Best of
Theory
2009
Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
Mark Fisher - 2009
What effects has this “capitalist realism” had on work, culture, education and mental health? Is it possible to imagine an alternative to capitalism that is not some throwback to discredited models of state control?
Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity
José Esteban Muñoz - 2009
It has been stifled by this myopic focus on the present, which is short-sighted and assimilationist.Cruising Utopia seeks to break the present stagnancy by cruising ahead. Drawing on the work of Ernst Bloch, José Esteban Muñoz recalls the queer past for guidance in presaging its future. He considers the work of seminal artists and writers such as Andy Warhol, LeRoi Jones, Frank O'Hara, Ray Johnson, Fred Herko, Samuel Delany, and Elizabeth Bishop, alongside contemporary performance and visual artists like Dynasty Handbag, My Barbarian, Luke Dowd, Tony Just, and Kevin McCarty in order to decipher the anticipatory illumination of art and its uncanny ability to open windows to the future.In a startling repudiation of what the LGBT movement has held dear, Muñoz contends that queerness is instead a futurity bound phenomenon, a "not yet here" that critically engages pragmatic presentism. Part manifesto, part love-letter to the past and the future, Cruising Utopia argues that the here and now are not enough and issues an urgent call for the revivification of the queer political imagination.
The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader
Gloria E. Anzaldúa - 2009
As the author of Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Anzaldúa played a major role in shaping contemporary Chicano/a and lesbian/queer theories and identities. As an editor of three anthologies, including the groundbreaking This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, she played an equally vital role in developing an inclusionary, multicultural feminist movement. A versatile author, Anzaldúa published poetry, theoretical essays, short stories, autobiographical narratives, interviews, and children’s books. Her work, which has been included in more than 100 anthologies to date, has helped to transform academic fields including American, Chicano/a, composition, ethnic, literary, and women’s studies.This reader—which provides a representative sample of the poetry, prose, fiction, and experimental autobiographical writing that Anzaldúa produced during her thirty-year career—demonstrates the breadth and philosophical depth of her work. While the reader contains much of Anzaldúa’s published writing (including several pieces now out of print), more than half the material has never before been published. This newly available work offers fresh insights into crucial aspects of Anzaldúa’s life and career, including her upbringing, education, teaching experiences, writing practice and aesthetics, lifelong health struggles, and interest in visual art, as well as her theories of disability, multiculturalism, pedagogy, and spiritual activism. The pieces are arranged chronologically; each one is preceded by a brief introduction. The collection includes a glossary of Anzaldúa’s key terms and concepts, a timeline of her life, primary and secondary bibliographies, and a detailed index.
Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?
Judith Butler - 2009
In this age of CNN-mediated war, the lives of those wretched populations of the earth—the refugees; the victims of unjust imprisonment and torture; the immigrants virtually enslaved by their starvation and legal disenfranchisement—are always presented to us as already irretrievable and thereby already lost. We may shake our heads at their wretchedness but then we sacrifice them nonetheless, for they are already forgone.By analyzing the different frames through which we experience war, Butler calls for a reorientation of the Left toward the precarity of those lives. Only by recognizing those lives as precarious lives—lives that are not yet lost but are ever fragile and in need of protection—might the Left stand in unity against the violence perpetrated through arbitrary state power.
In Defense of the Poor Image
Hito Steyerl - 2009
Instead, it is about its own real conditions of existence: about swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities. It is about defiance and appropriation just as it is about conformism and exploitation.In short: it is about reality."
Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide
Boaventura de Sousa Santos - 2009
Rarely acknowledged is another vital dimension: cognitive injustice, the failure to recognize the different ways of knowing by which people across the globe run their lives and provide meaning to their existence. This book shows why cognitive injustice underlies all the other dimensions; global social justice is not possible without global cognitive justice. Santos's argument unfolds in two inquiries. No matter how internally diverse, Western Modernity provided the knowledge underlying the long cycle of colonialism followed by global capitalism. These historical processes profoundly devalued and marginalized the knowledge and wisdom that had been in existence in the global South. Today, working against epistemicide is imperative in order to recover and valorize the epistemological diversity of the world. Such recovery and valorization is the book's second inquiry and is based on four key analytical tools: sociology of absences, sociology of emergences, ecology of knowledges, and intercultural translation. The transformation of the world's epistemological diversity into an empowering instrument against hegemonic globalization points to a new kind of bottom-up cosmopolitanism. It would promote a wide conversation of humankind, celebrating conviviality, solidarity, and life against the logic of market-ridden greed and individualism and the destruction of life to which world populations large and small are condemned by the dominant forces of globalization.
Red, White Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms
Frank B. Wilderson III - 2009
Offering an unflinching account of race and representation, Frank B. Wilderson III asks whether such films accurately represent the structure of U.S. racial antagonisms. That structure, he argues, is based on three essential subject positions: that of the White (the “settler,” “master,” and “human”), the Red (the “savage” and “half-human”), and the Black (the “slave” and “non-human”). Wilderson contends that for Blacks, slavery is ontological, an inseparable element of their being. From the beginning of the European slave trade until now, Blacks have had symbolic value as fungible flesh, as the non-human (or anti-human) against which Whites have defined themselves as human. Just as slavery is the existential basis of the Black subject position, genocide is essential to the ontology of the Indian. Both positions are foundational to the existence of (White) humanity.Wilderson provides detailed readings of two films by Black directors, Antwone Fisher (Denzel Washington) and Bush Mama (Haile Gerima); one by an Indian director, Skins (Chris Eyre); and one by a White director, Monster’s Ball (Marc Foster). These films present Red and Black people beleaguered by problems such as homelessness and the repercussions of incarceration. They portray social turmoil in terms of conflict, as problems that can be solved (at least theoretically, if not in the given narratives). Wilderson maintains that at the narrative level, they fail to recognize that the turmoil is based not in conflict, but in fundamentally irreconcilable racial antagonisms. Yet, as he explains, those antagonisms are unintentionally disclosed in the films’ non-narrative strategies, in decisions regarding matters such as lighting, camera angles, and sound.
The Apprentice's Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition and Fascism
Ishay Landa - 2009
Departing from this analysis, Landa highlights the long overlooked critical affinities between the liberal tradition and fascism. Far from being the antithesis of liberalism, fascism, both in its ideology and its practice, was substantially, if dialectically, indebted to liberalism, particularly to its economic variant
Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP's Fight against AIDS
Deborah B. Gould - 2009
But by the early 1990s, the organization they founded, ACT UP, was no more; even as the AIDS epidemic raged on. Weaving together interviews with activists, extensive research, and reflections on the author's time as a member of the organization, Moving Politics is the first book to chronicle the rise and fall of ACT UP, highlighting a key factor in its trajectory: emotion.Surprisingly overlooked by many scholars of social movements, emotion, Gould argues, plays a fundamental role in political activism. From anger to hope, pride to shame, and solidarity to despair, feelings played a significant part in ACT UP's provocative style of protest, which included raucous demonstrations, die-ins, and other kinds of street theater. Detailing the movement's public triumphs and private setbacks, Moving Politics is the definitive account of ACT UP’s origin, development, and decline as well as a searching look at the role of emotion in contentious politics.
Cannibal Metaphysics
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro - 2009
Along the way, he spells out the consequences of this anthropology for thinking in general via a major reassessment of the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, arguments for the continued relevance of Deleuze and Guattari, dialogues with the work of Philippe Descola, Bruno Latour, and Marilyn Strathern, and inventive treatments of problems of ontology, translation, and transformation. Bold, unexpected, and profound, Cannibal Metaphysics is one of the chief works marking anthropology’s current return to the theoretical center stage.
You Must Change Your Life
Peter Sloterdijk - 2009
For it is not religion that is returning; rather, there is something else quite profound that is taking on increasing significance in the present: the human as a practising, training being, one that creates itself through exercises and thereby transcends itself. Rainer Maria Rilke formulated the drive towards such self-training in the early twentieth century in the imperative 'You must change your life'.In making his case for the expansion of the practice zone for individuals and for society as a whole, Sloterdijk develops a fundamental and fundamentally new anthropology. The core of his science of the human being is an insight into the self-formation of all things human. The activity of both individuals and collectives constantly comes back to affect them: work affects the worker, communication the communicator, feelings the feeler.It is those humans who engage expressly in practice that embody this mode of existence most clearly: farmers, workers, warriors, writers, yogis, rhetoricians, musicians or models. By examining their training plans and peak performances, this book offers a panorama of exercises that are necessary to be, and remain, a human being
Gerhard Richter: Writings: 1961 to 2007
Gerhard Richter - 2009
Perhaps it is only natural that an artist whose painting incarnates the Cagean premise that there is nothing to communicate should be moved to address that fact over and over. For this reason, the first edition of Richter's writings, The Daily Practice of Painting (published in 1993 by MIT Press) was an especially compelling collection, gathering the speculations of an artist profoundly involved in states of doubt, uncertainty and negation. Edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist, it quickly became a basic text in all of the creative fields. For this new, complete edition of the writings, Richter has placed his private archive at the editor's disposal; most of the photographic material comes from this archive and has not been previously published. The volume begins with the artist's farewell letters to his teacher Heinz Lohmar in 1961, is augmented with 15 unpublished texts from 1962 to 1993, as well as texts from the past 14 (highly productive) years of his career, and closes with an interview on his contribution to the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. In between are public statements on specific exhibitions, private reflections drawn from personal correspondence, answers to questions posed by critics and journal excerpts discussing the intentions, methods and subjects of his works from various periods. At more than 600 pages (the first edition was only 288), it is without doubt the essential companion to Richter's colossal oeuvre.Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden in 1932. His first solo show was in 1964 at Galerie Schmela in Dusseldorf. Today he is ranked among the world's greatest painters.
