James Cairns begins his new collection of essays, In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times, with a quotation from the American writer Franny Choi (it’s the title of one of her poems): “The world keeps ending, and the world goes on.” While that well-chosen epigraph gathers what Cairns has to say about crisis into one sentence, it would be a shame if readers of this review were to substitute that epigraph for an engagement with Cairns’s thoughtful, broad-ranging examination of the word “crisis” and the multiple instances of it that we seem, collectively and individually, to be facing in the present moment.
I use the verb “seem” deliberately, because according to Cairns, not everything we take to be a crisis actually is one. In his introductory essay, he describes both the range of his inquiry and its purpose: “At a moment when crisis-talk is everywhere but detailed analysis of crisis remains rare, this book helps think about what we mean by crisis, and what crises mean to us.” That means historicizing the notion of crisis (not a surprising move for a Marxist writer) by pointing out that people have often felt that they were in the midst of a decisive moment, and that sometimes those moments last decades, even centuries. Cairns notes that the word “crisis” comes from the Greek verb krino/krinein, “meaning to separate, choose, decide, judge. Crisis splits time in two.” By calling a situation a crisis, we tell a story: the current instability is unique, terrible, and demands our action. If we understand how such stories are used, we can understand the conflicts that will determine what the future will look like. “If crises are disruptions to business-as-usual, and given that business-as usual in capitalist democracy means violence, mass suffering and ecological destruction, we might think of crises as periods of hope—at least partially,” Cairns argues. “When normal breaks down, it becomes easier to see where power truly lies and to experiment collectively with how power might be organized differently.” The downside of the creative opportunity afforded by crises, of course, is the massive human suffering those moments create.
Recognizing that the future is open is necessary in times of crisis: we need to be capable of imagining things might change.
The scope of Cairns’s analysis ranges from political and ecological issues (the apparent “crisis of democracy,” the effects of our rapidly warming climate) to epistemological ones (the real crisis of truth is the fact that the myths of liberal democracy and capitalism are obviously lies) to literary ones (fiction that imagines the apocalypse, reading Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, the sense that Sylvia Plath’s suicide was somehow inevitable). The latter essay, the one on Plath, is particularly fine. The myth that she was fated to die young is an example of reading causation backwards: we know how Plath’s story ended, and that makes it hard to imagine that any other outcome was possible. Such fatalism about either the past or the present, Cairns argues, limits our sense of what is possible. Recognizing that the future is open is necessary in times of crisis: we need to be capable of imagining things might change.
What takes In Crisis, On Crisis beyond an academic discussion of its topic is Cairns’ inclusion of his personal crises. Looming over his discussions of fatherhood and moving to a small town is his struggle with alcohol, particularly in “Blackout,” the book’s final and, in my opinion, stand-out essay. There, Cairns reads his addiction against Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, which flies backwards into the future, facing the past, apprehending not a series of events but rather one ongoing disaster. “We know Benjamin’s angel of history has seen the final revolution erupt before, the actual dawn of systemic change, only to see catastrophe return,” he concludes. “Yet I cannot accept that my life is destined to cycle through relapse and recovery. To accept as much would already be to put the bottle back in my hand.” Instead, Cairns imagines himself as Benjamin’s angel, “closing my wings against storms from the past, at last turning toward the future.” We can all wish something similar for ourselves, no matter what crises define our lives.
James Cairns lives with his family in Paris, Ontario, on territory that the Haldimand Treaty of 1784 recognizes as belonging to the Six Nations of the Grand River in perpetuity. He is a professor in the Department of Indigenous Studies, Law and Social Justice at Wilfrid Laurier University, where his courses and research focus on political theory and social movements. James is a staff writer at the Hamilton Review of Books, and the community relations director for the Paris-based Riverside Reading Series. James has published three books with the University of Toronto Press, most recently, The Myth of the Age of Entitlement: Millennials, Austerity, and Hope (2017), as well as numerous essays in periodicals such as Canadian Notes & Queries, the Montreal Review of Books, Briarpatch, TOPIA, Rethinking Marxism and the Journal of Canadian Studies. James’ essay “My Struggle and My Struggle,” originally published in CNQ, appeared in Biblioasis’s Best Canadian Essays, 2025 anthology.
Publisher: Wolsak and Wynn (June 10th, 2025)
Paperback: 8″ x 6″ | 226 pp
ISBN: 9781998408191
Ken Wilson is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Regina. His first book is Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road; his second, Walking Well, will appear in 2026.
- Ken Wilsonhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/ken-wilson/
- Ken Wilsonhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/ken-wilson/
