{"product_id":"9781915609052","title":"People of the Universe","description":"\u003cb\u003eHow have we evolved within the globalized market economy that has reigned triumphant in the decades since the 1999 Battle of Seattle?\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Commentating, illustrating\u003cbr\u003e Description giving, adjective expert\u003cbr\u003e Analyzing, surmising, musical\u003cbr\u003e Myth-seeking people of the universe, this is yours!”\u003cbr\u003e—T La Rock, “It’s Yours”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat are people like now? How have we, in a cultural sense, evolved within the globalized market economy that has reigned triumphant in the decades since the 1999 Battle of Seattle? \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn \u003ci\u003ePeople of the Universe\u003c\/i\u003e, Charles Mudede begins with the distinction between the cultural and the social. The former emerges from the latter, which defines the kind of animal we are universally. Sociobiological universality is stretched to the cultural with political consequences whose temporality is not directly biotic (the social) but historical. The historical specificity of a collective experience is defined by the principles of a culture determined by the distributional logic of the market system. We do not experience abstract time, which is the time of always. We specifically experience market-time, which is not transhistorical. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003ePeople of the Universe\u003c\/i\u003e is infused with a futurism that is not without its problems. A number of its essays examine the limits not only of a futurism directed by an unthinking reverence of progress that has its origins in the Victorian cultural world, but, more specifically, Afrofuturism. Other essays scan the horizon with a third conceptual tool, this time taken from world-systems thinking, which, in essence, organizes the history of capitalist accumulation into four state forms.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCopublished by e-flux journal","brand":"Charles Mudede","offers":[{"title":"MIT Press |  Paperback \/ softback | Trade paperback (US) |  2025-08-05","offer_id":44663258054911,"sku":"9781915609052","price":32.0,"currency_code":"CAD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0329\/9075\/7001\/files\/BNCImageAPI_85bec18f-26fc-4fe0-b3c9-80b827e22644.jpg?v=1704603227","url":"https:\/\/riverbookshop.com\/products\/9781915609052","provider":"River Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}