Bruce Robbins
Biographic Data
| ID | 3629972 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bruce Robbins |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bruce |
| FAMILY NAME | Robbins |
| SIGNATURE | ROBBINS B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Columbia University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 77 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 122 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 75 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1982 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Protest and Privilege at Columbia
This article reports on the situation at Columbia University following the university administration's much-discussed capitulation to the Republican Party's demands that it crack down on pro-Palestinian protesters. The article argues that despite superficial signs of incoherence, the administration's response makes sense in terms of the ideological and financial investments of the university's board of trustees; thus, the capitulation is more acc…
Only Noticed When It Fails
Asked to observe the state in action (Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins has used this assignment in a course on the anthropology of the state), students may well object that they don't have a car. The assumption seems to be that in order to encounter the state you have to travel some distance, maybe as far as Washington, DC, maybe only as far as the local bureau of motor vehicles. In other words, they don't think of the state as already there, enmeshe…
The Shame of the Educated
Report from Columbia
“This Wave Feels Like a Tsunami”: The Political Responses of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” to Anti-Drag Legislation in the United States
This article will consider the ways in which season 15 of Drag Race has creatively responded to anti-drag legislation.References to current legal developments appeared throughout the season, such as in "werk room" scenes where the queens debunked myths about the role of drag in educational contexts, a teacher's makeover challenge where they discuss the importance of having queer figures in the classroom or the season finale's fundraising drive fo…
Atheism in the Grand Scheme of Things
Detox, Binge, Filter, Ghost
According to its final sentence, what this book wants to do is to taxonomize “some of the ways people live now” (258). The modesty of this self-description—mere taxonomy, nothing more; mere surface, no depth—does not seem entirely convincing. The book has an argument. It argues that each of the four styles of living it taxonomizes—their names are “detox,” “binge,” “filter,” and “ghost”—is, in effect, racist. “[W]hiteness becomes a proxy for contr…
Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction
The Possibility of Progress: An Interview with Bruce Robbins
In this wide-ranging interview, Bruce Robbins reflects on themes that have long been at the center of his work, including cosmopolitanism, the political functions of literature and of literary criticism, narratives, progress, feelings, morals, class politics in general and “middle-class politics” in particular, solidarity, anti-statism, how to measure a scholarly career, and more
Stuart Hall, a peerless mediator
The authors discuss Stuart Hall's lifelong critical engagement with Marxism - though his was a complex, subtle, agonistic, Marxism, where nothing is taken for granted. This engagement continued even as postcoloniality, ethnicity, race and identity steadily came to the centre of Hall's attention, constituting ways of thinking that in some ways represented a departure. Hall can be seen as a mediator, both within Marxism - for example structuralism …
The 1960s, Always
Was there an ethical turn in literary studies? No. Ethics did not have to return; it had never gone away. So-called post-structuralism always had an ethical dimension, however unacknowledged. So-called post-humanism, which condemns human mistreatment of the nonhuman world by unarticulated ethical standards that the nonhuman world could not possibly articulate or apply to itself, is only the latest instance of a rule that holds as much for the ant…
Thinking with Balibar: A Lexicon of Conceptual Practice
George Orwell, Cosmopolitanism, and Global Justice
Anthropological
Cosmopolitanisms
Cosmopolitanism is less an ideal than a description. It merely assumes that wherever and whenever history has set peoples in motion across national boundaries, sometimes by force, many of them and their descendants will show signs of divided loyalties and a hybrid identity. Cosmopolitanism should no longer be conceived as singular—an overrriding loyalty to humanity as a whole—but plural. Instead of an unhealthily skinny ethical abstraction, we no…
F iona P aisley and P amela S cully . Writing Transnational History ; R oland W enzlhuemer . Doing Global History: An Introduction in 6 Concepts
When historians try to go beyond the nation, as many have in recent decades, what difference does it make to the history they write? What difference should it make? These two Bloomsbury introductions—Writing Transnational History, by Fiona Paisley and Pamela Scully, and Doing Global History: An Introduction in 6 Concepts, by Roland Wenzlhuemer—offer a welcome opportunity to inquire. To judge from the Paisley and Scully volume, the exemplary trans…