Sexuality and Socialism: History, Politics, and Theory of LGBT Liberation
Sherry Wolf - 2009
Sherry Wolf analyzes different theories about oppression—including those of Marxism, postmodernism, identity politics, and queer theory—and challenges myths about genes, gender, and sexuality.“Sexuality and Socialism is the most intelligent and enlightened discussion on sexuality to come from the Left in a long time. No other work that comes to my mind explains the history of sexuality and sexual repression in the United States as comprehensively and compellingly.”—Ron Jacobs, Dissident Voice“Sherry Wolf: Lesbian, Activist, Communist & Badass-ist... spoke to a pre-National Equality March rally. She. Blew. It. Up.”—Austin Chronicle“Sherry speaks with such eloquence and plain common sense that I can't help but want to know more about her ideas and convictions.”—Derek Washington, “In the LV” radio host, Director of LGBT Outreach, Clark County Democratic Black Caucus“The icons of the new generation of activists are people like Lady Gaga, Dustin Lance Black, Judy Shephard, Lt. Daniel Choi (ret.) and Sherry Wolf (author of Sexuality and Socialism).”—Don Gorton, Join the Impact Board Member“Surprisingly funny, very readable and a fitting tome for a new movement in these troubled times.”—Dave Zirin for Progressive's Best Books of 2009“‘What humans have constructed they can tear down.’ This is the powerful insight of this rare book that is at once politically important, theoretically and historically sophisticated, and clearly written. Sexuality and Socialism is enlivened in its engagement with a number of controversies, including those over the alleged biological determination of homosexuality, the myth of Black homophobia, and the consequences of postmodernist theories for the politics of gay liberation. Above all else, Wolf puts forward a cogent defense of the Marxist tradition—long and wrongly reviled as homophobic in itself—as a way to explain how LGBT oppression arose and what we can do to put it to bed.”—Dana Cloud, University of Texas at AustinSherry Wolf is the associate editor of the International Socialist Review. She was on the executive committee of the National Equality March Oct. 11, 2009 and has written for publications including the Nation, MRZine, Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, and Socialist Worker and speaks frequently across the country on the struggle for LGBT liberation as well as a wide range of social and economic justice issue.
Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects
Christina Sharpe - 2009
Her illuminating readings juxtapose Frederick Douglass’s narrative of witnessing the brutal beating of his Aunt Hester with Essie Mae Washington-Williams’s declaration of freedom in Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond, as well as the “generational genital fantasies” depicted in Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora with a firsthand account of such “monstrous intimacies” in the journals of an antebellum South Carolina senator, slaveholder, and vocal critic of miscegenation. Sharpe explores the South African–born writer Bessie Head’s novel Maru—about race, power, and liberation in Botswana—in light of the history of the KhoiSan woman Saartje Baartman, who was displayed in Europe as the “Hottentot Venus” in the nineteenth century. Reading Isaac Julien’s film The Attendant, Sharpe takes up issues of representation, slavery, and the sadomasochism of everyday black life. Her powerful meditation on intimacy, subjection, and subjectivity culminates in an analysis of Kara Walker’s black silhouettes, and the critiques leveled against both the silhouettes and the artist.
Sing, Mongrel
Claire Hero - 2009
"'Nothing lives in us//but hunger.' In the arresting and dazzlingly original poems of SING, MONGREL, Claire Hero investigates the mongrel of our selves: that mix of the urge for domesticity and peace and of the often more overwhelming urge toward a restless hunger for power--erotic, political, both. Hero asks what to make of the personal and public ramifications of desire, personified here as crackbone, who rides while 'the entrails of the est stink in his tracks.' What can we salvage, if indeed we still can? In gorgeous language, delicately balancing ferocity and restraint, Hero's poems announce a vision to be reckoned with. SING, MONGREL is an amazing and important book"--Carl Phillips.
The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography
Lyle Rexer - 2009
The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography is the first book in English to document this phenomenon and to put it into historical context, while also examining the diverse approaches thriving within contemporary photography. Author Lyle Rexer examines abstraction at pivotal moments, starting with the inception of photography, when many of the pioneers believed the camera might reveal other aspects of reality. The Edge of Vision traces subsequent explorations--from the Photo Secessionists, who emphasized process and emotional expression over observed reality, to Modernist and Surrealist experiments. In the decades to follow, in particular from the 1940s through the 1980s, a multitude of photographers--Edward Weston, Aaron Siskind and Barbara Kasten among them--took up abstraction from a variety of positions. Finally, Rexer explores the influence the history of abstraction exerts on contemporary thinking about the medium. Many contemporary artists--most prominently Ilan Wolff, Marco Breuer and Ellen Carey--reject photography's documentary dimension in favor of other possibilities, somewhere between painting and sculpture, that include the manipulation of process and printing. In addition to Rexer's engagingly written and richly illustrated history, this volume includes a selection of primary texts from and interviews with key practitioners and critics such as Edward Steichen, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and James Welling.
On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton
Hollis Frampton - 2009
It was a time when artists working in diverse disciplines were beginning to pick up cameras and produce films and videotapes, well before these practices were understood or embraced by institutions of contemporary art. This collection of Frampton's writings presents his critical essays (many written for Artforum and October) along with additional material, including lectures, correspondence, interviews, and production notes and scripts. It replaces—and supersedes—the long-unavailable Circles of Confusion, published in 1983.Frampton ranged widely over the visual arts in his writing, and the texts in this collection display his unique approaches to photography, film, and video, as well as the plastic and literary arts. They include critically acclaimed essays on Edward Weston and Eadweard Muybridge as well as appraisals of contemporary photographers; the influential essay, “For a Metahistory of Film,” along with scripts, textual material, and scores for his films; writings on video that constitute a prehistory of the digital arts; a dialogue with Carl Andre (his friend and former Phillips Andover classmate) from the early 1960s; and two inventive, almost unclassifiable pieces that are reminiscent of Borges, Joyce, and Beckett.
Occupying and Connecting: Thoughts on Territories and Spheres of Influence with Particular Reference to Human Settlement
Frei Otto - 2009
Claims to ownership, land and building regulations, planning decisions and political interventions make it difficult for settlement structures to adapt to constantly changing requirements to such an extent that meaningful and totally ecological use of the surface of the earth is becoming increasingly difficult, although new techniques and flexible planning models mean that a connection could be found with the self-designing processes of urban-development history.
A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society, 1996-2008
Adrienne Rich - 2009
Over more than three decades Adrienne Rich’s essays have been praised for their lucidity, courage, and range of concerns. In A Human Eye, Rich examines a diverse selection of writings and their place in past and present social disorders and transformations. Beyond literary theories, she explores from many angles how the arts of language have acted on and been shaped by their creators’ worlds. This powerful new collection includes a stirring response to the anthology Iraqi Poetry Today, a critique of three classic socialist manifestos, and a rereading of The Dead Lecturer, an early volume of poems by LeRoi Jones. Rich engages the impulse to make art that both impels toward and interacts with social change, a theme she also traces through the letters of poets Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, gay and lesbian politics and poetry, and influential texts on Zionism and the Jewish diaspora.
Flesh of My Flesh
Kaja Silverman - 2009
The theoreticians who loom so large within contemporary thought also privilege difference over similarity. Silverman reminds us that this is but half the story, and a dangerous half at that, for if we are all individuals, we are doomed to be rivals and enemies. A much older story, one that prevailed through the early modern era, held that likeness or resemblance was what organized the universe, and that everything emerges out of the same flesh. Silverman shows that analogy, so discredited by much of twentieth-century thought, offers a much more promising view of human relations. In the West, the emblematic story of turning away is that of Orpheus and Eurydice, and the heroes of Silverman's sweeping new reading of nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture, the modern heirs to the old, analogical view of the world, also gravitate to this myth. They embrace the correspondences that bind Orpheus to Eurydice and acknowledge their kinship with others past and present. The first half of this book assembles a cast of characters not usually brought together: Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust, Lou-Andréas Salomé, Romain Rolland, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wilhelm Jensen, and Paula Modersohn-Becker. The second half is devoted to three contemporary artists, whose works we see in a moving new light:Terrence Malick, James Coleman, and Gerhard Richter.
Metahaven: Uncorporate Identity
Daniel Van Der Velden - 2009
A science fiction book about design, it describes corporate identity beyond certainty, entwined with politics, speculation and information networks. Carved out from the multipolar geopolitical spaces of the early 21st century and the paradoxical leftovers and peripheries of ancient regimes and ruined ideologies, Uncorporate Identity is at once an artistic manifesto for design under globalization and a workbook of essays, narratives and truisms investigating the ambiguous state of identity and branding today.Authored by Metahaven, a design and research think tank consisting of Daniel van der Velden, Vinca Kruk and Gon Zifroni, Uncorporate Identity is edited by Marina Vishmidt and includes contributions by and collaborations with Armin Linke, Dieter Lesage, Chantal Mouffe, Peter van Ham, Regula StAmpfli, Michael Taussig, BAVO, Mihnea Mircan, Ruedi Baur, David Reinfurt, Adriaan Mellegers, Tina Clausmeyer and many others.
Software Engineering
Kassem A. Saleh - 2009
Moreover, software projects must be completed on time and within budgets and are important challenges to software engineers. Research has shown that one-third of software projects are never completed, another third do not fulfill their promises.Software Engineering provides the software engineering fundamentals, principles and skills needed to develop and maintain high quality software products. The software engineering processes and techniques covered include requirements specification, design, implementation, testing and management of software projects. This up-to-date book is modeled on the recommendations and guidelines prescribed in the Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) published by the IEEE Computer Society, and the Software Engineering Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Degree Programs in Software Engineering published by the IEEE Computer Society and the Association for Computing Machinery Joint Task Force on Computing Curricula.At the end of each chapter, the reader will be able to perform tangible software engineering tasks by applying the learned techniques and methods, will be familiar with the terminology, the principles by mastering the subjects, and will be able to analyze existing task deliverables, compare and critique the different techniques. The book is designed as a text for an undergraduate first course in software engineering and graduate bridging courses in information technology. In addition, Software Engineering can be used by practitioners who need to refresh their knowledge with the latest in software engineering techniques and processes. The prerequisite to use this text is to have a background in an object-oriented programming language.
