W. Oliver Baker’s essay “The Materialism of Violence and
the Politics of Recognition in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian” has won the
Michael Sprinker Prize, a national essay competition hosted by the Marxist
Literary Group and the editors of the journal Mediations. The Michael Sprinker
award recognizes an essay or dissertation chapter that engages with Marxist
theory, scholarship, pedagogy, and/or activism. The winner receives a prize of
$500 and automatic entry of the essay into the peer review process for the
journal Mediations. Commenting on Oliver’s essay, the judges “agreed, with very
little quibbling of any kind, that [it] was the most original and publishable
submission we received. We were
especially impressed with the elegance with which the essay managed to be a
critique both of the new materialisms and of the McCarthy novel.”
Oliver’s essay argues that Blood Meridian represents the
history of settler colonial violence in the form of a productive materialism or
“object-oriented” aesthetic, and that in so doing forecloses a view of
colonialism as a structure of capitalist violence. By representing settler
colonial domination in positive terms as an “event” or “stage” of violence
rather than in negative terms as a structure of dispossession, what Marx called
“primitive accumulation,” McCarthy’s novel participates in a politics of
neoliberal recognition whereby settler subjects of today “recognize” and
reconcile colonialist violence of the past as a way not to acknowledge the role
it still plays in contemporary forms of global capitalism that continue to
dispossess and bring violence against Indigenous peoples of the world.
Oliver recently completed his third year as a PhD student
in American Literary Studies. After passing his comprehensive exams last
spring, Oliver is now working toward defending his dissertation prospectus
after which he will begin his dissertation work this coming fall.
More information about Mediations and the MLG can be
found here: http://www.mediationsjournal.org/
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