Class, Culture, and Killing
In the final volume of a trilogy about the concept of culture and its relation to politics, Francis Mulhern defines a new genre, the condition of culture novel, and traces it from Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and E. M. Forster’s Howards End to Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, reading off from it middleclass anxieties about the rise of the working-class movement. What does it mean about the novel or about the workin…
A Little Muzhik, Muttering to Himself
The night before her suicide, Anna Karenina has a strange nightmare about a muzhik, or former serf, who speaks French and is doing something with a piece of iron. Given the place of class in the novel, if mainly on the Levin side rather than the Anna side, critics of Tolstoy have said less than might have been expected about the simple fact that this is a wealthy woman dreaming uneasily about a poor man. This essay attempts an interpretation of t…
Single? Great? Collective
Fredric Jameson's latest book, Allegory and Ideology (2019), returns to the provocative proposition that he floated in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981): that humankind's cultural past is only available to us today if we believe that "the human adventure is one"-a series of efforts to wrest a realm of freedom from the realm of necessity. This essay examines the new book for evidence of possible fluctuations in…
No-Fault Murder
What world history does world literature need
The new world literature, which has shifted away from the field's old centre in Europe and therefore also away from its old origin in classical Greece, has done so in large part because of its sensitivity to its own historical context, which is of course postcolonial. The case for literary autonomy that underlies Beecroft's ambitious and indeed unrivalled synthesis has its true centre in the nation-state. It seems worth generalising this logic to…
Beneficiary
Live Fire: On Ron Haviv's The Lost Rolls
War photography, a pervasive aspect of the militarization of everyday life, seems to work on the commonsensical premise that the world needs to know in order to be able to make proper decisions, in order to act. But what happens when war photographs age, when the events they recorded have faded into the past, when the photographs themselves can no longer count as moral or political interventions? Is this what Walter Benjamin meant by the aestheti…
Prolegomena to a Cosmopolitanism in Deep Time
When Assia Djebar ([1985] 1993) recounted the nineteenth-century French conquest of Algeria, was she obliged to recognize the earlier conquest of the Algerian Arabs by the Ottomans? Are we sure that this should not also count as colonialism? Was Djebar obliged, going even further back, to recognize the conquest by the Arabs of the Berbers? Would not this too have to be called an imperial conquest? The moment seems to have come when such awkward d…
An Interview with Orhan Pamuk
In this interview, conducted at Columbia University in the fall of 2013, Turkish Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk discusses the trajectory of his own novels, what has and has not changed in the genre's social aspirations and challenges, its characteristic topics and settings, its distinct forms of competition with journalism, on the one hand, and television, on the other. He comments on his relation as a writer to Western postmodernism and the conc…
The Smell of Infrastructure: Notes toward an Archive
Research Article| February 01 2007 The Smell of Infrastructure: Notes toward an Archive Bruce Robbins Bruce Robbins Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google boundary 2 (2007) 34 (1): 25–33. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-2006-025 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Bruce Robbins; The Smell of Infrastructure: Notes toward an Archive. boundary 2 1 February 2007; 34 (1)…
Comparative Cosmopolitanism
Is the Postcolonial Also Postsecular
Early postcolonial critics were at worst ambivalent about secularism, and more likely either uninterested or, like Edward Said, extremely enthusiastic. What is the meaning of the recent turn against secularism by critics in and around the field Said did so much to establish? This essay weighs both Said's militant commitment, finding it more complex than it appears, and the critiques of Said and secularism by such figures as Talal Asad and Gil Ani…
Cosmopolitanism: New and Newer
Research Article| August 01 2007 Cosmopolitanism: New and Newer Bruce Robbins Bruce Robbins Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google boundary 2 (2007) 34 (3): 47–60. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-2007-014 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Bruce Robbins; Cosmopolitanism: New and Newer. boundary 2 1 August 2007; 34 (3): 47–60. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-…
Reflections on Culture and Cultural Rights