Ecologica
André Gorz - 2009
Advocating an exit from capitalism through the self-limitation of needs and the networked use of the latest technologies, he outlines a practical, democratically based solution to our current predicament. Compiled by Gorz, Ecologica is intended as a final distillation of his work and thought, a guide to the survival of our planet. It is a work of political, rather than scientific ecology—Gorz aruges that the key to planetary survival is not a surrender to environmental experts and eco-technocrats, but a switch to non-consumerist modes of living that would amount to a type of cultural revolution. Praise for André Gorz“To my mind the greatest of modern French social thinkers.”—Herbert Gintis, author of Schooling in Capitalist America“Gorz’s work was always within the Utopian tradition—a label he welcomed but which was used pejoratively by his opponents. . . . Many of his derided early warnings about globalization and environmental degradation have become commonplace discourses in political debates today. Ultimately, Gorz’s Utopianism was expressed in a very practical sense—we never know how far along the road we are if we have no idea of the destination.”—Independent
The Silent Transformations
François Jullien - 2009
With time, great love can turn into indifference. And even the most earnest revolution can imperceptibly become its own system of privilege and corruption—just as global warming has slowly modified the climate by degrees. These are examples of the kind of quiet, unseen changes that François Jullien examines in The Silent Transformations, in which he compares Western and Eastern—specifically Chinese—ways of thinking about time and processes of change.Jullien argues that our failure to notice the effects of cumulative changes over time is due to Western thought’s foundations in classical Greek philosophies of being, which encourage thinking in terms of determined forms and neglect the indeterminable nature of the transition taking place. In contrast, Chinese thought, having a greater sense of the fluidity of life, offers a more flexible way of understanding everyday transformations and provides insightful perspectives from which to consider our relation to history and nature. In particular, a Chinese approach, argues Jullien, allows us to discover that there may be occasions when it is more efficacious to yield to situations than to confront them head-on.In The Silent Transformations, Jullien resituates Western philosophy by examining it in the light of traditions of thought that have developed from fundamentally different concepts and contexts. Jullien here opens a space for a new way of thinking, and this refreshing book will stimulate the interest of scholars in both Western and Eastern philosophy.
Routine Miracles: Restoring Faith and Hope in Medicine
Conrad Fischer - 2009
The patients' stories within this book yield hope, optimism, and triumph. This is the best time ever to come out of medical school and training. This fact will inspire and uplift everyone in the medical profession as well as all of us who must, at some point, rely on the art of medicine to see us through.""--Conrad Fischer, MDWhat has ruined today's medical students' interest in devoting their lives to finding cures for the most rampant diseases riddling our population? How can young doctors not be energized and excited by modern breakthroughs? Why are they not inspired by the ability of current AIDS drugs to increase life expectancy by twenty-five years?In Routine Miracles, award-winning internist and medical educator Conrad Fischer investigates the disconnect between medical advances and the rise of physician dissatisfaction. Fischer surveyed more than 3,000 physicians and interviewed hundreds of patients to uncover the seeds of doctors' discontent. Based upon his findings, he offers a deeply personal and compelling call to action for all of us, doctor and patient alike, to celebrate the present and the future of medicine.
Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children's Literature
Marah Gubar - 2009
The ideology of innocence was much slower to spread than we think, she contends, and the people whom we assume were most committed to it--children's authors and members of the infamous cult of the child--were actually deeply ambivalent about this Romantic notion. Rather than wholeheartedly promoting a static ideal of childhood purity, Golden Age children's authors often characterize young people as collaborators who are caught up in the constraints of the culture they inhabit, and yet not inevitably victimized as a result of this contact with adults and their world. Such nuanced meditations on the vexed issue of the child's agency, Gubar suggests, can help contemporary scholars to generate more flexible critical approaches to the study of childhood and children's literature.
Reading Chuck Palahniuk: American Monsters and Literary Mayhem
Cynthia Kuhn - 2009
Palahniuk's innovative stylistic accomplishments and notoriously disturbing subject matters invite close analysis, and the new essays in this collection offer fascinating insights about Palahniuk's texts, contexts, contributions, and controversies. Addressing novels from Fight Club through Snuff, as well as his nonfiction, this volume will be valuable to anyone with a serious interest in contemporary literature.
My Beloved Wager: Essays From A Writing Practice
Erín Moure - 2009
In her essays and linguistic-sculptural interventions on what poetry makes possible, Moure reveals why she has placed her bets on poetry as a way of life. In these works, the richness of poetry is laid bare as Moure challenges us to think more deeply about who we are as speakers, readers, writers, and citizens of the world.
The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory
Tavia Nyong’o - 2009
Scrutinizing widely diverse texts--archival, musical, visual, and theatrical--Tavia Nyong'o traces the genealogy of racial hybridity, analyzing how key events in the nineteenth century spawned a debate about interracialism that lives on today.Deeply interested in how discussions of racial hybridity have portrayed the hybrid as the recurring hope for a distant raceless future, Nyong'o is concerned with the ways this discourse deploys the figure of the racial hybrid as an alibi for a nationalism that reinvents the racist logics it claims to have broken with. As Nyong'o demonstrates, the rise of a pervasive image of racially anomalous bodies responded to the appearance of an independent black public sphere and organized politics of black uplift. This newfound mobility was apprehended in the political imaginary as a bodily and sexual scandal, and the resultant amalgamation discourse, he argues, must be recognized as one of the earliest and most enduring national dialogues on sex and sexuality.Nyong'o tracks the emergence of the concept of the racial hybrid as an ideological modernization of the older concept of the mongrel and shows how this revision brought race-thinking in line with new understandings of sex and gender, providing a racial context for the shift toward modern heterosexuality, the discourse on which postracial metaphors so frequently rely. A timely rebuttal to our contemporary fascination with racial hybridity, The Amalgamation Waltz questions the vision of a national future without racial difference or conflict.
Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy
Erin Manning - 2009
Exploring the relation between sensation and thought through the prisms of dance, cinema, art, and new media, Manning argues for the intensity of movement. From this idea of intensity -- the incipiency at the heart of movement -- Manning develops the concept of preacceleration, which makes palpable how movement creates relational intervals out of which displacements take form. Discussing her theory of incipient movement in terms of dance and relational movement, Manning describes choreographic practices that work to develop with a body in movement rather than simply stabilizing that body into patterns of displacement. She examines the movement-images of Leni Riefenstahl, Etienne-Jules Marey, and Norman McLaren (drawing on Bergson's idea of duration), and explores the dot-paintings of contemporary Australian Aboriginal artists. Turning to language, Manning proposes a theory of prearticulation claiming that language's affective force depends on a concept of thought in motion. Relationscapes takes a -Whiteheadian perspective, - recognizing Whitehead's importance and his influence on process philosophers of the late twentieth century -- Deleuze and Guattari in particular. It will be of special interest to scholars in new media, philosophy, dance studies, film theory, and art history.
Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965
Timothy Yu - 2009
Examining two of the most exciting developments in recent American writing, Timothy Yu juxtaposes the works of experimental language poets and Asian American poets—concerned primarily with issues of social identity centered around discourses of race. Yu delves into the 1960s social upheaval to trace how Language and Asian American writing emerged as parallel poetics of the avant-garde, each with its own distinctive form, style, and political meaning.From its provocative reevaluation of Allen Ginsberg to fresh readings of Ron Silliman, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and John Yau, along with its analysis of a new archive of Asian American writers from the 1970s, this book is indispensable for readers interested in race, Asian American studies, contemporary poetry, and the avant-garde.
The Task of Cultural Critique
Teresa L. Ebert - 2009
Ebert makes a spirited, pioneering case for a new cultural critique committed to the struggles for human freedom and global equality. Demonstrating the implosion of the linguistic turn that isolates culture from historical processes, The Task of Cultural Critique maps the contours of an emerging materialist critique that contributes toward a critical social and cultural consciousness. Through groundbreaking analyses of cultural texts, Ebert questions the contemporary Derridian dogma that asserts ""the future belongs to ghosts."" Events-to-come are not spectral, she contends, but the material outcome of global class struggles. Not ""hauntology"" but history produces cultural practices and their conflictive representations--from sexuality, war, and consumption to democracy, torture, globalization, and absolute otherness. With close readings of texts from Proust and Balzac to ""Chick Lit,"" from Lukács, de Man, Deleuze, and Marx to Derrida, Žižek, Butler, Kollontai, and Agamben, the book opens up new directions for cultural critique today.
Sex Slavery
Voltairine de Cleyre - 2009
A dynamic table of contents enables to jump directly to the chapter selected. Table of Contents - About This Book - Sex Slavery
Bad Reputation: Performances, Essays, Interviews
Penny Arcade - 2009
Arcade's brand of high camp and street-smart, punk-rock cabaret showmanship has been winning over international audiences ever since. This autobiographical trilogy of plays represents her at her best. Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore! is Penny Arcade's raucous, cutting-edge sex and censorship show, (which continues to be a commercial hit around the world), featuring the daily life of a receptionist in a brothel, the upbringing and rearing of a "faghag," the evolution of the New York gay scene in the 1990s, and a participatory "audience dance break." The funny and heart-rending title work, Bad Reputation, portrays a young teen runaway's coming of age in a Catholic reform school (run by nuns who are former fashion models) and her subsequent life on the streets of 1960s New York. La Miseria, a rare depiction of working-class Italian-Americans from a woman's point of view that portrays the clash between working-class morals and compassion during the 1980s AIDS epidemic, rounds out the trilogy. Bad Reputation is the first book by and on Penny Arcade. The complete scripts are accompanied by a new interview with Penny Arcade by Chris Kraus, a range of archival photographs of the East Village scene and Arcade's performances, an introduction by playwright Ken Bernard, and contributions by Sarah Schulman, Steve Zehentner, and Stephen Bottoms.
State, Space, World: Selected Essays
Henri Lefebvre - 2009
Shortly after the 1974 publication of his landmark book The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre embarked on one of the most ambitious projects of his career: a consideration of the history and geographies of the modern state through a monumental study that linked several disciplines, including political science, sociology, geography, and history.State, Space, World collects a series of Lefebvre's key writings on the state from this period. Making available in English for the first time the as-yet-unexplored political aspect of Lefebvre's work, it contains essays on philosophy, political theory, state formation, spatial planning, and globalization, as well as provocative reflections on the possibilities and limits of grassroots democracy under advanced capitalism.State, Space, World is an essential complement to The Production of Space, The Urban Revolution, and The Critique of Everyday Life. Lefebvre's original and prescient analyses that emerge in this volume are urgently relevant to contemporary debates on globalization and neoliberal capitalism.
The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound
Marjorie Perloff - 2009
The essays collected here by Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin break that critical silence to readdress some of the fundamental connections between poetry and sound—connections that go far beyond traditional metrical studies.Ranging from medieval Latin lyrics to a cyborg opera, sixteenth-century France to twentieth-century Brazil, romantic ballads to the contemporary avant-garde, the contributors to The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound explore such subjects as the translatability of lyric sound, the historical and cultural roles of rhyme, the role of sound repetition in novelistic prose, the connections between “sound poetry” and music, between the visual and the auditory, the role of the body in performance, and the impact of recording technologies on the lyric voice. Along the way, the essays take on the “ensemble discords” of Maurice Scève’s Délie, Ezra Pound’s use of “Chinese whispers,” the alchemical theology of Hugo Ball’s Dada performances, Jean Cocteau’s modernist radiophonics, and an intercultural account of the poetry reading as a kind of dubbing.A genuinely comparatist study, The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound is designed to challenge current preconceptions about what Susan Howe has called “articulations of sound forms in time” as they have transformed the expanded poetic field of the twenty-first century.
