Back Issues: Periodicals and the Formation of Critical and Cultural Theory in Canada [Hardcover]

Using independent critical and cultural theory journals that cross the Canada/US border as key examples, this book shows how to interpret the original practices of periodicals by tracing editorial diasporas and transitions to electronic publishing.

Back Issues explains the role of independent theory journals in the institutional formation of critical theory and cultural studies in Canada and the US by focusing on two seminal publications, Paul Piccones Telos and Arthur Krokers Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory. Editorial transits across the international border figure largely, as do founding conferences, interpersonal flare-ups, and the conviviality of academic communities and pre-gentrified urban bohemias. Both commensurable and incommensurable relationships between journal projects are analysed, and a hitherto unwritten history of critical and cultural theory in Canada is broached.

Back Issues brings to light a fascinating, if forgotten, history of the development of critical theory. Genosko and Marcellus do a marvelous job tracing out the lines of transversal communication and collaboration, from Toronto to New York, that underpin and make possible important shifts in media and cultural theory. Stevphen Shukaitis, co-director University of Essex Centre for Commons Organising, Values Equalities and Resilience

Genoskos witty and engaging account of the lives of critical and cultural theory journals, institutions, events and practitioners addresses an important and largely unexamined dimension of intellectual history. Its fine-grained analysis of the multiple forces at play in these periodicals is an exemplary study in Guattaris transversality that will interest readers across a number of disciplines. An essential contribution. Ronald Bogue, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, University oflóç