ALS PhD Student W. Oliver Baker wins the Michael Sprinker Essay Prize

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/