Future of the Past: Reviving the Queer Archives
Ryan Conrad - 2009
June 5 – July 3, 2009 at the Maine College of Art, Portland ME. Photographs courtesy of the University of Southern Maine Jean Byers Sampson Center for Diversity in Maine.Features nearly one hundred photographs by Annette Dragon documenting queer activism in Maine over the last two decades of the 20th century. Also includes new writing on archiving, queer activism and re-imagining radical queer futures by Susie R. Bock, Erica Rand and Ryan Conrad.
A World of Becoming
William E. Connolly - 2009
Connolly outlines a political philosophy suited to a world whose powers of creative evolution include and exceed the human estate. This is a world composed of multiple interacting systems, including those of climate change, biological evolution, economic practices, and geological formations. Such open systems, set on different temporal registers of stability and instability, periodically resonate together to produce profound, unpredictable changes. To engage such a world reflectively is to feel pressure to alter established practices of politics, ethics, and spirituality. In pursuing such a course, Connolly draws inspiration from philosophers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Alfred North Whitehead, and Gilles Deleuze, as well as the complexity theorist of biology Stuart Kauffman and the theologian Catherine Keller.Attunement to a world of becoming, Connolly argues, may help us address dangerous resonances between global finance capital, cross-regional religious resentments, neoconservative ideology, and the 24-hour mass media. Coming to terms with subliminal changes in the contemporary experience of time that challenge traditional images can help us grasp how these movements have arisen and perhaps even inspire creative counter-movements. The book closes with the chapter “The Theorist and the Seer,” in which Connolly draws insights from early Greek ideas of the Seer and a Jerry Lewis film, The Nutty Professor, to inform the theory enterprise today.
The End of Belonging: Untold Stories of Leaving Home and the Psychology of Global Relocation
Greg Madison - 2009
It also warns us that there may be an unexpected psychological effect from thinking we can just live everywhere. We may end up homeless. The 21st century could herald 'the end of belonging'.
Foundations of Critical Race Theory in Education
Edward Taylor - 2009
More recently, CRT has proven an important analytic tool in the field of education, offering critical perspectives on race, and the causes, consequences and manifestations of race, racism, inequity, and the dynamics of power and privilege in schooling. This groundbreaking anthology is the first to pull together both the foundational writings in the field and more recent scholarship on the cultural and racial politics of schooling. A comprehensive introduction provides an overview of the history and tenets of CRT in education. Each section then seeks to explicate ideological contestation of race in education and to create new, alternative accounts. In so doing, this landmark publication not only documents the progress to date of the CRT movement, it acts to further spur developments in education.
Staring: How We Look
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson - 2009
In the first book of its kind, Garland-Thomson defines staring, explores the factors that motivate it, and considers the targets and the effects of the stare. While borrowing from psychology and biology to help explain why the impulse to stare is so powerful, she also enlarges and complicates these formulations with examples from the realm of imaginative culture. Featuring over forty illustrations, Staring captures the stimulating combination of symbolic, material and emotional factors that make staring so irresistible while endeavoring to shift the usual response to staring, shame, into an engaged self-consideration. Elegant and provocative, this unique study advances new ways of thinking about visuality and the body that will appeal to readers who are interested in the overlap between the humanities and human behaviors.
Essential Writings of Karl Marx: Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Communist Manifesto, Wage Labor and Capital, Critique of the Gotha Program
Karl Marx - 2009
Preface gives an easy-to-understand introduction to Marxist philosophy. Includes the complete texts of "The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844", "The Communist Manifesto", "Wage Labor and Capital", and "Critique of the Gotha Program".
Analysing Policy: What's the Problem Represented to Be?
Carol Lee Bacchi - 2009
The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India
Sumathi Ramaswamy - 2009
Soon after Mother India’s emergence in the late nineteenth century, artists, both famous and amateur, began to picture her in various media, incorporating the map of India into her visual persona. The images they produced enabled patriotic men and women in a heterogeneous population to collectively visualize India, affectively identify with it, and even become willing to surrender their lives for it. Filled with illustrations, including 100 in color, The Goddess and the Nation draws on visual studies, gender studies, and the history of cartography to offer a rigorous analysis of Mother India’s appearance in painting, print, poster art, and pictures from the late nineteenth century to the present.By exploring the mutual entanglement of the scientifically mapped image of India and a (Hindu) mother/goddess, Sumathi Ramaswamy reveals Mother India as a figure who relies on the British colonial mapped image of her dominion to distinguish her from the other goddesses of India, and to guarantee her novel status as embodiment, sign, and symbol of national territory. Providing an exemplary critique of ideologies of gender and the science of cartography, Ramaswamy demonstrates that images do not merely reflect history; they actively make it. In The Goddess and the Nation, she teaches us about pictorial ways of learning the form of the nation, of how to live with it—and ultimately to die for it.
Agnes Martin
Lynne Cooke - 2009
Martin attributed her grid-based works to metaphysical motivations, lending a serene complexity to her oeuvre that has defied any easy categorization. Perhaps for this reason, critical and scholarly analysis of her paintings has been scarce—until now. This important new anthology brings together the most current scholarship on Martin’s paintings by twelve multidisciplinary essayists who consider various aspects of the artist’s four-decade career. Organized by Dia Art Foundation, whose extensive holdings of Martin’s paintings and ambitions to support in-depth research on the works are unparalleled, the publication brings renewed focus and energy to Martin’s career and her contributions to the art historical narrative.
Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique
Bliss Cua Lim - 2009
Despite the historicity of clock-time itself, the modern concept of time is considered universal and culturally neutral. What Walter Benjamin called “homogeneous, empty time” founds the modern notions of progress and a uniform global present in which the past and other forms of time consciousness are seen as superseded. In Translating Time, Bliss Cua Lim argues that fantastic cinema depicts the coexistence of other modes of being alongside and within the modern present, disclosing multiple “immiscible temporalities” that strain against the modern concept of homogeneous time. In this wide-ranging study—encompassing Asian American video (On Cannibalism), ghost films from the New Cinema movements of Hong Kong and the Philippines (Rouge, Itim, Haplos), Hollywood remakes of Asian horror films (Ju-on, The Grudge, A Tale of Two Sisters) and a Filipino horror film cycle on monstrous viscera suckers (Aswang)—Lim conceptualizes the fantastic as a form of temporal translation. The fantastic translates supernatural agency in secular terms while also exposing an untranslatable remainder, thereby undermining the fantasy of a singular national time and emphasizing shifting temporalities of transnational reception.Lim interweaves scholarship on visuality with postcolonial historiography. She draws on Henri Bergson’s understanding of cinema as both implicated in homogeneous time and central to its critique, as well as on postcolonial thought linking the ideology of progress to imperialist expansion. At stake in this project are more ethical forms of understanding time that refuse to domesticate difference as anachronism. While supernaturalism is often disparaged as a vestige of primitive or superstitious thought, Lim suggests an alternative interpretation of the fantastic as a mode of resistance to the ascendancy of homogeneous time and a starting-point for more ethical temporal imaginings.
Changing Difference: The Question of the Feminine in Philosophy
Catherine Malabou - 2009
Violence alone confers her being—whether it is domestic and social violence or theoretical violence. The critique of ‘essentialism’ (i.e. there is no specifically feminine essence) proposed by both gender theory and deconstruction is just one more twist in the ontological negation of the feminine.Contrary to all expectations, however, this ever more radical hollowing out of woman within intellectual movements supposed to protect her, this assimilation of woman to a ‘being nothing’, clears the way for a new beginning. Let us now assume the thought of ‘woman’ as an empty but resistant essence, an essence that is resistant precisely because it is empty, a resistance that strikes down the impossibility of its own disappearance once and for all. To ask what remains of woman after the sacrifice of her being is to signal a new era in the feminist struggle, changing the terms of the battle to go beyond both essentialism and anti-essentialism.In this groundbreaking work Catherine Malabou begins with philosophy, asking: what is the life of a woman philosopher?
The Mirror, the Window, and the Telescope: How Renaissance Linear Perspective Changed Our Vision of the Universe
Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr. - 2009
Edgerton brings fresh insight to a subject of perennial interest to the history of art and science in the West: the birth of linear perspective. Edgerton retells the fascinating story of how perspective emerged in early fifteenth-century Florence, growing out of an artistic and religious context in which devout Christians longed for divine presence in their daily lives. And yet, ironically, its discovery would have a profound effect not only on the history of art but on the history of science and technology, ultimately undermining the very medieval Christian cosmic view that gave rise to it in the first place. Among Edgerton's cast of characters is Filippo Brunelleschi, who first demonstrated how a familiar object could be painted in a picture exactly as it appeared in a mirror reflection. Brunelleschi communicated the principles of this new perspective to his artist friends Donatello, Masaccio, Masolino, and Fra Angelico. But it was the humanist scholar Leon Battista Alberti who codified Brunelleschi's perspective rules into a simple formula that even mathematically disadvantaged artists could understand.By looking through a window the geometric beauties of this world were revealed without the theological implications of a mirror reflection. Alberti's treatise, On Painting, spread the new concept throughout Italy and transalpine Europe, even influencing later scientists including Galileo Galilei. In fact, it was Galileo's telescope, called at the time a perspective tube, that revealed the earth to be not a mirror reflection of the heavens, as Brunelleschi had advocated, but just the other way around. Building on the knowledge he has accumulated over his distinguished career, Edgerton has written the definitive, up-to-date work on linear perspective, showing how this simple artistic tool did indeed change our present vision of the universe.
Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health, and Illness in the U.S.
