Best of
Theory
2012
Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle
Silvia Federici - 2012
Originally inspired by Federici's organizational work in the Wages for Housework movement, the topics discussed include the international restructuring of reproductive work and its effects on the sexual division of labor, the globalization of care work and sex work, the crisis of elder care, and the development of affective labor. Both a brief history of the international feminist movement and a contemporary critique of capitalism, these writings continue the investigation of the economic roots of violence against women.
The Wretched of the Screen
Hito Steyerl - 2012
The Wretched of the Screen collects a number of Steyerl's landmark essays from recent years in which she has steadily developed her very own politics of the image.Twisting the politics of representation around the representation of politics, these essays uncover a rich trove of information in the formal shifts and aberrant distortions of accelerated capitalism, of the art system as a vast mine of labor extraction and passionate commitment, of occupation and internship, of structural and literal violence, enchantment and fun, of hysterical, uncontrollable flight through the wreckage of postcolonial and modernist discourses and their unanticipated openings.
Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting
Sianne Ngai - 2012
They dominate the look of its art and commodities as well as our discourse about the ambivalent feelings these objects often inspire. In this radiant study, Sianne Ngai offers a theory of the aesthetic categories that most people use to process the hypercommodified, mass-mediated, performance-driven world of late capitalism, treating them with the same seriousness philosophers have reserved for analysis of the beautiful and the sublime.Ngai explores how each of these aesthetic categories expresses conflicting feelings that connect to the ways in which postmodern subjects work, exchange, and consume. As a style of performing that takes the form of affective labor, the zany is bound up with production and engages our playfulness and our sense of desperation. The interesting is tied to the circulation of discourse and inspires interest but also boredom. The cute’s involvement with consumption brings out feelings of tenderness and aggression simultaneously. At the deepest level, Ngai argues, these equivocal categories are about our complex relationship to performing, information, and commodities.Through readings of Adorno, Schlegel, and Nietzsche alongside cultural artifacts ranging from Bob Perelman’s poetry to Ed Ruscha’s photography books to the situation comedy of Lucille Ball, Ngai shows how these everyday aesthetic categories also provide traction to classic problems in aesthetic theory. The zany, cute, and interesting are not postmodernity’s only meaningful aesthetic categories, Ngai argues, but the ones best suited for grasping the radical transformation of aesthetic experience and discourse under its conditions.
Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected
Lisa Marie Cacho - 2012
Lisa Marie Cacho forcefully argues that the demands for personhood for those who, in the eyes of society, have little value, depend on capitalist and heteropatriarchal measures of worth.With poignant case studies, Cacho illustrates that our very understanding of personhood is premised upon the unchallenged devaluation of criminalized populations of color. Hence, the reliance of rights-based politics on notions of who is and is not a deserving member of society inadvertently replicates the logic that creates and normalizes states of social and literal death. Her understanding of inalienable rights and personhood provides us the much-needed comparative analytical and ethical tools to understand the racialized and nationalized tensions between racial groups. Driven by a radical, relentless critique, Social Death challenges us to imagine a heretofore "unthinkable" politics and ethics that do not rest on neoliberal arguments about worth, but rather emerge from the insurgent experiences of those negated persons who do not live by the norms that determine the productive, patriotic, law abiding, and family-oriented subject.
Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism
Slavoj Žižek - 2012
As a consequence, Hegel’s absolute idealism has become the bogeyman of philosophy, obscuring the fact that he is the defining philosopher of the historical transition to modernity, a period with which our own times share startling similarities.Today, as global capitalism comes apart at the seams, we are entering a new period of transition. In Less Than Nothing, the product of a career-long focus on the part of its author, Slavoj Žižek argues it is imperative we not simply return to Hegel but that we repeat and exceed his triumphs, overcoming his limitations by being even more Hegelian than the master himself. Such an approach not only enables Žižek to diagnose our present condition, but also to engage in a critical dialogue with key strands of contemporary thought—Heidegger, Badiou, speculative realism, quantum physics, and cognitive sciences. Modernity will begin and end with Hegel.From the Trade Paperback edition.
The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture
Kevin Quashie - 2012
In The Sovereignty of Quiet, Kevin Quashie explores quiet as a different kind of expressiveness, one which characterizes a person’s desires, ambitions, hungers, vulnerabilities, and fears. Quiet is a metaphor for the inner life, and as such, enables a more nuanced understanding of black culture. The book revisits such iconic moments as Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s protest at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics and Elizabeth Alexander’s reading at the 2009 inauguration of Barack Obama. Quashie also examines such landmark texts as Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, and Toni Morrison’s Sula to move beyond the emphasis on resistance, and to suggest that concepts like surrender, dreaming, and waiting can remind us of the wealth of black humanity.
Decolonization is not a metaphor
Eve Tuck - 2012
Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. The easy adoption of decolonizing discourse by educational advocacy and scholarship, evidenced by the increasing number of calls to “decolonize our schools,” or use “decolonizing methods,” or, “decolonize student thinking”, turns decolonization into a metaphor. As important as their goals may be, social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches that decenter settler perspectives have objectives that may be incommensurable with decolonization. Because settler colonialism is built upon an entangled triad structure of settler-native-slave, the decolonial desires of white, non-white, immigrant, postcolonial, and oppressed people, can similarly be entangled in resettlement, reoccupation, and reinhabitation that actually further settler colonialism. The metaphorization of decolonization makes possible a set of evasions, or “settler moves to innocence”, that problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity. In this article, we analyze multiple settler moves towards innocence in order to forward “an ethic of incommensurability” that recognizes what is distinct and what is sovereign for project(s) of decolonization in relation to human and civil rights based social justice projects. We also point to unsettling themes within transnational/Third World decolonizations, abolition, and critical space-place pedagogies, which challenge the coalescence of social justice endeavors, making room for more meaningful potential alliances.
