Greetings,
On behalf of the Editorial Team of Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory, I am writing to direct your attention to the new blog that we have just launched on the journal’s website. We have called the blog In the Midst in an effort to convey the difficulties of writing during critical times, and to register the importance of writing from within concrete, unfolding situations, of staying with the troubles of the moment, of thinking from particular grounds, and of allowing for responsive, experimental, and tentative interventions. Published online alongside the journal’s issues, the blog will allow us to respond to world events in a more immediate way than is possible through the journal’s longer editorial and production processes. We launch In the Midst during the time of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. These are distressing times of devastation and loss. But these are also times of reflection on the state of the unequal world that this pandemic has brought to sharper relief, intervened in, and interrupted. Like the journal, In the Midst will feature reflections and interventions from different parts of the world in an effort to develop critical vocabularies for understanding our present and possible futures.
Three texts are now featured on In the Midst. The first, “Covidian Catastrophes,” by Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip, is a meditation on surviving catastrophes, thinking through and with the catastrophe of slavery to apprehend the challenge of COVID-19. The second text, by Osama Tanous, a Palestinian pediatrician, reflects on Israeli settler-colonial politics of erasure in the time of the coronavirus. And the third text is by Robin Celikates, a member of Critical Times’ Editorial Team, and discusses borders in times of pandemic and the tasks of critical theory.
We hope that you will visit our blog and will help us to direct readers to it. To stay apprised of new posts to the blog, please visit and “like” the Facebook pages of Critical Times and the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs.
In Solidarity,
Samera Esmeir
Senior Editor, Critical Times