Juan Meneses’s book “Resisting Dialogue”

Professor Juan Meneses’s book, Resisting Dialogue: Modern Fiction and the Future of Dissent, has just been published by University of Minnesota Press. The book is “a bold new critique of dialogue as a method of eliminating dissent.” “Is dialogue,” Meneses asks, “always the productive political and communicative tool it is widely conceived to be?” In Resisting Dialogue, he reassesses our assumptions about dialogue and what a politically healthy society should look like, arguing that, far from an unalloyed good, dialogue often serves as a subtle tool of domination, perpetuating the underlying inequalities it is intended to address. Grant Farred, Professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University, writes enthusiastically about Meneses’s study:

​Deepening and widening a furrow first plowed by Jacques Rancière and Slavoj Žižek, Resisting Dialogue marks a refusal to underwrite ‘postpolitics’ as politics by insisting that unspeakable political ambition take its place, without apology, so that our voyage from a troubled modernist literature to the Anthropocene maps, simultaneously, a continuous trajectory and a jarring, disjunctive continuity.

Congratulations to Juan for this important contribution to and intervention about literature, resistance, discourse, and hegemony in the modern era.