Tao Te Ching
John Braun Jr. - 2012
Reading it could change your life.If, however, you pick a translation that doesn't resonate with you, it could have almost no effect other than to confuse you and make you feel as if you have wasted your time. Naturally, you are looking for the best one.In this description, we are meant to sell you our book. Instead of attempting to do this, we would like to offer you your first and possibly most important lesson in Taoism: There is no such thing as a “best” translation of the Tao Te Ching.Certainly, many translations claim to be the best or employ the words of an expert who is quoted, swearing that this version surpasses all others in its clarity. Unfortunately, claiming that one translation is superior to all others betrays a slight misunderstanding the Tao Te Ching, which warns in its very first line against valuing words over what they are meant to convey.What this means is that the truth that lies at the core of the text can only be hinted at or approximated by words. Even now, many lifetimes after it was first recorded, people are still trying to capture this essence, which is why it is one of the most translated texts on the planet.The truth is, this essence cannot be captured in one form. The closest anyone can come to succeeding in this goal is to glimpse it for themselves, if only for a second. Only you can understand it. No one else, however brilliant, can understand it for you.Nevertheless, a good translation of the text can be a very useful tool for accomplishing this. What we try to provide to you is an entry point into the ancient wisdom of the Tao Te Ching, a companion that seeks to help open up the wisdom to you, to help facilitate your own understanding.When choosing, we highly recommend taking advantage of the convenience of e-books and basing your decision on the provided sample chapters rather than the description. While a cleverly written synopsis can promise you the world, you may find that the actual text does not deliver what it claims.Many versions claim an incredible accuracy of translation from the original, approaching the text as a sacred tome to be painstakingly maintained word for word, another practice that runs somewhat askew from the actual teachings.The original text was written in terms of the language and culture of feudal China. While, historically speaking, this is worth preserving, the idiosyncrasies of the archaic language can actually hinder a modern reader from connecting with the deeper message.The Taoist philosophy is meant to be applied to all times and places. Thus, preserving the linguistic peculiarities of a particular time and place can turn a broad philosophy into one that is so narrow as to seem impassible. Our version is the result of over a year spent poring over several different English translations, each one based on the same original Chinese text. We were surprised to find just how idealistically different some of these texts were, considering their mutual origin. For the purposes of our own growth, we made every attempt to find one thread connecting them all to the original and recorded this in our own words.The result of this method, however, might not be most accurately described as a translation of the Tao Te Ching. What we've done is a rendering. Through the juxtaposition of multiple English translations, the cultural and ideological fingerprints of past translators were exposed like decaying flesh on a skeleton. We tried to separate the skeleton -- the basic principles of the Tao Te Ching that themselves precede Lao Tzu -- from its flesh, and reanimate the Tao Te Ching for a contemporary audience.
Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship
Claire Bishop - 2012
Around the world, the champions of this form of expression are numerous, ranging from art historians such as Grant Kester, curators such as Nicolas Bourriaud and Nato Thompson, to performance theorists such as Shannon Jackson. Artificial Hells is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art, known in the US as “social practice.” Claire Bishop follows the trajectory of twentieth-century art and examines key moments in the development of a participatory aesthetic. This itinerary takes in Futurism and Dada; the Situationist International; Happenings in Eastern Europe, Argentina and Paris; the 1970s Community Arts Movement; and the Artists Placement Group. It concludes with a discussion of long-term educational projects by contemporary artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tania Bruguera, Pawe? Althamer and Paul Chan.Since her controversial essay in Artforum in 2006, Claire Bishop has been one of the few to challenge the political and aesthetic ambitions of participatory art. In Artificial Hells, she not only scrutinizes the emancipatory claims made for these projects, but also provides an alternative to the ethical (rather than artistic) criteria invited by such artworks. Artificial Hells calls for a less prescriptive approach to art and politics, and for more compelling, troubling and bolder forms of participatory art and criticism.
I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing By Women
Caroline Bergvall - 2012
Edited by Caroline Bergvall, Laynie Browne, Teresa Carmody and Vanessa Place, I’ll Drown My Book takes its name from a poem by Bernadette Mayer, appropriating Shakespeare. The book includes work by 64 women from 10 countries, with contributors’ responses to the question—What is conceptual writing?—appearing alongside their work. I’ll Drown My Book offers feminist perspectives within this literary phenomenon.CONTRIBUTORS:Kathy Acker, Oana Avasilichioaei & Erin Moure, Dodie Bellamy, Lee Ann Brown, Angela Carr, Monica de la Torre, Danielle Dutton, Renee Gladman, Jen Hofer, Bernadette Mayer, Sharon Mesmer, Laura Mullen, Harryette Mullen, Deborah Richards, Juliana Spahr, Cecilia Vicuna, Wendy Walker, Jen Bervin, Inger Christiansen, Marcella Durand, Katie Degentesh, Nada Gordon, Jennifer Karmin, Mette Moestrup, Yedda Morrison, Anne Portugal, Joan Retallack, Cia Rinne, Giovanni Singleton, Anne Tardos, Hannah Weiner, Christine Wertheim, Norma Cole, Debra Di Blasi, Stacy Doris & Lisa Robertson, Sarah Dowling, Bhanu Kapil, Rachel Levitsky, Laura Moriarty, Redell Olsen, Chus Pato, Julie Patton, Kristin Prevallet, a.rawlings, Ryoko Seikiguchi, Susan M. Schultz, Rosmarie Waldrop, Renee Angle, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Tina Darragh, Judith Goldman, Susan Howe, Maryrose Larkin, Tracie Morris, Sawako Nakayasu, M. NourbeSe Philip, Jena Osman, kathryn l. pringle, Frances Richard, Kim Rosenfeld, and Rachel Zolf.
Nilling: Prose (Department of Critical Thought)
Lisa Robertson - 2012
Just beneath the surface of the phonemes, a gendered name rhythmically explodes into a founding variousness. And then the strictures of the text assert again themselves. I want to claim for this inconspicuousness a transformational agency that runs counter to the teleology of readerly intention. Syllables might call to gods who do and don't exist. That is, they appear in the text's absences and densities as a motile graphic and phonemic force that abnegates its own necessity. Overwhelmingly in my submission to reading's supple snare, I feel love.
Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice
bell hooks - 2012
From the films Precious and Crash to recent biographies of Malcolm X and Henrietta Lacks, hooks offers provocative insights into the way race is being talked about in this "post-racial" era.
