The multiverse trope in contemporary culture is overdetermined. It is ideological. It flows with the fragmented totality of an attenuating neoliberalism. It is also a result of the economy of digital media. On streaming services, the multiverse tropes of Star Trek, Star Wars, Marvel, and other intellectual property franchises reflect the expansion of an attention economy. Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm and Star Wars for more than four billion dollars requires the maximization of content production to realize future profits. A steady output of content must be produced to capture attention. In this way, the multiverse trope is also phenomenological. Digital media, along with the chaos of gig economics and neoliberal precarity, create a sense of “everything everywhere all at once.”
Read MoreAnother Multiverse is Possible!? - Call for Submissions
How do you dismantle a conspiracy theory? Through simple logic? A counter delirium? How do you disrupt — or gesture to disrupt — bland technophilia? Do you point out how the dystopian dreams of the tech billionaires will fail? Or, that they will work all too well? For the well-heeled, does the uncertain future overwhelm the comforts of the present? For the rest of us, does precarity overwhelm efforts to salvage the future?
Read MoreMonsters Are Coming
The formation of the proletariat by capital’s historic crimes — and the ongoing recomposition of the class by imperialism, racism, heterosexism, and immiseration — is not unlike the creation of Frankenstein’s monster. The working-class, as a whole, is a disordered and chaotic body. Labor was (and is) formed through the theft of forests, farms, continents, and people. It was (and is) formed in the creation and displacement of entire industries, gender norms and the shifts in social reproduction, the invention of “races” and “nations.” The targets of capital’s crimes were (and continually are) fused together and torn apart in their relation to capital. Labor does not become a class “for itself” by pretending otherwise. It must study the journals of the “men who made it.” But the class becomes conscious when each disordered element of the class defends every other disordered element.
Read MoreMonsters Are Coming - Call for Submissions
There are, culturally and in actuality, their “monsters” and our “monsters.” Our rulers describe whole sections of the working-class and subaltern in terms borrowed from various folk and other horrors. They demonize people by race and caste. They stoke fears of crime, exaggerated and irrational, even as they drive the entire world toward war and climate disaster. As they steal the wealth created by our labor. As they loot entire nations.
Read MoreWars Beneath
The following editorial was published in Locust Review #9 and written in late fall (2022): There is a prevailing sense of being under siege. It is felt in our bones. It turns our stomachs inside-out. It chokes our arteries with anxiety.
Read MoreLocust #9 Call for Submissions: CONFLICT
Please send submissions — artwork, poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, short essays, and so on — to locust.review@gmail.com by October 31st.
Read MoreThe Utopia Principle
Read MoreDear comrades-descendants, the labourers of the 20th century are writing to you. Tell your children and grandchildren how we struggled for your right to immortality. We lived in heroic times when great discoveries were made, when the world was shaken by revolutions and wars burned the planet. […] You have probably already eliminated all harmful bacteria and viruses and live without ageing or sickness. But it was us who helped you in this, when we discovered the mysteries of cancer and overcame the barrier of tissue incompatibility.
Missing Days
Early in US history, graveyards were chaotic tumbles in the middle of cities. In the late 19th century, however, there was a suburbanization of death. Large new cemeteries were built in the farmlands and woods outside town. The ramshackle graves in the cities were sometimes a health hazard but also a site of ideological discomfort for the bourgeoisie. In Chicago, the silty earth near Lake Michigan would sometimes belch up a buried corpse. Wealthy cosmopolitans increasingly envisioned grassy fields with trees housing family mausoleums like estate mansions. Such stately accommodations were out of the reach for workers. For the poor there was a potter’s field.
Read MoreCall for Submissions! ~ Locust #8, “The Utopia Principle” AND Imago #2!
We can still dream… for now. Throughout all of the darkness, we have managed to hope for something better. And behind that hope, there is always that word. Less a word than an idea, a longing, whose open description has come to be scoffed at in adult conversation. Utopia.
Read MoreGive the Gift of Locust (Review)!
The discounted gift subscription rate will be available through January 15, 2022. In addition to the standard subscription packages, all gift subscriptions will include an additional copy of Locust #6 and Imago #1.
Read MoreCyborgs! Shoot the Moon
WHAT IF we become cyborgs right before the world ends, and because we are cyborgs we can no longer fear the apocalypse? Does the glowing sky on fire become, in our minds, an Instagram filter?
Read MoreLocust at Historical Materialism Online 2021
The Locust Arts & Letters Collective will be presenting a panel at Historical Materialism Online 2021, the replacement for HM’s conference that normally takes place in London in early November.
Read MoreLocust #7: “Missing Days” ~ Call For Submissions!
“Are you employed sir?”
“Employed?”
“You don’t go out looking for a job dressed like that? On a weekday?”
“Is this a… what day is this?”
-- exchange between Jeffrey Lebowski and the Dude
Read MoreWorking-Class Art Against the Slow Motion Apocalypse
When more and more disasters are reached — in the form of personal catastrophe, a continent on fire, a city underwater, a state without water and electricity, a plague uncontrolled, a planet on the verge of ecological catastrophe — capitalist realism can only shrug (and hone new forms of disaster capitalism).
Read MoreLocust #6 ~ Call for Submissions!
So send us what you have – your art, your poetry, your fiction, your odd ephemera – and remember that we only ask it be weird, strange, experimental, and that it cling to the dreams of liberation and the hopes of radical transformation.
Read MoreLocust #5 ~ Call for Submissions!
How strange does sunlight seem to us now? Or seeing someone we haven’t seen in a year? Perhaps… even shaking hands with them? What is the odd-but-familiar sensation we call touch? And what does it mean on this dying rock? What does it mean for our hope and despair to be simultaneously so attenuated?
Read MoreNorming in America
“I wanted to greet you, welcome you, embrace you, but ‘Normal’ kept getting in the way. I wish you, the Old King, the New King, and the Old King’s soldiers, good luck.”
Read MoreLocust #4 ~ Call for Submissions!
Submissions are now open. As always, we want your words and images, your prose and poetry, your “this doesn’t quite fit in a normal world, in more than one way.” It needs a place. We have always sought to give it a place. We reckon, as the world spasms and unravels in so many unpredictable directions, it will continue to need a place.
Read MoreEvent: Irrealism as Socialist Cultural Strategy (Thursday Nov. 12)
Join us on Thursday, November 12 (18:30 GMT, 1:30pm EST, 12:30pm CST, 10:30am PST) for a Locust Review panel discussion at this year’s (virtual) Historical Materialism conference. Our panel, focusing on “Irrealism as Socialist Cultural Strategy” will feature Locust editorial collective members Alexander Billet on “The Case for Critical Irrealism,” Holly Lewis on “How Collective Dreams Can End the Sleep of Reason,” Adam Turl on “Their Weird and Ours: Socialist Irrealism vs. Fascist Occultism,” and Anupam Roy on “Representational Impossibility: A Propagandist’s Urgencies and Crisis.” More information follows below.
Read MoreSWARMCAST is coming!!!
Attention humans. We at Locust Review are pleased to announce SWARMCAST, a monthly podcast on the weird, the political, and where they intersect in fiction, art, poetry and creativity. Hosted by LR editors Tish Markley, Adam Turl and Alexander Billet, SWARMCAST will feature discussions of the radical weird, history and current events, interviews with artists, writers, and musicians, readings of poetry and fiction from contributors to LR, and even the occasional comedy performance.
Read More