Dread

David Theo Goldberg is Director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute.

“In this compelling new book, Goldberg brilliantly shows that the technologies we now require to live are depriving us of the social lives required for survival. This searing impasse is at once revealed and countered in this incisive book.”Judith Butler, author of The Force of Nonviolence“Incisive, well informed, and theoretically rich, this most illuminating critique of our present enriches, stretches, and challenges our understanding of our potential futures.”Achille Mbembe, author of Necropolitics“Dread is a profoundly insightful book and a fantastic read too.”Sebastian Liao, director of the Institute for Advanced Study at National Taiwan University“Dread covers a complex mélange of affective, intellectual, political, and cultural terror made digestible through select case studies. I thank him for his labours.”Matthew Hughey, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power“Traversing political economy, public health, the tech industry and the environment in its focus of study, and deploying conceptual repertoires from across the human and social sciences in its analytical range, this challenging intervention does not lack ambition. Nor indeed, and despite its subtitle, Facing Futureless Futures, does it lack faith in our ability to forge strategies that might help us to ‘De-Dread’.”Nasar Meer, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power“In this elegant presentation, David Theo Goldberg takes on the ‘dread’ that has become palpable globally in the second decade of the twenty-first century… What Goldberg shows through a range of examples is how those who are marginalized live in terror of being somehow extinguished, those who are relatively within the mainstream (at least economically) become aware of the precarity of their assimilation, and, more suggestively, those who might see themselves as the majority or the norm are not spared either.”Anjali Prabhu, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power

• Preface 1. A World of Dread2. Sensing Dread3. Dread’s Operating System4. Tracking-Capitalism: The Political Economy of Dread5. Viral Dread6. Ecoforming Dread7. Civil War8. De-DreadingReferences