Divided World Divided Class: Global Political Economy and the Stratification of Labour Under Capitalism
Zak Cope - 2012
It argues that pervasive national, racial and cultural chauvinism in the core capitalist countries is not primarily attributable to ‘false class consciousness’, ideological indoctrination or ignorance as much left and liberal thinking assumes. Rather, these and related forms of bigotry are concentrated expressions of the major social strata of the core capitalist nations’ shared economic interest in the exploitation and repression of dependent nations.The book demonstrates not only how redistribution of income derived from super-exploitation has allowed for the amelioration of class conflict in the wealthy capitalist countries, it also shows that the exorbitant ‘super-wage’ paid to workers there has meant the disappearance of a domestic vehicle for socialism, an exploited working class. Rather, in its place is a deeply conservative metropolitan workforce committed to maintaining, and even extending, its privileged position through imperialism.The book is intended as a major contribution to debates on the international class structure and socialist strategy for the twenty-first century. What People Are Saying “Dr. Cope presents a thought provoking study of the political economy of the world system by focusing on the concept of a global labour aristocracy. Within the world system, which has also been described as a global apartheid system by some, enormous differences exist between workers’ wages and living conditions, depending on where the workers are located. The author details how a global labour aristocracy in core countries benefits at the expense of workers in periphery countries. The mechanisms supporting such a situation are identified as exploitation, imperialism and racism. The book is a valuable contribution to globalization critique.”- Gernot Köhler, Professor (retired) of Computer Studies at the Department of Computing and Information Management, Sheridan College, Ontario, Canada and author of The Global Wage System: A Study of International Wage Differences and Global Economics: An Introductory Course“How can we link the division between the poor and the rich people in one and any country and the division between the rich and poor nations together into an analytical framework? The answer lies in the concept of ‘the embourgeoisement of the working people’ of the rich core countries and the fact that colonialism and national chauvinism have gone hand in hand so as to breed a ‘labour aristocracy’. This book is a must-read for anyone who cares about fairness. Zak Cope brings together brilliantly the concepts of nation, race and class analytically under the umbrella of capitalism, by situating racism in the class structure and by locating class in the context of the global economy.”- Mobo Gao, Chair of Chinese Studies and Director of the Confucius Institute at the Centre for Asian Studies, University of Adelaide, and author of The Battle for China’s Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution“This is a surprising book. At a time when confusion about Globalization surrounds us, Zak Cope pulls us towards what is fundamental. He outlines the 19th & 20th century recasting of the diverse human world into rigid forms of oppressed colonized societies and oppressor colonizing societies. A world divide still heavily determining our lives. Working rigorously in a marxist-leninist vein, the author focuses on how imperialism led to a giant metropolis where even the main working class itself is heavily socially bribed and loyal to capitalist oppression. Much is laid aside in his analysis, in order to concentrate on only what he considers the most basic structure of all in world capitalist society. This is writing both controversial and foundational at one and the same time.”- J. Sakai, author of Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat
The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza
Eyal Weizman - 2012
From its roots in classical ethics and Christian theology, to Hannah Arendt’s exploration of the work of the Jewish Councils during the Nazi regime, Weizman explores its development in three key transformations of the problem: the defining intervention of Médecins Sans Frontières in mid-1980s Ethiopia; the separation wall in Israel-Palestine; and international and human rights law in Bosnia, Gaza and Iraq. Drawing on a wealth of new research, Weizman charts the latest manifestation of this age-old idea. In doing so he shows how military and political intervention acquired a new “humanitarian” acceptability and legality in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Curiosity and Method: Ten Years of Cabinet Magazine
Daniel Birnbaum - 2012
Book annotation not available for this title.
On Intellectual Activism
Patricia Hill Collins - 2012
This book is a collection of those lectures, along with new and (a few) previously-published essays.
Judaism and Christianity: A Contrast
Stuart Federow - 2012
The rise of Christians calling themselves messianic “Jews,” the successes of Christian missionaries, Jews ingratiating themselves to Evangelical Christians because of their support for the State of Israel, the overuse of the term “Judeo-Christian,” and the increasing use of Jewish rituals in Christian churches, blur the lines between Judaism and Christianity. Develop a better understanding of the irreconcilable differences between Judaism and Christianity, and where the two faiths hold mutually exclusive beliefs. You’ll learn how • Their views differ regarding God, humanity, the devil, faith versus the law, the Messiah, and more; • Both faiths read the same Biblical verses but understand them so differently; and • Missionary Christians use this blurring of the lines between the two faiths, and other techniques, to convert Jews to Christianity. Real interfaith dialogue begins when those engaging in it not only speak of how they are similar, but also where they differ. Real understanding begins when the topics discussed are in areas of disagreement. Judaism and Christianity: A Contrastwill help you understand the Jewish view of these disagreements."
The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within
Mari Ruti - 2012
It argues that, unlike the "subject" (who comes into existence as a result of symbolic prohibition) or the "person" (who is aligned with the narcissistic conceits of the imaginary), the singular self emerges in response to a galvanizing directive arising from the real. This directive carries the force of an obligation that cannot be resisted and that summons the individual to a "character" beyond his or her social investments. Consequently, singularity expresses something about the individual's non-negotiable distinctiveness, eccentricity, or idiosyncrasy at the same time it prevents both symbolic and imaginary closure. It opens to layers of rebelliousness, indicating that there are components of human life exceeding the realm of normative sociality.Written with an unusual blend of rigor and clarity, The Singularity of Being combines incisive readings of Lacan with the best insights of recent Lacanian theory to reach beyond the dogmas of the field. Moving from what, thanks in part to Slavoj Zizek, has come to be known as the "ethics of the act" to a nuanced interpretation of Lacan's "ethics of sublimation," the book offers a sweeping overview of Lacan's thought while making an original contribution to contemporary theory and ethics. Aimed at specialists and nonspecialists alike, the book manages to educate at the same time as it intervenes in current debates about subjectivity, agency, resistance, creativity, the self-other relationship, and effective political and ethical action. By focusing on the Lacanian real, Ruti honors the uniqueness of subjective experience without losing sight of the social and intersubjective components of human life.
A Brief Introduction to Psychoanalytic Theory
Stephen Frosh - 2012
A vibrant text mapping the relevance of psychoanalysis across social sciences, humanities and the arts.
The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust
Marianne Hirsch - 2012
Children of survivors and their contemporaries inherit catastrophic histories not through direct recollection but through haunting postmemories--multiply mediated images, objects, stories, behaviors, and affects passed down within the family and the culture at large.In these new and revised critical readings of the literary and visual legacies of the Holocaust and other, related sites of memory, Marianne Hirsch builds on her influential concept of postmemory. The book's chapters, two of which were written collaboratively with the historian Leo Spitzer, engage the work of postgeneration artists and writers such as Art Spiegelman, W.G. Sebald, Eva Hoffman, Tatana Kellner, Muriel Hasbun, Anne Karpff, Lily Brett, Lorie Novak, David Levinthal, Nancy Spero and Susan Meiselas. Grappling with the ethics of empathy and identification, these artists attempt to forge a creative postmemorial aesthetic that reanimates the past without appropriating it. In her analyses of their fractured texts, Hirsch locates the roots of the familial and affiliative practices of postmemory in feminism and other movements for social change. Using feminist critical strategies to connect past and present, words and images, and memory and gender, she brings the entangled strands of disparate traumatic histories into more intimate contact. With more than fifty illustrations, her text enables a multifaceted encounter with foundational and cutting edge theories in memory, trauma, gender, and visual culture, eliciting a new understanding of history and our place in it.
Essays on Deleuze
Daniel W. Smith - 2012
Combining his most important pieces over the last 15 years along with two completely new essays, 'On the Becoming of Concepts' and 'The Idea of the Open', this volume is Smith's definitive treatise on Deleuze. The four sections cover Deleuze's use of the history of philosophy, his philosophical system, several Deleuzian concepts and his position within contemporary philosophy.Smith's essays are frequent references for students and scholars working on Deleuze, and Dan Smith is widely regarded as the world's leading commentator on Deleuze. Several of the articles have already become touchstones in the field, notably those on Alain Badiou and Jacques Derrida. For anyone interested in Deleuze's philosophy, this book is not to be missed.
Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race
Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman - 2012
Abdur-Rahman interrogates and challenges cultural theorists' interpretations of sexual transgression in African American literature. She argues that, from the mid-nineteenth century through the twentieth, black writers used depictions of erotic transgression to contest popular theories of identity, pathology, national belonging, and racial difference in American culture. Connecting metaphors of sexual transgression to specific historical periods, Abdur-Rahman explains how tropes such as sadomasochism and incest illuminated the psychodynamics of particular racial injuries and suggested forms of social repair and political redress from the time of slavery, through post-Reconstruction and the civil rights and black power movements, to the late twentieth century.Abdur-Rahman brings black feminist, psychoanalytic, critical race, and poststructuralist theories to bear on literary genres from slave narratives to science fiction. Analyzing works by African American writers, including Frederick Douglass, Pauline Hopkins, Harriet Jacobs, James Baldwin, and Octavia Butler, she shows how literary representations of transgressive sexuality expressed the longings of African Americans for individual and collective freedom. Abdur-Rahman contends that those representations were fundamental to the development of African American forms of literary expression and modes of political intervention and cultural self-fashioning.Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman is Assistant Professor of English at Brandeis University."Against the Closet is an important and much-needed book, a significant contribution to African American literature, cultural studies, sexuality studies, and critical race theory. Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman's close readings of fictional representations of race and sex are nuanced and illuminating, and the history of racial thought and sexual science that she presents is indispensable."—Maurice O. Wallace, author of Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775–1995"In this significant and timely text, Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman complicates and expands our understanding of the queerness of blackness, making a welcome contribution to black cultural studies, black queer studies, literary studies, and work on lynching and the making of post-slavery whiteness."—Christina Sharpe, author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects
The Routledge Queer Studies Reader
Donald E. Hall - 2012
The collection is edited by leading scholars in the field and presents:individual introductory notes that situate each work within its historical, disciplinary and theoretical contextsessays grouped by key subject areas including Genealogies, Sex, Temporalities, Kinship, Affect, Bodies, and Borderswritings by major figures including Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, David M. Halperin, Jose Esteban Munoz, Elizabeth Grosz, David Eng, Judith Halberstam and Sara Ahmed.The Routledge Queer Studies Reader is a field-defining volume and presents an illuminating guide for established scholars and also those new to Queer Studies.
Baedan 1: Journal of Queer Nihilism
Baedan - 2012
It is not a political negativity that we must locate in our queerness, but rather a vicious anti-politics which opposes any utopian dreams of a better future residing on the far side of a lifetime of sacrifice. Our queer negativity has nothing to do with art, but it has a great deal to do with urban insurrection, piracy, slave revolt: all those bodily struggles that refuse the future and pursue the irrationality of jouissance, enjoyment, rage, chaos. Ours is not the struggle for an alternative, because there is no alternative which can escape the ever-expanding horizons of capital. Instead we fight, hopeless, to tear our lives away from that expanding horizon and to erupt with wild enjoyment now. Anything less is our continued domestication to the rule of civilization.”
Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook
Jonathan Solomon - 2012
This is true both physically (built on steep slopes, the city has no ground plane) and culturally (there is no concept of ground). Density obliterates figure-ground in the city, and in turn re-defines public-private spatial relationships. Perception of distance and time is distorted through compact networks of pedestrian infrastructure, public transport and natural topography in the urban landscape.Without a ground, there can be no figure either. In fact, Hong Kong lacks any of the traditional figure-ground relationships that shape urban space: axis, edge, center, even fabric. Cities Without Ground explores this condition by mapping three-dimensional circulation networks that join shopping malls, train stations and public transport interchanges, public parks and private lobbies as a series of spatial models and drawings. These networks, though built piecemeal, owned by different public and private stakeholders, and adjacent to different programs and uses, form a continuous space of variegated environments that serves as a fundamental public resource for the city. The emergence of the shopping malls as spaces of civil society rather than of global capital— as grounds of resistance— comes as a surprise.This continuous network and the microclimates of temperature, humidity, noise and smell which differentiate it constitute an entirely new form of urban spatial hierarchy. The relation between shopping malls and air temperature, for instance, suggests architectural implications in circulation—differentiating spaces where pedestrians eagerly flow or make efforts to avoid, where people stop and linger or where smokers gather. Air particle concentration is both logical and counterintuitive: outdoor air is more polluted, while the air in the higher-end malls is cleaner than air adjacent to lower value retail programs. Train stations, while significantly cooler than bus terminals, have only moderately cleaner air. Boundaries determined by sound or smell (a street of flower vendors or bird keepers, or an artificially perfumed mall) can ultimately provide more substantive spatial boundaries than a ground. While space in the city may be continuous, plumes of temperature differential or air particle intensity demonstrate that environments are far from equal.
For Indigenous Minds Only: A Decolonization Handbook
Waziyatawin Angela WilsonCliff Atleo Jr. - 2012
The title reflects an understanding that decolonizing actions must begin in the mind, and that creative, consistent decolonized thinking shapes and empowers the brain, which in turn provides a major prime for positive change. Included in this book are discussions of global collapse, what to consider in returning to a land-based existence, demilitarization for imperial purposes and re-militarization for Indigenous purposes, survival strategies for tribal prisoners, moving beyond the nation-state model, a land-based educational model, personal decolonization, decolonization strategies for youth in custody, and decolonizing gender roles. As with For Indigenous Eyes Only, the authors do not intend to provide universal solutions for problems stemming from centuries of colonialism. Rather, they hope to facilitate and encourage critical thinking skills while offering recommendations for fostering community discussions and plans for purposeful community action. For Indigenous Minds Only will serve an important need within Indigenous communities for years to come.
Look, a White!: Philosophical Essays on Whiteness
George Yancy - 2012
Prompted by Eric Holder's charge, that as Americans, we are cowards when it comes to discussing the issue of race, noted philosopher George Yancy's essays map out a structure of whiteness.He considers whiteness within the context of racial embodiment, film, pedagogy, colonialism, its "danger," and its position within the work of specific writers. Identifying the embedded and opaque ways white power and privilege operate, Yancy argues that the Black countergaze can function as a "gift" to whites in terms of seeing their own whiteness more effectively.Throughout Look, a White! Yancy pays special attention to the impact of whiteness on individuals, as well as on how the structures of whiteness limit the capacity of social actors to completely untangle the way whiteness operates, thus preventing the erasure of racism in social life.
How To Unblock Everything On The Internet
Ankit Fadia - 2012
Chat Software Stock Trading Websites. Career Websites. USB Ports. Download & Speed Limits. Torrents And just about everything else!Who should read this book? College Students. Office Goers. Travelers to countries where websites are blocked (China, UAE, Saudi Arabia and others). Anybody else who wants to unblock stuff on the Internet.About The AuthorAGE 10 - Gifted a computer at home by his parents.AGE 12 - Developed an interest in Computer Hacking.AGE 14 - Published his first book titled The Unofficial Guide to Ethical Hacking which became an instant bestseller worldwide, sold 3 million copies and was translated into 11 languages.AGE 16 - After the Sept. 11th attacks, cracked an encrypted email sent by the Al-Qaeda terrorist network for a classified intelligence agency.AGE 26 - Widely recognized as a Computer Security Expert and Cyber Terrorism guru. Written 14 bestselling books, delivered more than 1000 talks in 25 countries, received 45 awards, has trained more than 20,000 people in India & China, hosts his own TV show called MTV What the Hack!, is writing a script for a movie, runs his own consulting company and also went to Stanford University. His work has touched & influenced the cyber lives of millions of individuals and organizations worldwide.
