LAUSR

Response to Kyla Wazana Tompkins, “On the Limits and Promise of New Materialist Philosophy,” published in Lateral 5.1. Shomura mediates upon the promise and possibilities that new materialisms affords in its attentiveness to the material. In “On the Limits and Promise of New Materialist Philosophy,” Kyla Tompkins provides a ne critical overview of the still-emerging new materialism and its relation to established elds. Through feminist, queer, and critical race theory, Tompkins offers correctives to new materialism that are especially important for those who share my background in political theory. Prominent strands of new materialism have been pioneered by political theorists such as Jane Bennett, William Connolly, Diana Coole, and Samantha Frost; Kathy Ferguson, Anatoli Ignatov, and Sharon Krause have also offered compelling engagements. One may gain much from these rich accounts of matter and materiality yet remain uneasy over their turn away from if not marginalization of race, sexuality, and gender. When political theory learns more from feminist, queer, and critical race theory, its insights into new materialism may productively in ect the nature and conduct of cultural and American studies. In what follows, I draw upon such insights to extend Tompkins’s account and to identify several other promising directions for new materialist studies. “New Materialism” is an umbrella term for a broad range of scholarship that attends to matter as a key component of events, lives, and worlds. New materialists examine the materiality of humans and nonhumans alike. Oftentimes, they excavate bits of liveliness from what might seem to be most inert: rocks, machines, dead bodies . . . The generative force of matter is less an intrinsic property than a situated capacity. New materialists are thus fond of concepts like assemblage and ecology. They share a number of other common beliefs: the human is merely one form of being amongst others; no being necessarily bears more value than another; causality is not mechanistic but emergent; agency is slippery and distributed; and power slides across various spatiotemporal scales, from planetary and even cosmic terrains to the teeniest nooks and crannies of ordinary life. New materialisms have been particularly helpful in addressing the crises instigated or intensi ed by anthropogenic climate change. Many hold that the parsing of life and matter throughout majoritarian Western thought has enabled the human to catalyze the ecological disasters of capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism. New materialisms reject fantasies of human mastery and af rm the entanglement of humans with nonhuman animals, vegetables, and minerals. They emphasize that, as artist and poet Jess X. Chen puts it, what we do to the earth is what we do to ourselves. New materialisms aid in the expansion of care and concern beyond the human as well. 1