Nessuna Torno Indietro – 1938, 2025

Ann Goldstein’s new English translation of Italian-Cuban author Alba De Céspedes’ debut novel, There’s No Turning Back (Nessuna Torno Indietro, 1938), is the first since… Eunsong Kim, The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property. Duke University Press Books, 2024. 328 pages. Eunsong Kim is a poet, writer, and Associate Professor of English at Northeastern University. Her new book, The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property, traces the history of US museums to conceptual artists like Marcel Duchamp to dispel myths around artistic merit, avant garde art, and white male genius. Kim’s research dives deep into primary documents – Jim Crow-era financial statements, correspondence between art curators and financiers, and labor movement records – to ultimately look past much of the romance and mysticism that veils modern and contemporary art to ask questions about the human price of institution-building. The book is essential reading for arts workers who feel conflicted about their desire to support creativity while feeling despair in current systems available to do so. It is an elegy for lives destroyed under false pretenses of charity and aesthetic advancement. It is vindication against recent violences committed by the institution that are mismarketed as caretaking.