Yayoi Kusama
Frances Morris - 2012
1929) is arguably Japan's most famous living artist. Her originality, innovation and powerful desire to communicate have propelled her through a career that has spanned six decades. During this time, Kusama has explored painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, collage, film and video, performance and installation, as well as product design. From the late 1950s to the early 1970s Kusama lived in New York and was at the forefront of many artistic innovations in the city. Returning to Japan in her forties, she rebuilt her career, waiting years for the international recognition she has recently achieved. Now in her eightieth year, she continues to make art, extending the range of her large-scale, dazzling installations and relentlessly hand-painting extensive series of minutely detailed figurative fantasy paintings. Kusama has exhibited widely around the world, including representing Japan at the Venice Biennale, and her work is in many major collections. Accompanying the first major retrospective exhibition of the artist's work to be staged in the UK, this lavishly illustrated book features an introductory essay by Tate curator Frances Morris as well as four other substantial essays by leading international critics. Topics covered include Kusama's time in New York, her career after her return to Japan, her installation works and an exploration of her art from a psychoanalytical point of view.
Disability Politics and Theory
A.J. Withers - 2012
The examination looks at when, how, and why new categories of disability are created, describing how capitalism benefits from and enforces disabled people’s oppression. Critiquing the model that currently dominates the discipline—the social model of disability—this book offers an alternative: the radical disability model, which builds on the original while drawing from more recent schools of radical thought, particularly feminism and critical race theory. The study reveals how this new model emphasizes the role of intersecting oppressions in the marginalization of disabled people, stressing the importance of addressing disability both independently and in conjunction with other oppressions. Intertwining theoretical and historical analysis with personal experience, this reference is a poignant portrayal of disabled people in Canada and the United States—and a radical call for social and economic justice.
Singing in Magnetic Hoofbeat: Essays, Prose Texts, Interviews and a Lecture 1991-2007
Will Alexander - 2012
African American Studies. Edited and with an Introduction by Taylor Brady. Afterword by Andrew Joron. One of the most prolific and original figures in the field of contemporary literature, Will Alexander is known worldwide for his arresting explorations of European and Caribbean surrealism, postcolonial history, twentieth-century philosophy, and contemporary scientific theory. Here, Alexander undertakes nothing less than a redefinition of the essay form itself, opening an "artery of twilight" wherein aesthetic, political, historical, social, cultural, scientific, and theoretical discourses often become indistinguishable elements of a holistic investigation into the composition or, re-composition of the physical and metaphysical worlds. SINGING IN MAGNETIC HOOFBEAT is an indispensible record of Alexander's thought, and confirms his reputation as one of the foremost exponents of Afro-futurist modernism."In SINGING IN MAGNETIC HOOFBEAT...Alexander praises his influences; analyzes the politics and aesthetics of the long 20th century; reflects on the repressed, but undeniable importance of African cosmological views to the European Renaissance; and articulates the expansive possibilities of what we might call non-exclusively an African diasporic surrealism. For a trail guide to the wonders of Alexandrian poetics, read these essays. For fresh evidence that surrealism is alive, not as a 'movement, ' but as a freedom-oriented, imaginatively unbounded mode of being in the world, read these esssays." Evie Shockley"
Reconceptualizing India Studies
S.N. Balagangadhara - 2012
Post Said's Orientalism, postcolonialism, as a discipline, has drifted into the realm of paralysing self-reflection and impenetrable jargon. This volume addresses the original concernsof postcolonial studies and the central problems of modern India studies, and points out a potential direction for the social-scientific study of the Indian culture at a time when it is being challenged from all sides. Stressing the need for an alternative understanding of the Western culture, Balagangadhara argues that Hinduism, caste system, and secularism are not colonial constructs but entities within the Western cultural experience. He believes that the so-called facts about India and her traditions are a result of colonial consciousness. To answer the questions about Indiantraditions, we need to understand the Western culture.This book will be of considerable interest to all those interested in understanding Indian society, culture, and traditions. Scholars and students of history, philosophy, sociology, and postcolonial studies will also find this very useful.
The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power
Partha Chatterjee - 2012
Of the group, 123 died of suffocation. While this episode was never independently confirmed, the story of the black hole of Calcutta was widely circulated and seen by the British public as an atrocity committed by savage colonial subjects. The Black Hole of Empire follows the ever-changing representations of this historical event and founding myth of the British Empire in India, from the eighteenth century to the present. Partha Chatterjee explores how a supposed tragedy paved the ideological foundations for the civilizing force of British imperial rule and territorial control in India.Chatterjee takes a close look at the justifications of modern empire by liberal thinkers, international lawyers, and conservative traditionalists, and examines the intellectual and political responses of the colonized, including those of Bengali nationalists. The two sides of empire's entwined history are brought together in the story of the Black Hole memorial: set up in Calcutta in 1760, demolished in 1821, restored by Lord Curzon in 1902, and removed in 1940 to a neglected churchyard. Challenging conventional truisms of imperial history, nationalist scholarship, and liberal visions of globalization, Chatterjee argues that empire is a necessary and continuing part of the history of the modern state.
Red Dirt Revival: A Poetic Memoir in 6 Breaths
Tim'm T. West - 2012
It is being renewed and validated by the haunting images of ancestors. It is the ebullient voices of kinfolk on Sunday afternoons. It is the tongues of the brothers and sisters who have struggled and sacrificed, reclaiming their language. It is the spirit proclaiming and exalting in life and love beyond the limitations of gender and constructed notions of masculinity. This is the emotion that grows inside me as I enter the world of Tim'm West's Red Dirt Revival. West is a bold critic of the status quo. He speaks many truths to the complexities of power. As he declares the notion of Black Men loving Black Men as a revolutionary act, he also challenges the limitations of gender in an in depth essay, A letter to Helen Cixous. West writes, "My mutha gave birth to a Toya, my lil' sista'. I sometimes wonder if I was supposed to be her and she me, or both of us indistinguishable both with affinities for whatever color boyblue and girlpink make when they consolidate. What color would that be?" In Red Dirt Revival language is used to validate cultural identity. The words of the "folk" who are at family reunions, on street corners, behind academic or prison walls, become a collective voice in the work of Tim'm West. It is the phonetic harmonies that West brings to his poems and observations that has moved me to cry, smile or just sit and think awhile. He signifies, he rhytes, he speaks "blakk" at you and with you, he praises, he religiously creates a lens for us to see the ambiguous and contradictory nature of human classifications. Yah dig? West is an observer of love and human relationships. He expresses the urgency of this human need for a deeper spiritual love of one another, transcending labels and identities that are not easily defined. In "Magnetix" he writes: `I have loved black men/ agitated by the thick of it/ guarded like when they anticipate/the sting of a racial slur/or a gender reprimand /for not being a manly enough boy
" Tim'm West is a political thinker, deconstructing how one's identity determines their fate. In "Pro-Lifer" he says "Metaphors don't come sweet these days/Cause niggaboys and girls/Are pronounced dead at birth". I feel in Red Dirt Revival, we are being asked to challenge and praise the blakkness in ourselves. We are being pushed to inwardly examine our concepts of queerness, femininity, and masculinity. And what does love got to do with it? It is through his words that Tim'm West allows us entrance into our own revivals. We are given permission to feel the pain, joy, and bewilderment from our shared existence, and our individual lives.
