Special issue of the journal Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies

In September of 2024 at the age of 90, America's most important Marxist philosopher and literary theorist passed away. It is no exaggeration to say that Jameson revitalized Marxist criticism in the American academy. With the publication of the iconic book Marxism and Form: 20th Century Dialectical Theories of Literature in the mid-seventies, Jameson provided a comprehensive introduction to Western Marxism while also demonstrating the power of his synthetic, dialectical methodology. Since then, Jameson has ceaselessly and tirelessly expanded the scope of Marxist scholarship, every time illustrating its explanatory scope and enriching its conceptual repertoire through articulations with feminist standpoint theory, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, and structuralism (to name a few). From dialectical analyses of modernist masterpieces to pop-culture cinema to science fiction novels to television series, nothing has escaped Jameson's attention. Whether reflecting on the political unconscious of Jaws or the utopian potentials of The Wire, Jameson's writings always illustrate the subtle workings of ideology, reification, and commodification at play throughout culture while also pinpointing emergent signs of communist desires and revolutionary potentials within the very same cultural forms.

Although not widely acknowledged, questions of education and pedagogy are a continual feature of Jameson's writings. Famously, he wrote that "an aesthetic of cognitive mapping -- a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system -- will necessarily have to respect this now enormously complex representation dialectic and invent radically new forms in order to do it justice" (Postmodernism, p. 54). Here Jameson highlights the overdetermined and co-constituting relationship between pedagogy, politics, and culture. The three articulate the problematic of cognitive mapping, which is an attempt to navigate the impossibly vast and complex situation of late capitalism through the invention of new modes of representation. But perhaps more importantly, these modes embody a certain paradox that seems to drive Jameson's project: the need for new perceptual ways of seeing in order to imagine such representations and the need for such representations to educate perception in news was of seeing. Or perhaps more tellingly, in an interview concerning the political relevance of teaching Marxism in a literature course, Jameson responded that cultural Marxism "opens up into the more general problem of a Marxist pedagogy" (Jameson on Jameson, p. 12). In this instance, pedagogy suddenly shifts from a regional and thus technical concern to the larger framing problematic of Marxism as such. In both cases, pedagogy and education are never secondary concerns but are front and center of Jameson's understanding of the cultural work of Marxism and of Marxist intellectuals.

For the first time ever, this special issue will take up the implicit and explicit references to education in Jameson's body of work. The issue is especially interested in the following questions:

1) What is unique about a Jamesonian approach to Marxist pedagogy and education that differentiates it from other Marxists?

2) What is urgent in returning to Jameson's aesthetics of cognitive mapping as a pedagogical cultural politics at this precise historical moment?

3) For those who studied with Jameson, how did his theory connect with his pedagogical practice and/or how did his pedagogy impact his theory?

4) What has been the historic impact of Jameson within critical pedagogy?

5) How might a Jamesonian Marxist pedagogy intervene in specific educational issues or problematics?

Please send a 200 word abstract to Dr. Tyson E. Lewis at [email protected] by Dec. 5th, 2024 if you are interested. If accepted, first drafts of completed manuscripts will be due May 1st of 2025.