Adele E. ClarkeNatalie Boero - 2009
political economy by the end of the Second World War, the first “social transformation of American medicine.” Then, in an ongoing process called medicalization, the jurisdiction of medicine began expanding, redefining certain areas once deemed moral, social, or legal problems (such as alcoholism, drug addiction, and obesity) as medical problems. The editors of this important collection argue that since the mid-1980s, dramatic, and especially technoscientific, changes in the constitution, organization, and practices of contemporary biomedicine have coalesced into biomedicalization, the second major transformation of American medicine. This volume offers in-depth analyses and case studies along with the groundbreaking essay in which the editors first elaborated their theory of biomedicalization.Contributors. Natalie Boero, Adele E. Clarke, Jennifer R. Fishman, Jennifer Ruth Fosket, Kelly Joyce, Jonathan Kahn, Laura Mamo, Jackie Orr, Elianne Riska, Janet K. Shim, Sara Shostak
Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars
John Henry McDowell - 2009
This is a decisive volume that seeks to heal the divisions in contemporary philosophy.
The Corporeal Turn: An Interdisciplinary Reader
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone - 2009
The corporeal turn is envisioned as an ever-expanding, continuous, and open-ended spiral of inquiry in which deeper and deeper understandings are forged, understandings that in each instance themselves call out for deeper and deeper inquiries. The first thirteen essays have already been published as distinct articles. The two new essays constituting the final two chapters are testimony to this open-ended spiral of inquiry.
Politics and the Imagination
Raymond Geuss - 2009
Even the most conservative defenses of the status quo, Raymond Geuss argues, require imaginative acts of some kind. In this collection of recent essays, including his most overtly political writing yet, Geuss explores the role of imagination in politics, particularly how imaginative constructs interact with political reality. He uses decisions about the war in Iraq to explore the peculiar ways in which politicians can be deluded and citizens can misunderstand their leaders. He also examines critically what he sees as one of the most serious delusions of western political thinking--the idea that a human society is always best conceived as a closed system obeying fixed rules. And, in essays on Don Quixote, museums, Celan's poetry, Heidegger's brother Fritz, Richard Rorty, and bourgeois philosophy, Geuss reflects on how cultural artifacts can lead us to embrace or reject conventional assumptions about the world. While paying particular attention to the relative political roles played by rule-following, utilitarian calculations of interest, and aspirations to lead a collective life of a certain kind, Geuss discusses a wide range of related issues, including the distance critics need from their political systems, the extent to which history can enlighten politics, and the possibility of utopian thinking in a world in which action retains its urgency.
The Affective Life of Law: Legal Modernism and the Literary Imagination
Ravit Reichman - 2009
Through readings of Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, and Hannah Arendt, as well as legal opinions and treatises, this book considers both law and literature as necessary complements in the efforts to take responsibility for the loss and damage inflicted by war. Ravit Reichman expertly charts the terrain that underwrites the law, proposing that the traumas, anxieties, and hopes that shape a culture's relationship to justice are realized in more than practical legal terms alone.Between the world wars, traditional notions of responsibility proved inadequate to address postwar trauma. Legal changes, following changes in literary language, placed new demands on writers to tell the story of law's response to wartime atrocities, and literature began to encourage readers to imagine the world not as it is, but as it ought to be. Our understanding of concepts such as Crimes Against Humanity or Crimes Against the Jewish People is a legacy of modernism's relationship to narrative and subjectivity. The Affective Life of Law examines the inheritance of this legacy.
The Piano Improvisation Handbook: A Practical Guide to Musical Invention [With CD (Audio)]
Carl Humphries - 2009
Whereas most books offer little more than models for imitation and exercises for practicing, this one adopts an approach specifically designed to encourage and enable independent creative exploration. The book contains a series of graded tutorial sections with musical examples on CD, as well as an appendix listing useful scales, chords, voicings, and progressions across all keys, a bibliography, and a discography. In addition to sections outlining how melody, harmony, rhythm, texture, and form work in improvised piano music, giving distinctive emphasis to the interconnectedness of classical and jazz improvisation, there are sections devoted to explaining how ideas can be developed into continuous music and to exploring the process of finding a personal style.
Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities
Holly Furneaux - 2009
It demonstrates that, rather than representing a largely conventional, conservative view of sexuality and gender, he presents a distinctly queer corpus, everywhere fascinated by the diversity of gender roles, the expandability of notions of the family, and the complex multiplicity of sexual desire. The book examines the long overlooked figures of bachelor fathers, martially resistant men, and male nurses. It explores Dickens's attention to a longing, not to reproduce, but to nurture, his interest in healing touch, and his articulation, over the course of his career, of homoerotic desire.Holly Furneaux places Dickens's writing in a broad literary and social context, alongside authors including Bulwer-Lytton, Tennyson, Braddon, Collins, and Whitman, to make a case for Dickens's central position in queer literary history. Examining novels, poetry, life-writing, journalism, and legal and political debates, Queer Dickens argues that this eminent Victorian can direct us to the ways in which his culture could, and did, comfortably accommodate homoeroticism and families of choice. Further, it contends that Dickens's portrayals of nurturing masculinity and his concern with touch and affect between men challenge what we have been used to thinking about Victorian ideals of maleness.Queer Dickens intervenes in current debates about the Victorians (neither so punitive nor so prudish as we once imagined) and about the methodologies of the histories of the family and of sexuality. It makes the case for a more optimistic, nurturing, and life-affirming trajectory in queer theory.
Dada's Women
Ruth Hemus - 2009
This fascinating book challenges that assumption, focusing on the creative contributions made to Dada by five pivotal European women. Ruth Hemus establishes the ways in which Emmy Hennings and Sophie Taeuber in Zurich, Hannah Höch in Berlin, and Suzanne Duchamp and Céline Arnauld in Paris made important interventions across fine art, literature, and performance. Hemus highlights how their techniques and approaches were characteristic of Dada’s rebellion against aesthetic and cultural conventions, analyzes the impact of gender on each woman’s work, and shows convincingly that they were innovators and not imitators. In its new and original perspective on Dada, the book broadens our appreciation and challenges accepted understandings of this revolutionary avant-garde movement.
Words Without Pictures
Alex Klein - 2009
Every month for a year, beginning in November 2007, an artist, educator, critic or curator was invited to contribute a short unillustrated essay about an aspect of emerging photography. Each piece was available on the Words Without Pictures website for one month and was accompanied by a discussion forum focused on its specific topic. Over the course of its month-long "life," each essay received both invited and unsolicited responses from a wide range of interested parties. All of these essays, responses and other provocations are gathered together here. Previously issued as a print-on-demand title, we are pleased to present "Words Without Pictures" to the trade for the first time as part of the "Aperture Ideas" series. The contributors are Amy Adler, George Baker, Christopher Bedford, Walead Beshty, Sarah Charlesworth, Charlotte Cotton, John Divola, Shannon Ebner, Jason Evans, Harrell Fletcher, Paul Graham, Leslie Hewitt, Darius Himes, Soo Kim, Sze Tsung Leong, Miranda Lichtenstein, Sharon Lockhart, Allan McCollum, Kevin Moore, Carter Mull, Marisa Olson, Arthur Ou, Anthony Pearson, Michael Queenland, Allen Ruppersberg, Alex Slade, A.L. Steiner, Penelope Umbrico, James Welling, Charlie White, Mark Wyse and Amir Zaki.
Pleasure Consuming Medicine: The Queer Politics of Drugs
Kane Race - 2009
Alongside the party outfits, drugs, lights, and DJs is a volunteer care team trained to deal with the drug-related emergencies that occasionally occur. But when police appear at the gates with drug-detecting dogs, mild panic ensues. Some patrons down all their drugs, heightening their risk of overdose. Others try their luck at the gates. After twenty-six attendees are arrested with small quantities of illicit substances, the party is shut down and the remaining partygoers disperse into the city streets. For Kane Race, the Azure Party drug search is emblematic of a broader technology of power that converges on embodiment, consumption, and pleasure in the name of health. In Pleasure Consuming Medicine, he illuminates the symbolic role that the illicit drug user fulfills for the neoliberal state. As he demonstrates, the state’s performance of moral sovereignty around substances designated “illicit” bears little relation to the actual dangers of drug consumption; in fact, it exacerbates those dangers. Race does not suggest that drug use is risk-free, good, or bad, but rather that the regulation of drugs has become a site where ideological lessons about the propriety of consumption are propounded. He argues that official discourses about drug use conjure a space where the neoliberal state can be seen to be policing the “excesses” of the amoral market. He explores this normative investment in drug regimes and some “counterpublic health” measures that have emerged in response. These measures, which Race finds in certain pragmatic gay men’s health and HIV prevention practices, are not cloaked in moralistic language, and they do not cast health as antithetical to pleasure.
Night Music: Essays on Music 1928-1962
Theodor W. Adorno - 2009
Adorno is best known for his association with the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, he began his career as a composer and successful music critic. Night Music presents the first complete English translations of two collections of texts compiled by German philosopher and musicologist Adorno—Moments musicaux, containing essays written between 1928 and 1962, and Theory of New Music, a group of texts written between 1929 and 1955.In Moments musicaux, Adorno echoes Schubert’s eponymous cycle, with its emphasis on aphorism, and offers lyrical reflections on music of the past and his own time. The essays include extended aesthetic analyses that demonstrate Adorno’s aim to apply high philosophical standards to the study of music. Theory of New Music, as its title indicates, presents Adorno’s thoughts and theories on the composition, reception, and analysis of the music that was being written around him. His extensive philosophical writing ultimately prevented him from pursuing the compositional career he had once envisaged, but his view of the modern music of the time is not simply that of a theorist, but clearly also that of a composer. Though his advocacy of the Second Viennese School, comprising composer Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils, is well known, many of his writings in this field have remained obscure. Collected in their entirety for the first time in English, the insightful texts in Night Music show the breadth of Adorno’s musical understanding and reveal an overlooked side to this significant thinker.
Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir: Ready for Her Close-Up
Julie Grossman - 2009
In the context of nineteenth-century Victorinoir and close readings of original-cycle film noir, Julie Grossman argues that the presence of the 'femme fatale' figure, as she is understood in film criticism and popular culture, is drastically over-emphasized and has helped to sustain cultural obsessions with 'bad' women.
