Frank Herbert's influential science fiction novel Dune (1965) is usually understood as a prescient work of environmentalism. Yet it is also concerned with empire, and not merely in an abstract way. Herbert worked in politics with the men who oversaw the United States’ overseas territories, and he took an unusually strong interest in Indigenous communities in the Pacific Northwest, particularly the Quileute Nation. Conversations with Quileute interlocutors both inspired Dune and help explain Herbert's turn toward environmentalism. This article recovers the neglected imperial context for Herbert's writing, reinterpreting Dune in light of that context.

The aftermath of the 1992 Rodney King crisis in Los Angeles produced a flurry of debate regarding urban social policy in America that has gone unexamined by scholars. This article suggests that by exploring grassroots activists and their proposals for how the city should be rebuilt, we can gain valuable insight into the role of racialized space in motivating protest. It therefore considers a case study of the Tourism Industry Development Council (TIDC), a largely unknown coalition of some of LA's most dynamic activists, created in an attempt to reform the city's tourism policies. By examining a series of bus tours hosted by the TIDC in 1994 and 1996, this article argues that in addition to trying to establish equitable and inclusive economic development in low-income communities of colour, these activists were also reimagining the meanings and uses of urban space. In creating these tours, organizers utilized a “spatial imaginary” to challenge the ideological underpinnings of urban redevelopment and reconceptualized how social justice could be achieved through the remaking of urban spaces in ways which would have important implications for the future of protest and resistance in modern Los Angeles.

The article studies African American narratives of indigenous captivity from its emergence in the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth. Taking accounts by Briton Hammon, John Marrant, Henry Bibb, and James Beckwourth as examples, the essay charts the development of this body of writings, its distinction from white-authored narratives, and its contribution to North American autobiography. In so doing, the article argues that the black-authored texts strategically employed only certain elements of the Indian captivity narrative and that they blended these with aspects of other types of Western autobiography to claim black people's agency and discursive authority in white-dominated print culture.

This article examines the role of “gifts” and “giftedness” in two recent novels about Occupy Wall Street, Barbara Browning's The Gift and Caleb Crain's Overthrow. Together these novels explore how projects designed to offset the effects of neoliberal individualism very often end up replicating, rather than disrupting, aspects of capitalist exchange: the authors temper their own utopian impulses by interrogating the factors which prevent systemic change, such as individual complacency and governmental intervention. The article considers the cycle of gift giving launched by Browning's narrator, a project which falters because her understanding of economization is inadequate, and because she refuses to take account of her own class position. Crain's group of young Brooklynites believe that mind reading draws people together and prevents social isolation. While the vagueness of their aims can be taken as an implied narrative criticism of their impractical plans, the reason they abandon the project is because it encroaches on the government's surveillance programme, which identifies them as security threats.

Peter Bogdanovich's masterpiece The Last Picture Show (1971) remains a highly influential example of 1970s New Hollywood filmmaking. Yet it has largely escaped the sustained critical attention enjoyed by many of its contemporaries. This article seeks to revisit the status of the film and its critical reputation. Amongst the critics who have appraised this unique film, opinion is split. On the one hand, it remains an influential example of the “post-western” impulse in the American New Wave. On the other hand, it has been critically maligned as a “nostalgia film.” This article revisits these perspectives and argues that a holistic understanding of the inner dynamics of the film must necessarily take both perspectives into account. It examines how these dynamics are organized around a central formal tension between the cinematic codes of the western and those of social realism. Finally, it argues that the pejorative critical categorization of The Last Picture Show as a “nostalgia film” does not adequately grasp its rich, complex and contradictory affects. Instead, it proposes that the sense of loss, nostalgia and disappointment that Bogdanovich articulates can be read as an expression of that confrontation between “Desire” and the “Real” that the Marxian critic Fredric Jameson theorized was central to the “political unconscious.”

This article argues that in Bleeding Edge, Pynchon moves from an oppositional schema in which the world is divided into “elect” and “preterite” populations towards one that is concerned with implication and complicity. The article uses Michael Rothberg's The Implicated Subject (2019) as the basis for analysis, and notably his argument that to be implicated in wrongdoing often involves a kind of structural blindness towards suffering elsewhere. In the case of Bleeding Edge, the protagonist, Maxine Tarnow, is implicated in the violence committed in order to secure the hegemony of neoliberalism. The article describes Maxine's gradual recognition of her own blindness, and hence of her implication in the harms perpetrated in the name of neoliberalism. It begins by noting that her experience of neoliberalism is one of process and of immaterial exchange. The second part of the article argues that the introduction of Nicholas Windust shows how neoliberalism may be an experience of rupture or trauma for those outside the developed world. Finally, with the 9/11 attacks on New York, the same violence rebounds against its source; the attacks therefore act as the final stage in Maxine's increasing awareness of her own implication.