Research Article| July 01 2004 Reflections on Culture and Cultural Rights Bruce Robbins; Bruce Robbins Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Elsa Stamatopoulou Elsa Stamatopoulou Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (2004) 103 (2-3): 419–434. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-103-2-3-419 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citati…
Some Versions of U. S. Internationalism
Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism: A Symposium
Between the appearance of Orientalism in 1978 and Culture and Imperialism in the spring of 1993, there have been some interesting and paradoxical years. Edward Said has done a great deal of political writing about the Palestinians and American foreign policy, and he has become a public figure in a sense that would apply to very few literary critics, however respected. But he has not had the sort of public influence he desired. American policy tow…
Sad Stories in the International Public Sphere: Richard Rorty on Culture and Human Rights
Research Article| May 01 1997 Sad Stories in the International Public Sphere: Richard Rorty on Culture and Human Rights Bruce Robbins Bruce Robbins Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1997) 9 (2): 209–232. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9-2-209 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Bruce Robbins; Sad Stories in the International Public Sphere: Ric…
Secularism, Elitism, Progress, and Other Transgressions: "On Edward Said's "Voyage in
Presentism, Pastism, Professionalism
I T SHOULD COME AS NO SURPRISE, and probably doesn’t, that cultural studies and Victorian studies have much in common. As George Levine observes in his overview of the earlier field over the past quarter century, “the founding of [the journal] Victorian Studies, in 1957 . . . was almost exactly contemporary with the publication of Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society, one of the most influential books of the last half century” (136). 1 Williams…
Althusser's Object
L'A. defend la these selon laquelle les cinq moments de la rupture epistemologique decrite par Althusser n'echappent pas au domaine de la philosophie pour s'inscrire dans celui de la politique (communisme); au contraire, ils definissent l'objet philosophique propre a Althusser, dont l'elaboration se manifeste de facon dialectique, afin de parvenir au renversement du platonisme et atteindre le monde reel de la politique et de l'histoire
Single? Great? Collective
Fredric Jameson's latest book, Allegory and Ideology (2019), returns to the provocative proposition that he floated in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981): that humankind's cultural past is only available to us today if we believe that "the human adventure is one"-a series of efforts to wrest a realm of freedom from the realm of necessity. This essay examines the new book for evidence of possible fluctuations in…
No-Fault Murder
Temporizing: Time and Politics in the Humanities and Human Rights
Research Article| February 01 2005 Temporizing: Time and Politics in the Humanities and Human Rights Bruce Robbins Bruce Robbins Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google boundary 2 (2005) 32 (1): 191–208. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-32-1-191 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Bruce Robbins; Temporizing: Time and Politics in the Humanities and Human Rights. bounda…
Head Fake: Mentorship and Mobility in Hoop Dreams
Toward the end of the documentary Hoop Dreams (1994), Coach PingaBruce Robbins tore of St. Joseph's pronounces judgment on William Gates's high school basketball career, which has just ended. He tells the camera that William has had good career, not a great career. Since Coach Pingatore is something like the film's villain-its most visible representative of the systematic exploitation of young black athletes, and its most enthusiastic spokesman f…
The Politics of Theory
Any title of form the of suggests that we already know what is and are about to find out how x measures up against it. Politics serves as a yardstick, an undeviating standard. It does all questioning but does not itself get questioned. This is a position of power, and it has been abused. If titles like the of circulate widely and yet are often received with a certain quiet disappointment, it's because they make large and promising commitments whi…
A Little Muzhik, Muttering to Himself
The night before her suicide, Anna Karenina has a strange nightmare about a muzhik, or former serf, who speaks French and is doing something with a piece of iron. Given the place of class in the novel, if mainly on the Levin side rather than the Anna side, critics of Tolstoy have said less than might have been expected about the simple fact that this is a wealthy woman dreaming uneasily about a poor man. This essay attempts an interpretation of t…
Part 1: Why I Am Not a Postsecularist