The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality
David Couzens Hoy - 2009
A confrontation with the passing of time and with human finitude runs through the history of philosophy as an ultimate concern. In this genealogy of the concept of temporality, David Hoy examines the emergence in post-Kantian continental philosophy of a focus on the lived experience of the "time of our lives" rather than on the time of the universe. The purpose is to see how phenomenological and poststructuralist philosophers have tried to locate the source of temporality, how they have analyzed time's passing, and how they have depicted our relation to time once it has been--in a Proustian sense--regained. Hoy engages competing theoretical tactics for reconciling us to our fleeting temporality, drawing on work by Kant, Heidegger, Hegel, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, Gadamer, Sartre, Bourdieu, Foucault, Bergson, Deleuze, Zizek, and Derrida. Hoy considers four existential strategies for coping with the apparent flow of temporality, including Proust's passive and Walter Benjamin's active reconciliation through memory, Zizek's critique of poststructuralist politics, Foucault's confrontation with the temporality of power, and Deleuze's account of Aion and Chronos. He concludes by exploring whether a dual temporalization could be what constitutes the singular "time of our lives."
The Engaged Intellect: Philosophical Essays
John Henry McDowell - 2009
The combination of philosophical breadth with dialectical depth - of intricate argumentative detail with overall philosophical coherence - marks McDowell as one of the most compelling philosophers of our time.
Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics
Steven Shaviro - 2009
What if Whitehead, instead of Heidegger, had set the agenda for postmodern thought? Heidegger asks, "Why is there something, rather than nothing?" Whitehead asks, "How is it that there is always something new?" In a world where everything from popular music to DNA is being sampled and recombined, argues Shaviro, Whitehead's question is the truly urgent one. Without Criteria is Shaviro's experiment in rethinking postmodern theory, especially the theory of aesthetics, from a point of view that hearkens back to Whitehead rather than Heidegger. In working through the ideas of Whitehead and Deleuze, Shaviro also appeals to Kant, arguing that certain aspects of Kant's thought pave the way for the philosophical "constructivism" embraced by both Whitehead and Deleuze. Kant, Whitehead, and Deleuze are not commonly grouped together, but the juxtaposition of them in Without Criteria helps to shed light on a variety of issues that are of concern to contemporary art and media practices.
Having Words
Denise Scott Brown - 2009
In between, eight other essays from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, offer insights not only into Scott Brown's evolving architectural imagination but touch upon the changing collective ideas and aspirations of design education and practice.-Description from William Stout Architectural Books
James Turrell: Geometry of Light
Ursula Sinnreich - 2009
A lifelong explorer of perceptual psychology, Turrell is undoubtedly the most influential contemporary light artist, as well as one of America's most popular artists. In Geometry of Light, the first significant Turrell survey in many years, an extraordinary body of work covering several decades is assessed. At the book's center is the series of works known as Sky Spaces, a signature Turrell conception in which the sky is made to seem "on top of" the room's ceiling, and which has become a mini-genre unto itself within light art. Academic, philosophical and art-historical essays explicate these perceptual spaces, whose evolution is closely allied to Turrell's development of the Roden Crater Project in the Arizona desert, where he began constructing an observatory in 1974. Also included is the latest installation, "Skyspace/Camera Obscura Space," which Turrell conceived for the Zentrum f�r Internationale Lichtkunst in Unna, Germany. As an undergraduate, James Turrell (born in Los Angeles, 1943) studied psychology and mathematics, transitioning to art only at MFA level. A practicing Quaker, one of his earliest memories is of his grandmother inviting him to "go inside and greet the light" at Quaker meetings. The recipient of several prestigious awards such as Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, Turrell lives in Arizona.
Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics
Hans Rainer Sepp - 2009
The c- tinuing focus has thus been on knowledge and being. But if one began without those interests and with an understanding of the phenomenological style of approach, one might well see that art and aesthetics make up the most natural eld to be approached phenomenologically. Contributions to this eld have continually been made in the phenomenological tradition from very early on, but, so to speak, along the side. (The situation has been similar with phenomenological ethics. ) A great deal of thought about art and aesthetics has nevertheless accumulated during a century and a handbook like the present one is long overdue. The project of this handbook began in conversations over dinner in Sepp s apa- ment in Baden-Baden at one evening of the hot European summer in the year 2003. As things worked out, he knew more about whom to ask and how much space to allocate to each entry and Embree knew more about how to conduct the inviting, preliminary editing, and prodding of contributors who were late returning their criticized drafts and copyedited entries and was able to invest the time and other resources from his endowed chair. That process took longer than anticipated and there were additional unfortunate delays due to factors beyond the editors s control."
The Mighty Scot: Nation, Gender, and the Nineteenth-Century Mystique of Scottish Masculinity
Maureen M. Martin - 2009
Maureen M. Martin analyzes portrayals of Scottish masculinity over the course of the nineteenth century and looks at how the mystique of Scottish masculinity arose, the role it played in conceptions of English national identity, and its impact on Scots' attempts to construct a national identity of their own. This engaging book argues that the intricately woven concerns of nationality and masculinity are at the heart of the problematic meanings of Scotland, England, and manliness in nineteenth-century Britain.
Frenchness and the African Diaspora: Identity and Uprising in Contemporary France
Charles Tshimanga - 2009
More than 10,000 automobiles were burned or stoned, hundreds of public buildings were vandalized or burned to the ground, and hundreds of people were injured. Charles Tshimanga, Didier Gondola, Peter J. Bloom, and a group of international scholars seek to understand the causes and consequences of these momentous events, while examining how the concept of Frenchness has been reshaped by the African diaspora in France and the colonial legacy.
Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Work of Julia Kristeva
Kelly Oliver - 2009
Presenting Kristeva's thought as the sustained interrogation of a political problematic, the contributors argue that her use of psychoanalysis and aesthetics offers significant insight into social and political issues that would otherwise remain concealed. The collection addresses the entirety of Kristeva's oeuvre, from her earliest work on poetic language to her most recent work on female genius, and it includes two previously untranslated essays by Kristeva, as well as original contributions from scholars working in several countries and a variety of disciplines.
Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze's Film Philosophy
D.N. Rodowick - 2009
Author of more than twenty books on literature, music, and the visual arts, Deleuze published the first volume of his two-volume study of film, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, in 1983 and the second volume, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, in 1985. Since their publication, these books have had a profound impact on the study of film and philosophy. Film, media, and cultural studies scholars still grapple today with how they can most productively incorporate Deleuze’s thought.The first new collection of critical studies on Deleuze’s cinema writings in nearly a decade, Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy provides original essays that evaluate the continuing significance of Deleuze’s film theories, accounting systematically for the ways in which they have influenced the investigation of contemporary visual culture and offering new directions for research.Contributors: Raymond Bellour, Centre Nationale de Recherches Scientifiques; Ronald Bogue, U of Georgia; Giuliana Bruno, Harvard U; Ian Buchanan, Cardiff U; James K. Chandler, U of Chicago; Tom Conley, Harvard U; Amy Herzog, CUNY; András Bálint Kovács, Eötvös Loránd U; Patricia MacCormack, Anglia Ruskin U; Timothy Murray, Cornell U; Dorothea Olkowski, U of Colorado; John Rajchman, Columbia U; Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, U Paris VIII; Garrett Stewart, U of Iowa; Damian Sutton, Glasgow School of Art; Melinda Szaloky, UC Santa Barbara.
Practical Intelligence and the Virtues
Daniel C. Russell - 2009
In this new book, Daniel Russell explores two important hopes for such an approach to moral thought: that starting from the virtues should cast light on what makes an action right, and that notions like character, virtue, and vice should yield a plausible picture of human psychology. Russell argues that the key to each of these hopes is an understanding of the cognitive and deliberative skills involved in the virtues. If right action is defined in terms of acting generously or kindly, then these virtues must involve skills for determining what the kind or generous thing to do would be on a given occasion. Likewise, Russell argues that understanding virtuous action as the intelligent pursuit of virtuous goals yields a promising picture of the psychology of virtue. This book develops an Aristotelian account of the virtue of practical intelligence or 'phronesis'--an excellence of deliberating and making choices--which Russell argues is a necessary part of every virtue. This emphasis on the roots of the virtues in the practical intellect contrasts with ambivalence about the practical intellect in much recent work on the virtues--a trend Russell argues is ultimately perilous for virtue theory. This book also takes a penetrating look at issues like the unity of the virtues, responsibility for character, and that elusive figure, 'the virtuous person'. Written in a clear and careful manner, Practical Intelligence and the Virtues will appeal to philosophers and students alike in moral philosophy and moral psychology.
Intersex and After
Iain MorlandApril M. Herndon - 2009
By examining the ethics of medical treatment and the repercussions of intersex surgery, “Intersex and After” demonstrates how biology, activism, law, morality, and ethics have a shared interest in the relationship between intersexuality and the meaning of sex, gender, and sexuality.In one essay, two prominent intersex activists reflect on their often controversial work on behalf of the Intersex Society of North America to achieve change in medical policy over the last ten years. Other essays explore the impact of the categorization of intersexuality as a “disorder of sex development” and of the treatment guidelines published in 2006 by the Consortium on the Management of Disorders of Sex Development. An essay by the issue’s guest editor takes a comprehensive look at the relationship between intersexuality and the study of gender and sexuality. The issue also includes a portfolio of photographs as well as a roundtable discussion that brings together intersex experts from medicine, law, psychology, and the humanities.Contributors. Sarah M. Creighton, Alice D. Dreger, Ellen K. Feder, Julie A. Greenberg, April Herndon, Iain Morland, Katrina Roen, Vernon A. Rosario, Nikki Sullivan, Del LaGrace Volcano
The Retrieval of the Beautiful: Thinking Through Merleau-Ponty’s Aesthetics
Galen A. Johnson - 2009
Although Merleau-Ponty seldom spoke directly of beauty, his philosophy is essentially about the beautiful.In Johnson’s formulation, the ontology of Flesh as element and the ontology of the Beautiful as elemental are folded together, for Desire, Love, and Beauty are part of the fabric of the world’s element, Flesh itself, the term at which Merleau-Ponty arrived to replace Substance, Matter, or Life as the name of Being.Merleau-Ponty’s Eye and Mind is at the core of the book, so Johnson engages, as Merleau-Ponty did, the writings and visual work of Paul Cézanne, Auguste Rodin, and Paul Klee, as well as Rilke’s commentary on Cézanne and Rodin. From these widely varying aesthetics emerge the fundamental themes of the retrieval of the beautiful: desire, repetition, difference, rhythm, and the sublime. The third part of Johnson’s book takes each of these up in turn, bringing Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic thinking into dialogue with classical philosophy as well as Sartre, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Deleuze. Johnson concludes his final chapter with a direct dialogue with Kant and Merleau-Ponty, and also Lyotard, on the subject of the beautiful and the sublime. As we experience with Rodin’s Balzac, beauty and the sublime blend into one another when the beautiful grows powerful, majestic, mysterious, and transcendent.
