Seriality and Social Change: Peter Hitchcock in Conversation with Jonathan W. Gray
Join the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics for a discussion with Jonathan Gray of Peter Hitchcock’s new book Serality and Social Change.
From Karl Marx’s decision to publish Capital in serial form to contemporary adaptations in manga and graphic novels, Seriality and Social Change examines how serialization both democratizes knowledge and shapes the very process of social transformation. Peter Hitchcock delves into the paradox of the serial: while it can expand access to radical thought, it can also impose structural limits, slowing or containing the revolutionary potential it seeks to unleash.
Through a sweeping analysis that links literature and political economy, Hitchcock explores how serialized narratives frame, sustain, or even hinder movements for change. Does seriality mirror the mechanics of capitalism, or can it be a tool for subverting them? Engaging with this question across genres and forms, Seriality and Social Change invites readers to rethink how revolution is told and imagined over time.
Peter Hitchcock is Professor of English at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is also on the faculties of Women’s Studies and Film Studies at the GC. His books include Dialogics of the Oppressed (Minnesota, 1992), Oscillate Wildly: Space, Body, and Spirit of Millennial Materialism (Minnesota, 1999), Imaginary States: Studies in Cultural Transnationalism(Illinois, 2003), The Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form (Stanford, 2009), The New Public Intellectual: Politics, Theory, and the Public Sphere (Palgrave, 2016; coedited with Jeffrey R. Di Leo), Labor in Culture, or, Worker of the World(s) (Palgrave, 2017), The Debt Age (Routledge, 2018; coedited with Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Sophia McClennen), and Biotheory (Routledge, 2020; coedited with Jeffrey R. Di Leo). Forthcoming books include Seriality and Social Change (Seagull, 2025) and an edited collection, Parasitical Logic in Culture and Society (Bloomsbury, 2025). Hitchcock’s research and teaching focus on anticapitalism, postcolonial and decolonial critique, the politics of gender and sexuality, and aesthetics. Recent articles include: “Living the City: On Samuel R. Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue” for WSQ; “Countering Encounters: Theorizing the Scale of Globality” for a volume on theory as world literature; “Decolonizing Aesthetics: Bakhtin, Modernism, and Anti-Colonial Poetics” for Understanding Bakhtin, Understanding Modernism; “Inertia Creeps” for a volume on left theory and the alt-right; “Paroxysm Politics” for a book on Black Mirror; and “Auguries of Ethics” for a volume on contemporary architectural theory.
Jonathan W. Gray is Associate Professor of English at John Jay College-CUNY and the CUNY Graduate Center’s programs in English and Biography and Memoir. Prof. Gray’s research focuses on the literature and popular cultures of the post-WWII period, with a particular focus on race plays in the construction of civic belonging. Gray is the author of Civil Rights in the White Literary Imagination and the co-editor of the essay collection Disability in Comics and Graphic Novels. Prof. Gray wrote the entry “Race” for Keywords for Comics Studies and is working on a book projectIllustrating the Race: Representing Blackness in American Comics–which traces depictions of African Americans in comics from 1966 to the present and another exploring how Black the work of a cohort of artists, writers and musicians resisted the claims of the Reagan Revolution. Prof. Gray contributes to The New Republic, and has written in the past for Film Quarterly, Entertainment Weekly, Medium, and Salon.com.
This event is free and open to the public. It is organized by the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics.