The post in postsecular assumes the prior existence of secularism as a dominant social sensibility that can and should be superseded. Taking as its point of departure the fact that, for better or worse, secularism has never enjoyed such a hegemonic status in the United States, where supernatural beings are routinely assumed to intervene in earthly events, this essay rejects the term and asks how the scholarly community has come to see it as plaus…
Victorian Cosmopolitanism, Interrupted
Readers of Middlemarch (1871–1872) will remember the moment when Brooke's bid to win a seat in Parliament abruptly ends, in the middle of the Reform Bill campaign and in the middle of a speech. He tells the crowd how happy he is to be there. He tells the crowd he is a “close neighbor” of theirs. Then he says the following: “I've always gone a good deal into public questions – machinery, now, and machine-breaking – you're many of you concerned wit…
Chomsky's Golden Rule: Comparison and Cosmopolitanism
Noam Chomsky's rhetoric is emphatically cosmopolitan: written as if for instant translation with an absolute minimum of the vocal markers of location or nationality. Nevertheless it is a rhetoric, and its signature device is national comparison-more precisely, the comparison built as an imperative into the Golden Rule: that the United States should do unto other countries as it would have them do unto it. While appreciative of this point, this es…
Intellectuals in Decline? Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe
American Intellectuals and Middle East Politics: An Interview with Edward W. Said
ES: The scale of resistance is what is particularly impressive and new. There have been up to 3500 to 4000 recorded incidents a year in the last 5 years, that is since 1982. And certainly the level of Israeli reprisals and punishments and repressions has been fairly high all through. For example in October 5 or 6 people were killed in Gaza. That's not considered part of this particular round, which is supposed to have begun on the 9th of December…
Feeling Global: Experience and John Berger
Much of John Berger's writing in the past decade has had to do with peasants. What Berger calls experience is the explicit subject of the short fictions of Pig Earth (1979); it is the point of departure and social counterweight of his essay on European migrant workers, A Seventh Man (1975); it provides the privileged field of instances drawn upon by the art criticism of About Looking (1980) and the recent unclassifiable volume of and about photog…
Homelessness and Worldliness
The Butler Did it: On Agency in the Novel
Research Article| April 01 1984 The Butler Did it: On Agency in the Novel Bruce Robbins Bruce Robbins Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Representations (1984) 6: 85–97. https://doi.org/10.2307/2928539 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Bruce Robbin…
Deformed Professions, Empty Politics
In French, which is where it comes from, the phrase is a mild witticism. The French term for professional or vocational training is formation professionnelle, and an echo of formation is thus heard in dcformation. This auditory similitude hints that deformation professionnelle may not after all be a perversion, excess, or displacement of professionalism, but what happens to everyone as she or he is formed by professional training and experience- …
The Politics of Theory
Any title of form the of suggests that we already know what is and are about to find out how x measures up against it. Politics serves as a yardstick, an undeviating standard. It does all questioning but does not itself get questioned. This is a position of power, and it has been abused. If titles like the of circulate widely and yet are often received with a certain quiet disappointment, it's because they make large and promising commitments whi…
Men in Feminism
Other| May 01 1988 Men in Feminism Bruce Robbins Bruce Robbins Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Camera Obscura (1988) 6 (2 (17)): 206–214. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-6-2_17-206 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Bruce Robbins; Men in Feminism. Camera Obscura 1 May 1988; 6 (2 (17)): 206–214. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-6-2_17-206 Download citation file: Zotero Referenc…
The History of Literary Theory: Starting Over
Bruce Robbins, The History of Literary Theory: Starting Over, Poetics Today, Vol. 9, No. 4, Episodes in the History of Criticism and Theory: Papers from the Fourth Annual Meeting of the GRIP Project (1988), pp. 767-781
American Intellectuals and Middle East Politics: An Interview with Edward W. Said
ES: The scale of resistance is what is particularly impressive and new. There have been up to 3500 to 4000 recorded incidents a year in the last 5 years, that is since 1982. And certainly the level of Israeli reprisals and punishments and repressions has been fairly high all through. For example in October 5 or 6 people were killed in Gaza. That's not considered part of this particular round, which is supposed to have begun on the 9th of December…
Intellectuals in Decline? Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe
Interdisciplinarity in Public: The Rhetoric of Rhetoric