Beyond Red and Blue: How Twelve Political Philosophies Shape American Debates
Peter S. Wenz - 2009
But in fact, writes Peter Wenz in Beyond Red and Blue, Americans do not divide neatly into two ideological camps of red/blue, Republican/Democrat, right/left. In real life, as Wenz shows, different ideologies can converge on certain issues; people from the right and left can support the same policy for different reasons. Thus, for example, libertarian-leaning Republicans can oppose the Patriot Act's encroachment on personal freedom and social conservatives can support gay marriage on the grounds that it strengthens the institution of marriage.Wenz maps out twelve political philosophies--ranging from theocracy and free-market conservatism to feminism and cosmopolitanism--on which Americans draw when taking political positions. He then turns his focus to some of America's most controversial issues and shows how ideologically diverse coalitions can emerge on such hot-button topics as extending life by artificial means, the war on drugs, the war on terrorism, affirmative action, abortion, same-sex marriage, health care, immigration, and globalization.Awareness of these twelve political philosophies, Wenz argues, can help activists enlist allies, citizens better understand politics and elections, and all of us define our own political identities.
The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan: Right-Wing Movements and National Politics
Rory McVeigh - 2009
In sharp contrast to earlier studies of the KKK, McVeigh treats the Klan as it saw itself-as a national organization concerned with national issues.
Self-Liberation: A Guide to Strategic Planning for Action to End a Dictatorship or Other Oppression
Gene Sharp - 2009
This document is not only relevant to people facing internal dictatorships. It is also meant to be useful to people facing any kind of oppression. This short document cannot include adequate in-depth presentations of all the knowledge and ideas needed for strategic planning of a nonviolent struggle for liberation. Therefore, interspersed in this text are references to selected published readings covering those important topics. Careful study of these selected readings, available for download below, in the sequence recommended is essential. They contain much of the understandings, knowledge, and insights that may be useful in the preparation of strategies of liberation.
Myth of the Silent Woman: Moroccan Women Writers
Suellen Diaconoff - 2009
The Myth of the Silent Woman examines representative French-language texts from Moroccan women writers. Suellen Diaconoff situates these works in a discourse of social justice and reform, arguing that they contribute to the emerging national debate on democracy and help to create new public spaces of discourse and participation.In novels and short stories, essays and memoirs, including one powerful text by a dissident and former political prisoner, these authors contest hegemonic systems of thought and practice, reappraise traditional spaces and limits, shatter taboos and transgress borders. In so doing, they profoundly undermine easy assumptions about Arab women, feminism, and democracy, while boldly challenging the stereotype of the silent woman.
Higher Topos Theory (Am-170)
Jacob Lurie - 2009
In Higher Topos Theory, Jacob Lurie presents the foundations of this theory, using the language of weak Kan complexes introduced by Boardman and Vogt, and shows how existing theorems in algebraic topology can be reformulated and generalized in the theory's new language. The result is a powerful theory with applications in many areas of mathematics.The book's first five chapters give an exposition of the theory of infinity-categories that emphasizes their role as a generalization of ordinary categories. Many of the fundamental ideas from classical category theory are generalized to the infinity-categorical setting, such as limits and colimits, adjoint functors, ind-objects and pro-objects, locally accessible and presentable categories, Grothendieck fibrations, presheaves, and Yoneda's lemma. A sixth chapter presents an infinity-categorical version of the theory of Grothendieck topoi, introducing the notion of an infinity-topos, an infinity-category that resembles the infinity-category of topological spaces in the sense that it satisfies certain axioms that codify some of the basic principles of algebraic topology. A seventh and final chapter presents applications that illustrate connections between the theory of higher topoi and ideas from classical topology.
Possession: Jung's Comparative Anatomy of the Psyche
Craig E. Stephenson - 2009
Analogizing the concept - lining it up comparatively beside the history of religion, anthropology, psychiatry, and even drama and film criticism - offers not a naive syncretism, but enlightening possibilities along the borders of these diverse disciplines.An original, wide-ranging exploration of phenomena both ancient and modern, this book offers a conceptual bridge between psychology and anthropology, it challenges psychiatry to culturally contextualize its diagnostic manual, and it posits a much more fluid, pluralistic and embodied notion of selfhood.
The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture
Bernice M. Murphy - 2009
An examination of the way American suburbia has been depicted in Gothic and horror films, television and literature from 1948 to the present day, in which Bernice Murphy demonstrates that Gothic depictions of suburbia provide an intriguing glimpse into the way modern American society views itself.
Voids/Vides: A Retrospective of Empty Exhibitions
Jon Hendricks - 2009
The means by which artists and thinkers have dismantled conventions of reality and perception with acts of emptying, removing, destroying, or emphasizing nothingness, are numerous, as this massive survey testifies. This paperback edition of "Voids" serves as a catalogue to the Centre Pompidou's retrospective of empty exhibitions, curated by the dream team of Laurent Le Bon, John Armleder, Mathieu Copeland, Gustav Metzger, Mai-Thu Perret and Clive Phillpot, and featuring Yves Klein, Robert Barry, Art & Language, Stanley Brouwn, Laurie Parsons, Bethan Huws, Robert Irwin, Maria Eichhorn and Roman Ondak; but it also supplies a crucial anthology of texts, with contributions by artists and writers such as Stuart Comer, Brian O'Doherty, Ralph Rugoff, Jon Savage, Sarah Wilson, Peter Downsbrough, Lawrence Weiner, Sherrie Levine, Seth Price, Trisha Donnelly, Wade Guyton and Olivier Mosset, among others. Available in both paperback and hardcover editions.
Handbook on Poverty + Inequality
Jonathan Haughton - 2009
The 'Handbook' begins with an explanatory text that includes numerous examples, multiple-choice questions to ensure active learning, and extensive practical exercises that use Stata statistical software. The 'Handbook' will help researchers and evaluators in charge of preparing background materials for Poverty Reducation Strategy Papers (PRSPs) and those responsible for monitoring and evaluating poverty reduction programs and policies. The World Bank Institute has used the 'Handbook' in training workshops in countries from Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, to Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand, to Malawi and Tanzania, as well as in university courses on poverty and in distance education courses with participants from Asian and African countries. The 'Handbook' has also been used in an online asynchronous course with more than 200 participants worldwide. Using the feedback from these courses, the authors have created a clearly-written text that balances rigor with practicality. The 'Handbook' is designed to be accessible to people with a university-level background in science or the social sciences. It is an invaluable tool for policy analysts, researchers, college students, and government officials working on policy issues related to poverty and inequality.
For Love of the Father: A Psychoanalytic Study of Religious Terrorism
Ruth Stein - 2009
She argues that most Islamic extremists undertake destructive and self-destructive actions not out of blind hatred, nor even for political gain, but to achieve an explosive merger with a transcendent awesome Father, God. The extremist is thus motivated more by his love for God than his hatred of the infidel. The contemporary Islamic terrorist kills "God's enemies" to express his intoxication with and complete submission to the God-idea. Stein further shows that this same leitmotif of filial submission and sacrifice runs through patriarchal monotheism in general.
Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture
Carrie Noland - 2009
Arguing against the constructivist metaphor of bodily inscription dominant since Foucault, Noland maintains that kinesthetic experience, produced by acts of embodied gesturing, places pressure on the conditioning a body receives, encouraging variations in cultural practice that cannot otherwise be explained.Drawing on work in disciplines as diverse as dance and movement theory, phenomenology, cognitive science, and literary criticism, Noland argues that kinesthesia--feeling the body move--encourages experiment, modification, and, at times, rejection of the routine. Noland privileges corporeal performance and the sensory experience it affords in order to find a way beyond constructivist theory's inability to produce a convincing account of agency. She observes that despite the impact of social conditioning, human beings continue to invent surprising new ways of altering the inscribed behaviors they are called on to perform. Through lucid close readings of Marcel Mauss, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Bill Viola, Andr Leroi-Gourhan, Henri Michaux, Judith Butler, Frantz Fanon, Jacques Derrida, and contemporary digital artist Camille Utterback, Noland illustrates her provocative thesis, addressing issues of concern to scholars in critical theory, performance studies, anthropology, and visual studies.
Bakhtin and the Movies: New Ways of Understanding Hollywood Film
Martin Flanagan - 2009
Martin Flanagan uses Bakhtins notions of dialogism, chronotope and polyphony to address fundamental questions about film form and reception, focusing particularly on the way cinematic narrative utilizes time and space in its very construction.
The Graph of Desire: Using the Work of Jacques Lacan
Alfredo Eidelzstein - 2009
Considering that the Spanish translation has some problems, certain terms and paragraphs from the original French version have been translated by the author, in order to try to understand what Lacan affirms.The recordings of the course lectures constitute the basis for this book; they have been barely modified, for their colloquial style will not interfere with the reading.
Developmental Social Cognitive Neuroscience
Philip David Zelazo - 2009
No one any longer doubts that infants are born with a biologically based head start in accomplishing their important life tasks genetic resources, if you will, that are exploited differently in different contexts. Nevertheless, it is also true that socially relevant neural functions develop slowly during childhood and that this development is owed to complex interactions among genes, social and cultural environments, and children's own behavior. A key challenge lies in finding appropriate ways of describing these complex interactions and the way in which they unfold in real developmental time. This is the challenge that motivates research in developmental social cognitive neuroscience.The chapters in this book highlight the latest and best research in this emerging field, and they cover a range of topics, including the typical and atypical development of imitation, impulsivity, novelty seeking, risk taking, self and social awareness, emotion regulation, moral reasoning, and executive function. Also addressed are the potential limitations of a neuroscientific approach to the development of social cognition.Intended for researchers and advanced students in neuroscience and developmental, cognitive, and social psychology, this book is appropriate for graduate seminars and upper-level undergraduate courses on social cognitive neuroscience, developmental neuroscience, social development, and cognitive development.
Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial
Parama Roy - 2009
In crucial ways, she suggests, colonialism reconfigured the sensorium of colonizer and colonized, generating novel experiences of desire, taste, and appetite as well as new technologies of the embodied self. For colonizers, Indian nationalists, diasporic persons, and others in the colonial and postcolonial world orders, the alimentary tract functioned as an important corporeal, psychoaffective, and ethicopolitical contact zone, in which questions of identification, desire, difference, and responsibility were staged.Interpreting texts that have addressed cooking, dining, taste, hungers, excesses, and aversions in South Asia and its diaspora since the mid-nineteenth century, Roy relates historical events and literary figures to tropes of disgust, abstention, dearth, and appetite. She analyzes the fears of pollution and deprivation conveyed in British accounts of the so-called Mutiny of 1857, complicates understandings of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s vegetarianism, examines the “famine fictions” of the novelist-actor Mahasweta Devi, and reflects on the diasporic cookbooks and screen performances of Madhur Jaffrey. This account of richly visceral global modernity furnishes readers with a new idiom for understanding historical action and cultural transformation.
Information Literacy Landscapes: Information literacy in education, workplace and everyday contexts
Annemaree Lloyd - 2009
The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975
Pamela Wojcik - 2009
From the baby boom years into the 1970s, the apartment plot was not only key to films; it also surfaced in TV shows, Broadway plays, literature, and comic strips, from The Honeymooners and The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Subways are for Sleeping and Apartment 3-G. By identifying the apartment plot as a film genre, Wojcik reveals affinities between movies generally viewed as belonging to such distinct genres as film noir, romantic comedy, and melodrama. She analyzes the apartment plot as part of a mid-twentieth-century urban discourse, showing how it offers a vision of home centered on values of community, visibility, contact, mobility, impermanence, and porousness that contrasts with views of home as private, stable, and family-based. Wojcik suggests that the apartment plot presents a philosophy of urbanism related to the theories of Jane Jacobs and Henri Lefebvre. Urban apartments were important spaces for negotiating gender, sexuality, race, and class in mid-twentieth-century America.
Anachronism and Its Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality
Valerie Rohy - 2009
Anachronism and Its Others traces contemporary analogies between homosexuality and blackness to their nineteenth-century origins--particularly the notions of "primitivism" associated with people of color as promoted by scientific racism, and the characterization of homosexuality as "arrested development," according to sexologists. Valerie Rohy explores the linked tropes of backwardness and regression associated with race and sexuality in U.S. culture and included in literary works by Edgar Allen Poe, Frederick Douglass, Pauline Hopkins, Willa Cather, and Ernest Hemingway, as well as interdisciplinary cultural contexts such as the history of science, psychoanalytic theory, popular journalism, and political rhetoric. Linking together two major directions in current queer scholarship--the relationship between race and sexuality and queer temporality--Rohy offers a critical genealogy that illuminates the ways in which race and sexuality are connected by concepts of time and untimeliness.
Cairo Contested: Governance, Urban Space, and Global Modernity
Diane Singerman - 2009
Suspicious of collective life and averse to power-sharing, Egyptian governance structures weaken but do not stop the public's role in the remaking of their city. What happens to a city where neo-liberalism has scaled back public services and encouraged the privatization of public goods, while the vast majority cannot afford the effects of such policies? Who wins and loses in the "march to the modern and the global" as the government transforms urban spaces and markets in the name of growth, security, tourism, and modernity? How do Cairenes struggle with an ambiguous and vulnerable legal and bureaucratic environment when legality is a privilege affordable only to the few or the connected? This companion volume to Cairo Cosmopolitan (AUC Press, 2006) further develops the central insights of the Cairo School of Urban Studies.
We Fight To Win: Inequality and the Politics of Youth Activism
Hava Rachel Gordon - 2009
We Fight to Win offers a compelling account of young people's attempts to get involved in community politics, and documents the battles waged to form youth movements and create social change in schools and neighborhoods.Hava Rachel Gordon compares the struggles and successes of two very different youth movements: a mostly white, middle-class youth activist network in Portland, Oregon, and a working-class network of minority youth in Oakland, California. She examines how these young activists navigate schools, families, community organizations, and the mainstream media, and employ a variety of strategies to make their voices heard on some of today's most pressing issuesùwar, school funding, the environmental crisis, the prison industrial complex, standardized testing, corporate accountability, and educational reform. We Fight to Win is one of the first books to focus on adolescence and political action and deftly explore the ways that the politics of youth activism are structured by age inequality as well as race, class, and gender.
Technologized Desire: Selfhood and the Body in Postcapitalist Science Fiction
D. Harlan Wilson - 2009
Harlan Wilson measures the evolution of the human condition as it has been represented by postcapitalist science fiction, which has consistently represented the body and subjectivity as ultraviolent pathological phenomena. Operating under the assumption that selfhood is a technology, Wilson studies the emergence of selfhood in philosophy (Deleuze & Guattari), fiction (William S. Burroughs' cut-up novels and Max Barry's Jennifer Government), and cinema (Army of Darkness, Vanilla Sky, and the Matrix trilogy) in an attempt to portray the schizophrenic rigor of twenty-first century mediatized life. We are obligated by the pathological unconscious to always choose to be enslaved by capital and its hi-tech arsenal. The universe of consumer-capitalism, Wilson argues, is an illusory prison from which there is no escape-despite the fact that it is illusory.
Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You!
David Graeber - 2009
Sacred and Immoral: On the Writings of Chuck Palahniuk
Jeffrey A. Sartain - 2009
Sartain, combines the efforts of an international list of writers to explore the depths of Chuck Palahniuk's fiction. Scholars have paid attention Palahniuk's premiere novel, Fight Club, for years. Sacred and Immoral is the first anthology dedicated to scholarship focused on Palahniuk's work following Fight Club, which he has been producing at an average of a book a year for thirteen years. By collecting the work of an interdisciplinary group of scholars under a single cover, Sacred and Immoral extends the reach of Palahniuk scholarship beyond any previous publication. Sacred and Immoral provides the single most comprehensive and useful scholarly resource to date for anyone wishing to examine Chuck Palahniuk's fiction in an academic context. Some of the anthology's chapters situate Palahniuk's work within existing generic conventions, while other chapters are concerned with the theoretical underpinnings of Palahniuk's writing and the philosophical implications of his work. With eleven new critical analyses of Palahniuk's later novels, Sacred and Immoral drastically expands the range and depth of academic inquiry into Palahniuk's fiction commensurate with the prominent and exciting position Palahniuk's work occupies in contemporary culture. "Sacred and Immoral" also includes a new interview with Chuck Palahniuk, conducted by literary scholar Matt Kavanagh. Finally, Sacred and Immoral boasts the most complete primary and secondary bibliographies of Palahniuk-related materials to date. Sacred and Immoral is not an attempt to have the last word on Chuck Palahniuk's literature. Rather, this volume is a springboard for other projects that relate to Palahniuk's writings. The anthology provides a critical framework for Palahniuk's later literature that students, teachers, and researchers can use in their own classrooms and writing.
On Art and War and Terror
Alex Danchev - 2009
War poetry, war films and war diaries are also considered in a broad view of art, and of war. Kafka is drawn upon to address torture and abuse in the war on terror; Homer is utilised to analyse current talk of 'barbarisation'. The paintings of Gerhard Richter are used to investigate the terrorists of the Baader-Meinhof group, while the photographs of Don McCullin and the writings of Vassily Grossman and Primo Levi allow the author to propose an ethics of small acts of altruism.This book examines the nature of war over the last century, from the Great War to a particular focus on the current 'Global War on Terror'. It investigates what it means to be human in war, the cost it exacts and the ways of coping. Several of the essays therefore have a biographical focus.
Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection
Elena del Rio - 2009
Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of the body, and on Deleuze-Spinoza's relevant concepts of affect and expression, Elena del R�o examines a kind of cinema that she calls 'affective-performative'. The features of this cinema unfold via detailed and engaging discussions of the movements, gestures and speeds of the body in a variety of films by Douglas Sirk, Rainer W. Fassbinder, Sally Potter, Claire Denis, and David Lynch. Key to the book's engagement with performance is a consistent attention to the body's powers of affection. Grounding her analysis in these powers, del R�o shows the insufficiency of former theoretical approaches in accounting for the transformative and creative capacities of the moving body of performance.Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance will be of interest to any scholars and students of film concerned with bodily aspects of cinema, whether from a Deleuzian, a phenomenological, or a feminist perspective.Key Features*The first study of the interface between Deleuzian theory and film performance.*A sustained consideration of the links between the body of performance and the body of affect.*A reevaluation of central concepts in earlier film theory-from fetishistic spectacle and performativity to Brechtian distanciation, sadomasochism, and narcissism.*An analysis of the relation of the performative body to a feminist politics.*New readings of classical melodramas as well as contemporary independent cinemas.
What Color Is the Sacred?
Michael Taussig - 2009
Playful, enthralling, and whip-smart, his writing makes ingenious connections between ideas, thinkers, and things. An extended meditation on the mysteries of color and the fascination they provoke, What Color Is the Sacred? is the next step on Taussig’s remarkable intellectual path.
Following his interest in magic and surrealism, his earlier work on mimesis, and his recent discussion of heat, gold, and cocaine in My Cocaine Museum, this book uses color to explore further dimensions of what Taussig calls “the bodily unconscious” in an age of global warming. Drawing on classic ethnography as well as the work of Benjamin, Burroughs, and Proust, he takes up the notion that color invites the viewer into images and into the world. Yet, as Taussig makes clear, color has a history—a manifestly colonial history rooted in the West’s discomfort with color, especially bright color, and its associations with the so-called primitive. He begins by noting Goethe’s belief that Europeans are physically averse to vivid color while the uncivilized revel in it, which prompts Taussig to reconsider colonialism as a tension between chromophobes and chromophiliacs. And he ends with the strange story of coal, which, he argues, displaced colonial color by giving birth to synthetic colors, organic chemistry, and IG Farben, the giant chemical corporation behind the Third Reich.
Nietzsche once wrote, “So far, all that has given colour to existence still lacks a history.” With What Color Is the Sacred? Taussig has taken up that challenge with all the radiant intelligence and inspiration we’ve come to expect from him.
The Transformer: Principles of Making Isotype Charts
Marie Neurath - 2009
Developed in 1936 by a team of sociologists lead by Otto and Marie Neurath, this process of "transforming" data into visual form has strongly influenced the fields of graphic design. The Transformer: Principles of Making Isotype Charts is the first English-language primer on Isotypethe foundation of the modern-day pictographic signals found in airports, train stations, highway signs, and computer interfaces. Featuring illustrated examples and essays, including a previously unpublished essay by Marie Neurath, The Transformer is a long-overdue appreciation of an important moment in the history of visual communication.