What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions?
Vinciane Despret - 2012
She does so by exploring incredible and often funny adventures about animals and their involvements with researchers, farmers, zookeepers, handlers, and other human beings. Do animals have a sense of humor? In reading these stories it is evident that they do seem to take perverse pleasure in creating scenarios that unsettle even the greatest of experts, who in turn devise newer and riskier hypotheses that invariably lead them to conclude that animals are not nearly as dumb as previously thought.These deftly translated accounts oblige us, along the way, to engage in both ethology and philosophy. Combining serious scholarship with humor that will resonate with anyone, this book—with a foreword by noted French philosopher, anthropologist, and sociologist of science Bruno Latour—is a must not only for specialists but also for general readers, including dog owners, who will never look at their canine companions the same way again.
Post-Digital Print – The Mutation of Publishing Since 1894
Alessandro Ludovico - 2012
The mutation of music and film into bits and bytes, downloads and streams is now taken for granted. For the world of book and magazine publishing however, this transformation has only just begun.Still, the vision of this transformation is far from new. For more than a century now, avant-garde artists, activists and technologists have been anticipating the development of networked and electronic publishing. Although in hindsight the reports of the death of paper were greatly exaggerated, electronic publishing has now certainly become a reality. How will the analog and the digital coexist in the post-digital age of publishing? How will they transition, mix and cross over?In this book, Alessandro Ludovico re-reads the history of media technology, cultural activism and the avantgarde arts as a prehistory of cutting through the so-calleddichotomy between paper and electronics. Ludovico is the editor and publisher of Neural, a magazine for critical digital culture and media arts. For more than twenty years now, he has been working at the cutting edge (and the outer fringes) of both print publishing and politically engaged digital art.
The Thinking Heart: Three Levels of Psychoanalytic Therapy with Disturbed Children
Anne Alvarez - 2012
Building on 50 years experience as a child and adolescent psychotherapist, Alvarez uses detailed and vivid clinical examples of different interactions between therapist and client, and explores the reasons why one type of therapeutic understanding can work rather than another. She also addresses what happens when the therapist gets it wrong.In The Thinking Heart, Alvarez identifies three different levels of analytic work and communication:- the explanatory level - the why - because- the descriptive level - the whatness of what the child feels- the intensified vitalizing level - gaining access to feeling itself for children with chronic dissociation, despairing apathy or 'undrawn' autism.The book offers a structured schema drawing on and updating some of her classic work. It is designed to help the therapist to find the right level of interpretation in work with clients and, provides particular help with the unreachable child. It will be of use to Psychotherapists, Psychoanalysts, Clinical and Educational Psychologists, Child Psychiatrists, Social Workers, Special needs teachers and carers of disturbed children.Anne Alvarez is a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist and is retired Co-Chair for The Autism Service at the Tavistock Clinic, London. She is currently a visiting teacher and lecturer for the Tavistock Clinic, and a Lecturer on the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Society Child Programme.
Who is Oakland?: Anti-Oppression Activism, the Politics of Safety, and State Co-optation
Anonymous - 2012
It is a critique of how privilege theory
and cultural essentialism have incapacitated antiracist, feminist, and queer
organizing in this country by minimizing and misrepresenting the severity and
structural character of the violence faced by marginalized groups.According to privilege theory, white supremacy is primarily a psychological
attitude which individuals can simply choose to discard instead of a material
infrastructure which reproduces race at key sites across society – from racially
segmented labor markets to the militarization of the border. Even when this
material infrastructure is named, more confrontational tactics which might
involve the risk of arrest are deemed “white” and “privileged,” while the focus
turns back to reforming the behavior and beliefs of individuals. Privilege
politics is ultimately rooted in an idealist theory of power which maintains that
psychological attitudes are the root cause of oppression and exploitation, and that
vague alterations in consciousness will somehow remake oppressive structures.This dominant form of anti-oppression politics also assumes that demographic
categories are coherent, homogeneous “communities” or “cultures.” This
pamphlet argues that identity categories do not indicate political unity or
agreement. Identity is not solidarity. The violent domination and subordination
we face on the basis of our race, gender, and sexuality do not immediately create a
shared political vision. But the uneven impact of oppression across society creates
the conditions for the diffuse emergence of autonomous groups organizing on the
basis of common experiences, analysis, and tactics. There is a difference between
a politics which places shared cultural identity at the center of its analysis of
oppression, and autonomous organizing against forms of oppression which
impact members of marginalized groups unevenly.This pamphlet argues that demands for increased cultural sensitivity and
recognition has utterly failed to stop a rising tide of bigotry and violence in an
age of deep austerity. Anti-oppression, civil rights, and decolonization struggles
repeatedly demonstrate that if resistance is even slightly effective, the people
who struggle are in danger. The choice is not between danger and safety, but
between the uncertain dangers of revolt and the certainty of continued violence,
deprivation, and death. There is no middle ground.
Transformation Now!: Toward a Post-Oppositional Politics of Change
AnaLouise Keating - 2012
women-of-color feminist/womanist thought and queer studies, inviting us to transform how we think about identity, difference, social justice and social change, metaphysics, reading, and teaching. Through detailed investigations of women of color theories and writings, indigenous thought, and her own personal and pedagogical experiences, Keating develops transformative modes of engagement that move through oppositional approaches to embrace interconnectivity as a framework for identity formation, theorizing, social change, and the possibility of planetary citizenship. Speaking to many dimensions of contemporary scholarship, activism, and social justice work, Transformation Now! calls for and enacts innovative, radically inclusionary ways of reading, teaching, and communicating.
Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds
Stef Craps - 2012
Postcolonial Witnessing argues that the suffering engendered by colonialism needs to be acknowledged more fully, on its own terms, in its own terms, and in relation to traumatic First World histories if trauma theory is to have any hope of redeeming its promise of cross-cultural ethical engagement.
Texts
Lewis Baltz - 2012
The book includes Baltz's texts on Edward Weston, Walker Evans, Robert Adams, Michael Schmidt, Allan Sekuka, Chris Burden, Thomas Ruff, Barry Le Va, Jeff Wall, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, John McLaughlin, Slavica Perkovic and Krzysztof Wodiczko, among others. This important publication gives Baltz's literary output the standing it deserves and offers a unique insight into some of history's leading photographers.Born in 1945 in Newport Beach, California, Lewis Baltz is a defining photographer of the last half-century. After studying at the San Francisco Art Institute and Claremont Graduate School, Baltz came to prominence with the New Topographics movement of the 1970s. His awards include a Guggenheim fellowship and the Charles Pratt Memorial Award, and his work is held in most major museum collections. Baltz's books with Steidl include 89-91, Sites of Technology (2007), Works (2010), The Prototype Works (2011) and Candlestick Point (2011).
