Introduction

The introduction presents the three-part theoretical periodization scheme that frames the book’s readings of a US Marxist feminist archive. The first of the three, the long 1970s, identifies the conjuncture form which the archive originates. The second, the long 1990s, names the recent past, a period characterized by a dominance of the turn to the subject and the ethical turn in US scholarly production against which the archive is posed. The third, “the fierce urgency of now,” borrows Martin Luther King Jr.’s phrase to provisionally name a new and still emerging emphasis on theorizing at the level of systemic structures and collective subjects, a methodological reflex and political sensibility with which the book’s project is aligned.