Birthday, Thomas Pynchon!

"For Lee, parascience is not just a cultural curiosity but a Foucauldian counter-discourse that 'produces new types of knowledge.' In this counter-discourse, discredited hypotheses of Western science are picked up by science fiction, which Lee argues serves as a primary parascientific laboratory."

New in review, Wolfgang Boehm reviews Derek Lee's Parascientific Revolutions: https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/wolfgang_boehm_reviews_parascientific_revolutions/

Summer cover. Issue is coming soon . . . .

"The focus of Wright's stories is on the difficult everyday ethical choices that blacks faced under Jim Crow. Yet the wrong choice was often made, he implies, because blacks had been socialized into a culture of docility. The disposition to submit to injustice is difficult to overcome, and resisting the urge to acquiesce does not always come naturally to the oppressed."

From our Spring 2012 issue, read Tommie Shelby's "The Ethics of Uncle Tom's Children": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/664549

"The Palestinian theater, as Al-Saber presents it, is marked by its distinct method of participatory aesthetics, the juxtaposition of explicit debate and abstract stylization, and a wide, sometimes untraversable gap between a legible story and its theatricalization onstage."

New in review, Marissa Fenley on Samer Al-Saber's A Movement’s Promise: https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/marissa_fenley_reviews_a_movements_promise/

Take hold of your own issue. Subscribe to CI for just over $50 a year.

Journal subscriptions for Critical Inquiry from the University of Chicago Press website. Journal subscriptions for Critical Inquiry from the University of Chicago Press website.

"As early scholars of biometrics stressed, absolute identification was a key to both inclusion and exclusion; comparing one body to others required the creation of biometric databases, themselves based on a mathematization of the body. "

From our Summer 2015 issue, read Nitzan Lebovic's "Biometrics, or The Power of the Radical Center": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/681788

"Colossal’s projects bring to the fore a curious phenomenon of the social world and the contemporary social imaginary of science." Read Veronika Reichert's "De-Extinction, Scientific Enchantment, and Technosalvation" on the CI blog.

De-Extinction, Scientific Enchantment, and Technosalvation: An Interpretation of the Projects of Colossal Biosciences Veronika Reichert In April of 2025, Colossal Biosciences released news that they had produced “woolly mice,” a step in their plan to produce a genetically modified elephant that—in their vision—wou…

"Drawing on political theory, international relations, Indigenous philosophies, and environmental law, Burke and Fishel move fluidly between histories of Westphalian sovereignty and proposals for planetary-scale institutions capable of protecting the biosphere as a subject of law."

New in review, Dipra Sarkhel and Dibyendu Sahana review Anthony Burke and Stefanie Fishel's The Ecology Politic: https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/dipra_sarkhel_and_dibyendu_sahana_review_the_ecology_politic/