In Trial of (1988), late I.F. Stone addressed a chapter Socrates and Rhetoric. Speaking on behalf of Athenian public, he took sides against and for rhetoric. Rhetoric, he said, was a skill enabling citizens to protect their interests in assembly and in law courts (90), hence an essential tool of Athenian democracy, and that was what anti-democratic most mistrusted about it. The unspoken premise of Socratic assault on oratory was disdain for commo…
Tenured Radicals, the New McCarthyism and 'PC
‘Watch What You Say,’ warned the cover of Newsweek in December of last year. ‘There’s a “Politically Correct” Way to Talk About Race, Sex, and Ideas. Is This the New Enlightenment—or the New McCarthyism?’ Answering this question in a blurb for Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education (1991), the latest
Two Days before the War
Research Article| May 01 1991 Two Days before the War Bruce Robbins Bruce Robbins Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1991) 3 (2): 120–121. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-3-2-120 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Bruce Robbins; Two Days before the War. Public Culture 1 May 1991; 3 (2): 120–121. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-3-2-120 Dow…
Comparative Cosmopolitanism
Self-Interest and Vocation
Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism: A Symposium
Between the appearance of Orientalism in 1978 and Culture and Imperialism in the spring of 1993, there have been some interesting and paradoxical years. Edward Said has done a great deal of political writing about the Palestinians and American foreign policy, and he has become a public figure in a sense that would apply to very few literary critics, however respected. But he has not had the sort of public influence he desired. American policy tow…
Althusser's Object
L'A. defend la these selon laquelle les cinq moments de la rupture epistemologique decrite par Althusser n'echappent pas au domaine de la philosophie pour s'inscrire dans celui de la politique (communisme); au contraire, ils definissent l'objet philosophique propre a Althusser, dont l'elaboration se manifeste de facon dialectique, afin de parvenir au renversement du platonisme et atteindre le monde reel de la politique et de l'histoire
Secularism, Elitism, Progress, and Other Transgressions: "On Edward Said's "Voyage in
The seduction of the unexpected: On imperialism and history
Some Versions of U. S. Internationalism
The Weird Heights: On Cosmopolitanism, Feeling, and Power
Research Article| April 01 1995 The Weird Heights: On Cosmopolitanism, Feeling, and Power Bruce Robbins Bruce Robbins bruce robbins teaches in the English department of Rutgers University. He is the author of Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (1993) and the editor of The Phantom Public Sphere (1993) and Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics (1990). The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from Below was reissued in pa…
Murder and Mentorship: Advancement in The Silence of the Lambs
Lecter does not suggest that Agent Starling has no more conventional desires for Valentine's Day, but others have suggested it, especially viewers of Jonathan Demme's 1991 film version. In adapting The Silence of the Lambs for the screen, Demme dramatically omitted the novel's gestures, however brief and unconvincing, in the direction of a normal loveinterest. He took out the token boyfriend Starling acquires in the final pages
Cosmopolitanism and Boredom
Theory & Event - Volume 1, Issue 2, 1997
Just Doing Your Job: Some Lessons of the Sokal Affair
Just Doing Your Job: Some Lessons of the Sokal Affair Bruce Robbins (bio) The December 3, 1996 issue of the French left-wing newspaper Libération contains a full-page article, plus photograph and interview, devoted to Alan Sokal’s hoax in Social Text and the media coverage that has followed. The article begins like this: “‘Does reality exist?’ It’s difficult to believe, but for the past six months, the American intellectual left has been gorging …
Head Fake: Mentorship and Mobility in Hoop Dreams
Toward the end of the documentary Hoop Dreams (1994), Coach PingaBruce Robbins tore of St. Joseph's pronounces judgment on William Gates's high school basketball career, which has just ended. He tells the camera that William has had good career, not a great career. Since Coach Pingatore is something like the film's villain-its most visible representative of the systematic exploitation of young black athletes, and its most enthusiastic spokesman f…
Sad Stories in the International Public Sphere: Richard Rorty on Culture and Human Rights
Research Article| May 01 1997 Sad Stories in the International Public Sphere: Richard Rorty on Culture and Human Rights Bruce Robbins Bruce Robbins Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1997) 9 (2): 209–232. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9-2-209 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Bruce Robbins; Sad Stories in the International Public Sphere: Ric…
Sociology (44 works) · Political science (40 works) · Law (37 works) · Philosophy (37 works) · History (29 works) · Art (28 works) · Politics (26 works) · Epistemology (22 works) · Literature (18 works) · Aesthetics (17 works)