Artforum covers Keller Easterling's Extrastatecraft

Harwood's acclaim for the text is grounded in how her approach challenges the often overstated disconnect between artistic and intellectual disciplines: 

Extrastatecraft marks her most explicit and synthetic statement yet about how to make sense of the complex contemporary phenomenon so often simplistically labeled “globalization.” Today, this all too familiar term is little more than a catchall to describe everything from the expanding reach of multinational corporations and NGOs to the erosion of state authority to the rapid obliteration of cultural specificity by generic architectural and urban typologies, normalizing economic practices, and universal ecological crisis. By eschewing the tendency toward a language of abstraction that obscures complex and disparate circumstances, and instead taking such phenomena seriously as the concrete effects of equally concrete political and aesthetic programs, Easterling not only reveals the magical strangeness of such realities but also opens up new strategies and tactics of response. Indeed, one of her most refreshing achievements here is to clear away the mythological bluster that continues to characterize what she terms “left or right politics [or] the politics of resistance” in favor of an attitude simultaneously more cynical and more utopian. The book, which pulls together materials from a rich panoply of her shorter essays, lectures, studio courses, and theory seminars, assembling them alongside insightful glosses of pivotal primary materials and secondary literature, is a primer for the thoughtful negotiation of the brave new world in which both professionals and academics find themselves working today.