Bradley J. Macdonald – författare

Interdisciplinary essays on the role of high theory in politics and popular culture.Interdisciplinary in scope and often provocative in their choice of materials, the essays in this volume present new strategies for theorizing culture and politics. Not content simply to "apply" theory to political and cultural objects, they instead treat all three as complex, interconnected, and constantly evolving areas of inquiry. Drawn from the innovative work originally published in Strategies: Journal of Theory, Culture and Politics, the essays collected here explore a variety of topics, ranging from considerations of Marx, Foucault, Jameson, and Rorty to investigations of Madonna, Pasolini, pornography, and vampires. Lively and inventive, Strategies for Theory goes beyond conventional cultural studies and cultural politics in order to suggest new approaches to both.Contributors include Teresa Brennan, William Chaloupka, Iain Chambers, Kelly Dennis, Ernesto Laclau, John P. Leavey Jr., Bradley J. Macdonald, Marilyn Manners, Donald Preziosi, Kriss Ravetto, Laurence A. Rickels, R. L. Rutsky, Michael Ryan, Keith Topper, Gregory L. Ulmer, and Samuel Weber.

Draws upon Marx, Western Marxism, and poststructuralist theory to constructively engage contemporary issues.Performing Marx looks at what it means to be a Marxist dealing with contemporary political and theoretical developments in the twenty-first century. Drawing upon Marx's work, Western Marxism, and poststructuralist theory, Bradley J. Macdonald explores how a living tradition of Marx's ideas can constructively engage a politics of desire and pleasure, ecological sustainability, a politics of everyday life that takes seriously popular culture, and the nature of globalization and of the radical forces being arrayed against the logics of global capitalism. By engaging such crucial issues, Macdonald also provides important clarifications of the work of William Morris, Guy Debord and the situationists, Michel Foucault, Antonio Negri, Ernesto Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe, as they relate to Marx.

While William Morris (1834-1896) is generally considered one of the most important cultural and political figures of late Victorian England, there is avid disagreement on the way in which we can understand the interconnections between his aesthetic commitments (as a celebrated poet and decorative artist influenced by Pre-Raphaelitism and Aestheticism) and his later revolutionary socialist advocacy. As opposed to dominant interpretations within Morris scholarship, Bradley J. Macdonald argues for the importance of understanding the role a “critical notion of beauty” had in moving Morris toward a theory of socialism that took seriously the way in which desire, pleasure, and “beauty” (as applied to all externals of human life, not just art works) could be regenerated only through radical transformations in socioeconomic life. Consequently , William Morris's development represents an interesting example of cultural politics. Given this genealogy, Macdonald clarifies, Morris’s mature political theory incorporated a very important commitment to not just economic justice, but also, among other distinctive applications ; ecological sustainability, making him one of the first eco-socialist theorists within the Western tradition, and also an early proponent of what is today known as “degrowth communism.”

Interdisciplinary essays on the role of high theory in politics and popular culture.Interdisciplinary in scope and often provocative in their choice of materials, the essays in this volume present new strategies for theorizing culture and politics. Not content simply to "apply" theory to political and cultural objects, they instead treat all three as complex, interconnected, and constantly evolving areas of inquiry. Drawn from the innovative work originally published in Strategies: Journal of Theory, Culture and Politics, the essays collected here explore a variety of topics, ranging from considerations of Marx, Foucault, Jameson, and Rorty to investigations of Madonna, Pasolini, pornography, and vampires. Lively and inventive, Strategies for Theory goes beyond conventional cultural studies and cultural politics in order to suggest new approaches to both.Contributors include Teresa Brennan, William Chaloupka, Iain Chambers, Kelly Dennis, Ernesto Laclau, John P. Leavey Jr., Bradley J. Macdonald, Marilyn Manners, Donald Preziosi, Kriss Ravetto, Laurence A. Rickels, R. L. Rutsky, Michael Ryan, Keith Topper, Gregory L. Ulmer, and Samuel Weber.