Joel Wendland-Liu

Joel Wendland-Liu is the author of Mythologies: A Political Economy of U.S. Literature in the Long Nineteenth-Century and The Collectivity of Life: Spaces of Social Mobility and the Individualism Myth. He is currently finishing his book project titled “Simply to Be Americans? Literary Radicalism and Early U.S. Monopoly Capitalism.”

LATEST ARTICLES BY Joel Wendland-Liu

Culture

Infuriating and beautiful: ‘Get on the Job and Organize’ is lesson for balancing radical vision with practical discipline
June 23, 2025 By Joel Wendland-Liu
The book delivers a powerful, if uneven, account of labor organizing in modern America.
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Culture

Towards socialism? Lauesen’s ‘Long Transition’ resurrects an infantile disorder
March 20, 2025 By Joel Wendland-Liu
Torkil Lauesen presents a subjectivist revision of theory despite claiming objectivity.
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Culture

‘Night Flyer’ book review: Grounding the mythos of Harriet Tubman with her political influence and worldview
February 20, 2025 By Joel Wendland-Liu
Mile presents a “faith biography” explaining that “Tubman was heroic, but she was not a superhero beyond the reach of our understanding, identification, and compassion.”
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Culture

Hu Yamin’s new book on Chinese Marxist literary criticism
January 13, 2025 By Joel Wendland-Liu
Hu argues that Western Marxists have deviated from Marx’s focus on class struggle and revolutionary change.
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Culture

A true American horror story: ‘Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum’
October 31, 2024 By Joel Wendland-Liu
The new book details how, before the turn toward mass incarceration in the 1970s, Black people in disproportionate numbers were institutionalized in mental hospitals, where they were assigned to forced labor regimes and other kinds of...
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Culture

New book opens imaginative doors to understanding Lenin’s global legacy
October 2, 2024 By Joel Wendland-Liu
The book’s strength lies in the fact that most contributors avoid clichés about Stalinism or self-pitying laments about what did or did not happen after the fateful October Revolution of 1917.
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Culture

‘Their Example Will Inspire Us: Five Black Communist Women’: A book review
September 12, 2024 By Joel Wendland-Liu
Occasionally, historians publish new research that tries to correct the record, restore our memory, and affirm our heritage. One such effort is Melissa Ford’s latest work.
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Culture

‘Transnational Communism Across the Americas’ offers valuable insights despite its anti-communist tropes
August 14, 2024 By Joel Wendland-Liu
The reliance on widely used anti-communist tropes in the book is regrettable and undermines its objectivity.
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