Truth and Revolution: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization, 1969-1986
Michael Staudenmaier - 2012
Through the influence of founding members like Noel Ignatiev and Don Hamerquist, STO took a Marxist approach to the question of race and revolution, exploring the notion of “white skin privilege,” and helping to lay the groundwork for the discipline of critical race studies.Michael Staudenmaier is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Illinois-Urbana.
Empowering Public Wisdom: A Practical Vision of Citizen-Led Politics
Tom Atlee - 2012
Reaching beyond partisan politics, Atlee explores how a diversity of views can be engaged around public issues in ways that generate a coherent, shared "voice of the people" that takes most or all of the population's perspectives and needs into account. Atlee's core approach is through "citizen deliberative councils," in which a small group of people randomly selected creates a "mini-public" or a microcosm of the larger population. Citizen councils engage in the study of a public issue and make recommendations to public officials and the community, but disband afterward; when a new issue arises, a new council is formed. Ultimately, Atlee aims even higher, suggesting a possible fourth branch of government to better balance our current democratic system. Combining a radical vision with practical solutions, Empowering Public Wisdom provides a unique and refreshing voice in the political arena.Empowering Public Wisdom is part of the EVOLVER EDITIONS Manifesto Series.
Connecting to Our Ancestral Past: Healing through Family Constellations, Ceremony, and Ritual
Francesca Mason Boring - 2012
Constellations facilitator and author Francesca Mason Boring presents this therapeutic method in the context of cultures like the Shoshone, of which she is a member, that have seen the world through a prism of interrelationships for millennia. In Constellations work there is an organic quality that requires a discipline of non-judgment, one that is embraced in traditional native circles, where the whole truth of a person's life, roots, and trans-generational trauma or challenge is understood and included. Mason Boring provides a transformational walk through the universal indigenous field— that place of healing and knowledge used by Native healers and teachers for centuries—by describing stories and rituals designed to help people with their particular struggles. These rituals, such as "Facing the Good Men"—designed to help women who have suffered abuse in relationships with men—reject Western notions of over-the-counter medication. Instead, they stress a comfortable environment whereby the "client," with the help of a facilitator, interacts with people chosen to represent concepts, things, and other people. In Western culture the word "medicine" is thought of as a concrete object, but Mason Boring explains that indigenous cultures favor a process of healing as opposed to an itemized substance. She re-opens doors that have been closed due to the exclusion of indigenous technology in the development of many Western healing traditions and introduces new concepts to the lexicon of Western psychology. A range of voices from around the world—leaders in the fields of systems constellations, theoretical physics, and tribal traditions—contribute to this exploration of aboriginal perspectives that will benefit facilitators of Constellations work, therapists, and human beings who are trying to walk with open eyes and hearts.
Black Transparency: The Right to Know in the Age of Mass Surveillance
Metahaven - 2012
More recently, in response to global political and economic developments, transparency became a loose set of strategies and tactics to scrutinize and expose the existing order--the behavior and secrets of governments, corporations and other organizations. The new transparency is vigilant, eclectic, immediate, and often humorous. From the revelations of WikiLeaks to the actions of Anonymous, it is more insurgent than institutional, and more civic than corporate, marking the emerging politization of a generation raised on global consumer culture. In Black Transparency, Metahaven investigates, questions, proclaims and illustrates design principles of this new movement and highlights its significance for architecture, art and design.
The Sympathy of Things: Ruskin and the Ecology of Design
Lars Spuybroek - 2012
Spuybroek returns to the insights of the great nineteenth-century art writer John Ruskin, for whom beauty always comprises variation, imperfection and fragility. Spuybroek argues that these three concepts not only define relations between humans and their designed products but between all things: "sympathy is what things feel when they shape each other." Spuybroek then compares five twinned themes in Ruskin--the Gothic and work, ornament and matter, sympathy and abstraction, the picturesque and time, ecology and design--with later philosophers and theorists such as William James and Bruno Latour. "If Spuybroek, like Ruskin, does not shake your design and aesthetic concepts," writes Charles Jencks, "you haven't understood him."
Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies
Anne Enke - 2012
Working from the premise that transgender is both material and cultural, the contributors address such aspects of the university as administration, sports, curriculum, pedagogy, and the appropriate location for transgender studies.Combining feminist theory, transgender studies, and activism centered on social diversity and justice, these essays examine how institutions as lived contexts shape everyday life."Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies is a very worthwhile book. Enke is knowledgeable about the field, and frames the issues nicely, explicitly addressing some of the core problems in feminism and women’s studies. This anthology shrewdly demonstrates how transgender studies can do feminist work, and it goes a long way toward furthering that important critical/political task."—Susan Stryker, Professor of Gender & Women's Studies at the University of Arizona, and author of Transgender History
Francesca Woodman: The Roman Years: Between Flesh and Films
Isabella Pedicini - 2012
By tracing back the author’s Roman itineraries and by gathering the stories told by her friends, this study reconstructs Woodman’s most significant encounters that happened between the Maldoror bookshop in Via del Parione and the ateliers of the Nuova Scuola Romana at the ex Pastificio Cerere in San Lorenzo.Through the writings and accounts recorded over a long period of research, this book highlights the echoes and references to Surrealism that can be found in Francesca Woodman’s photos; her use of the body as a proper language; and the topic of the metamorphosis as a sequel of life, where death is no longer seen as a final lap. In her pictures the observer discretely approaches the images and timidly takes part in the private and precious conversation that takes place inside each shot.This essay shows a new and intimate side of this great photographer, taking the reader by the hand through an intimate journey where words and images intertwine to trace the contours of Francesca Woodman’s universe.Isabella Pedicini was born in Benevento, Italy, in 1983. A journalist and a writer, she moved to Rome where she graduated, first with a BA and then with an MA, in art history at La Sapienza University. She collaborates on a regular basis with the gallery book shop "Il Museo del Louvre" and she writes for Artribune, a magazine of contemporary art.
