(The Center Square) – New York University is offering a course in spring 2026 entitled “Marxism Beyond Marx” that studies Black, Trans and Postcolonial Marxism in order to discover whether race, sex and sexuality “derive from political economy.”
The four-credit course “studies Marxism through the intellectual traditions of people of color, people from colonized and formerly colonized places, feminists, and queer and trans people,” according to a course description.
Some of the readings for the course include Transgender Marxism; Provincializing Europe; Black, White, Yellow and Left; The Reification of Desire; and The Communist Manifesto.
The course will begin “with two influential works by Marx to establish the analytic and political frame of his method against the historical backdrop that produced it,” according to its description.
“The course then studies traditions that have been designated either with adjectival modifications of Marxism (as in Black Marxism, Postcolonial Marxism, and Queer/Trans Marxism) or use the adjective Marxist as a modifier for a noun denoting a political and intellectual tradition (as in Marxist Feminism),” the description states.
“The goal here is to familiarize ourselves with these traditions, but also to address the long-standing and still vibrant conceptual question this grammar suggests,” the description says.
The question “Marxism Beyond Marx”poses to students is: “Do the historical formations of race, sex, and sexuality derive from political economy or do these historical formations constitute the substance of class itself?”
“By reading Marx from perspectives often considered marginal to or derivative of economic class, we will trace the answers to this question through historical periods and contexts,” the description states.
“Marxism Beyond Marx” is taught by Professor Emma Heaney and is offered through NYU’s XE: Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement program.
When contacted twice each for comment, neither Heaney nor XE responded.
According to a school bio, Heaney’s areas of research are “comparative literature of the long twentieth century; feminist studies; trans studies; Marxist studies; [and] creative writing.”
Professor Heaney has been giving a lecture entitled “An Analytic of Cisness, Toward its Abolition” at locations around the world, according to XE news.
The lecture discusses “whether we should continue to view gender through the lens of a binary framework,” as stated by its description.
Heaney claims in the lecture that “scholars should shift their focus from the binary concept of gender to a deeper analysis of cisness and patriarchy,” according to the description.
Other courses taught by Heaney at NYU according to her bio are Writing the New Woman: Modernist Literature on Trans Femininity; Interdisciplinarity, Genre Fiction from the Perspective of Craft; and Literature After Cisness.
When asked for comment, neither NYU Arts and Science director of communications Rebecca Portnoy nor NYU managing director of public affairs James Devitt responded.
