With characteristic brilliance, Rosemarie Buikema raises one of the most fundamental questions of our time: What to do with “old stuff”? That is, through what methods, means, and measures can humanity transition away from the violence of coloniality to just and equitable relations. A book about a political "not yet here" that has nevertheless already materialized in practices of imagination, Revolts in Cultural Critique offers a deeply compelling treatment of the capacity of form to work through complex and haunting pasts.

Frances Negrón-Muntaner, professor of English and comparative literature, Columbia University

In Revolts in Cultural Critique Rosemarie Buikema examines both a main argumentation and detailed case studies concerning the ways in which contemporary literature and art revisit history and revolt against its multiple modes of violence. These cultural critical expressions seek to make the as yet unformed and unseen, visible and thus, open for discussion, and for imagining a different future. Revolt as method and as theme. She focuses on multi-layered interaction between message and medium, materiality and form, that enacts revolt as a process of resistance against clear-cut truths. The revolt that she unpacks for all of us who crave insights into what art can be and do, encompasses a poetics of recycling, an unfolding of folds, and an inquiry into how matter matters, how forms morph, and how time leaps out of its classically assumed linearity. The art discussed demands an active involvement in the erasure and reconstruction of the violated world.

Mieke Bal, Professor Emerita in Literary Theory, University of Amsterdam

Rosemarie Buikema’s Revolts in Cultural Critique recharges hope in troubled times. The book explores in bold and innovative ways how cultural forms themselves can embody and unlock the forces of resistance. A series of vivid readings ranging from Woolf and Couperus to Kentridge and #RhodesMustFall, demonstrate that politics conjoined with critique can set change in motion. This is a crucial, innovative and often moving account of the necessity of the arts, theatre, and writing for political renewal—more so now than ever.

Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English, University of Oxford