Here are some texts published in the last few years that were meaningful reads for me in 2020 (and late 2019).
Julia Bryan-Wilson, Fray: Art And Textile Politics
Andrea Long Chu, Females -- more here
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, "Queerying Homophily"
Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism
Aria Dean, "On the Black Generic"
Shane Denson, Discorrelated Images -- more here
Denise Ferreira da Silva, "1 (life) ÷ 0 (blackness) = ∞ − ∞ or ∞ / ∞: On Matter Beyond the Equation of Value"
Lisa Gitelman, "Emoji Dick and the Eponymous Whale, An Essay in Four Parts"
Saidiya Hartman, "The Plot of Her Undoing"
Tobi Haslett's review of Thomas Chatterton Williams's Irrational Man
Patrick Jagoda, Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification -- read my review of Jagoda's previous book
Robin James, The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics -- more here
Anna Kornbluh, The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space
Anahid Nersessian, The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life
Leigh Claire La Berge, Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art
Sophie Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family
Catherine Malabou, Morphing Intelligence: From IQ Measurement to Artificial Brains -- related thoughts here
Brian Massumi, 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value: A Postcapitalist Manifesto -- more here
Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics
Sarah Pourciau, "A/logos: An Anomalous Episode in the History of Number"
Peter Szendy, Of Stigmatology: Punctuation as Experience
Rei Terada, "Hegel's Racism for Radicals" -- paired with a reread of Carla Lonzi, Let's Spit on Hegel
Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism
McKenzie Wark, Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse?
Calvin L. Warren, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation and "The Catastrophe: Black Feminist Poethics, (Anti)form, and Mathematical Nihilism"
Top of the List to Read Next
Louise Amoore, Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others
Fredric Jameson, The Benjamin Files
Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form
Elisabeth Paquette, Universal Emancipation: Race beyond Badiou
Jason E. Smith, Smart Machines and Service Work: Automation in an Age of Stagnation
Hito Steyerl, Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War
Frank B. Wilderson, III, Afropessimism
Books That I Refuse to Buy, Read, or Even Remotely Consider
Jane Bennett's doodle book
Felski & Muecke, eds., Latour and the Humanities -- Absolutely not. Under no circumstances.
Jack Halberstam goes WILD
Most Anticipated for 2021
This year I read drafts of manuscripts by Andrew Culp on the imperceptible and Aden Evens on the digital, both of which I'm eager to see published. Here are some other forthcoming titles I anticipate will be significant books next year:
Jonathan Beller, The World Computer: Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism (February 2021)
Seb Franklin, The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value (June 2021)
Jacob Gaboury, Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics (August 2021)
Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (January 2021)
Nicole Starosielski, Media Hot and Cold (Fall 2021)