Now What?

It is just as hard to face our hopes as our suffering,’ observes Rachel Weiss in this empathically argued account of living in the wake of once-promising, truncated social transformations. This redemptive poetics of history inhabits the imagination of the present moment radically altered by inherited traumas, idealisms, and messianic hopes. These encounters align the horizon under a night sky flashing with the stars of regardless and henceforward---Roberto Tejada, University of Houston

Casting her supremely intelligent eye on the simultaneous possibilities and limits of art, Rachel Weiss offers a far-reaching study of performance, painting, and film in the aftermath of societal convulsions and revolutions. She creatively rethinks how and why art comes to work in societies troubled by censorship, dictatorship, state violence, and trauma, on the one hand, and dreams of revolution, collectivism, and social justice on the other. Crucially, Weiss’s impassioned account of the stories that art can offer about these extreme historical realities takes on a new relevance and urgency in our current world, where authoritarianism, fake news, and alternative facts increasingly appear to rule the day.---Saloni Mathur, University of California, Los Angeles