Redefining Black Power: Reflections on the State of Black America
Joanne Griffith - 2012
But how--if at all--has the first black presidency helped move things forward for people of color? Has it delivered the "change we can believe in" and "deepening of democracy" that communities of color organized around? How has the reality and image of a black First Family impacted American culture? What lessons from past struggles can be applied to this unique historical moment to advance multicultural democracy in the U.S.?Starting the exploration of these questions with the voices of past civil rights and black power activists held in the historic Pacifica Radio Archives, BBC journalist Joanne Griffith traveled the country to interview black intellectuals, leaders and activists.The result is a rich and wide-ranging exploration of the hot-button issues facing African Americans today, from religion, law amd media to education and the economy, to the ever-shifting meaning of Obama's contribution and impact. Both timely and rich in personal wisdom, Redefining Black Power connects the dots between past civil rights struggles and the future of black civic and cultural life in the United States.Featuring Van Jones, Michelle Alexander, Julianne Malveaux, Vincent Harding, Ramona Africa, Esther Armah and Linn Washington Jr.Foreword by Pacifica Radio Archives director Brian DeShazor.Praise for Joanne Griffith:"Joanne Griffith is a superb journalist! She writes, speaks, and interviews with great skill, sincerity, and sensitivity to those she covers. Joanne has made it in a tough journalism world -- one where the white males, working for wealthy news organizations, have the advantages. Her writings and insights are a lesson to all. She reflects President Obama's spirited call of 'fired up, ready to go!'"--Connie Lawn, Senior White House Correspondent (since 1968)
Architecture of Density
Michael Wolf - 2012
Now "Architecture of Density“ comes in a new edition as a stand alone book.Focused on the specific visual elements Michael Wolf has depicted high density living in one of the world’s most crowded cities like nobody has before. For ›Architecture of Density‹, Wolf fashioned a distinctive style of photography. He removes any sky or horizon line from the frame and flattens the space until it becomes a relentless abstraction of urban expansion, with no escape for the viewer’s eye. Wolf photographs crumbling buildings in need of repair, brand new buildings under construction covered in bamboo scaffolding, as well as fully occupied residential complexes. Wolf’s disorienting vantage point gives the viewer the feeling that the buildings extend indefinitely, which perhaps is the spatial experience of Hong Kong’s inhabitants.Alert observers can also spot many traces of life on the facades, caused by inhabitants and users.Description credit: http://peperoni-books.de/tokyo_compre...
Freedom Now! Struggles for the Human Right to Housing in LA and Beyond
Jordan T. Camp - 2012
It documents the dynamic social movements emerging around struggles for housing as a human right. Produced with the grassroots housing and social justice organization LA CAN (the Los Angeles Community Action Network), this reader considers the struggles against eviction, gentrification, homelessness and the privatization of public housing. Drawing on the legacy of the Freedom Movement, Freedom Now! argues that these human rights struggles have been and continue to be constitutive of a struggle for a new society. Contributors include organizers such as Deborah Burton from LA CAN, J.R. Fleming of the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign, S'bu Zikode with Abahlali baseMjondolo a movement of South African Shack dwellers, artists like Chuck D from Public Enemy, as well as scholar-activists such as Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mike Davis, Rhonda Williams, George Lipsitz, Gaye Theresa Johnson, and Daniel Martinez HoSang.
The Spam of the Earth: Withdrawal from Representation
Hito Steyerl - 2012
Our letters and snapshots, intimate and official communications, TV broadcasts and text messages drift away from earth in rings, a tectonic architecture of the desires and fears of our times. In a few hundred thousand years, extraterrestrial forms of intelligence may incredulously sift through our wireless communications. But imagine the perplexity of those creatures when they actually look at the material. Because a huge percentage of the pictures inadvertently sent off into deep space is actually spam. Any archaeologist, forensic, or historian—in this world or another—will look at it as our legacy and our likeness, a true portrait of our times and ourselves. Imagine a human reconstruction somehow made from this digital rubble. Chances are, it would look like image spam.
Trajectories Of The Indian State: Politics And Ideas
Sudipta Kaviraj - 2012
Ironically, this has remained something of a state secret because Kaviraj’s writings are scattered and not easy to access as a connected body. So the present volume—like its predecessor The Imaginary Institution of India—fills a vital gap in South Asian political thought.Among Kaviraj’s many strengths is his exceptional ability to position Indian politics within the frameworks of Western political philosophy alongside perspectives from indigenous political thought. In order to understand relations between the state and social groups, or between dominant and subaltern communities, Kaviraj says it is necessary to first historicize the study of Indian politics. Deploying the historical method, he looks at the precise character of Indian social groups, the nature of political conflicts, the specific mechanisms of social oppression, and many related issues.In so doing Kaviraj reveals the variety of historical trajectories taken by Indian democracy. Indian political structures, with their developed system of rules and legislative orders, may seem to derive from colonialism. Yet these structures, says Kaviraj, are comparable less to the European nation-states of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than to the pre-modern empire-states of Indian and Islamic history. Scholars often work with a false genealogy: the convention of starting the story of Indian politics with 1947, or even 1858, has led to misconstructions. Kaviraj shows that there is no serious way into present politics except through a longer past; Weber, Marx, and Foucault may be less important in this enterprise than painstaking reconnections with the vernacular facts of Indian political history.This volume is indispensable for every student and scholar of South Asian politics, history, and sociology.
Treasuring the Gaze: Intimate Vision in Late Eighteenth-Century Eye Miniatures
Hanneke Grootenboer - 2012
Worn as brooches or pendants, these minuscule eyes served the same emotional need as more conventional mementoes, such as lockets containing a coil of a loved one’s hair. The fashion lasted only a few decades, and by the early 1800s eye miniatures had faded into oblivion. Unearthing these portraits in Treasuring the Gaze, Hanneke Grootenboer proposes that the rage for eye miniatures—and their abrupt disappearance—reveals a knot in the unfolding of the history of vision. Drawing on Alois Riegl, Jean-Luc Nancy, Marcia Pointon, Melanie Klein, and others, Grootenboer unravels this knot, discovering previously unseen patterns of looking and strategies for showing. She shows that eye miniatures portray the subject’s gaze rather than his or her eye, making the recipient of the keepsake an exclusive beholder who is perpetually watched. These treasured portraits always return the looks they receive and, as such, they create a reciprocal mode of viewing that Grootenboer calls intimate vision. Recounting stories about eye miniatures—including the role one played in the scandalous affair of Mrs. Fitzherbert and the Prince of Wales, a portrait of the mesmerizing eye of Lord Byron, and the loss and longing incorporated in crying eye miniatures—Grootenboer shows that intimate vision brings the gaze of another deep into the heart of private experience. With a host of fascinating imagery from this eccentric and mostly forgotten yet deeply private keepsake, Treasuring the Gaze provides new insights into the art of miniature painting and the genre of portraiture.
The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference
Roderick A. Ferguson - 2012
African American, Chicano, Asia American, American Indian, women, and queer activists demanded the creation of departments that reflected their histories and experiences, resulting in the formation of interdisciplinary studies programs that hoped to transform both the university and the wider society beyond the campus.In The Reorder of Things, however, Roderick A. Ferguson traces and assesses the ways in which the rise of interdisciplines—departments of race, gender, and ethnicity; fields such as queer studies—were not simply a challenge to contemporary power as manifest in academia, the state, and global capitalism but were, rather, constitutive of it. Ferguson delineates precisely how minority culture and difference as affirmed by legacies of the student movements were appropriated and institutionalized by established networks of power.Critically examining liberationist social movements and the cultural products that have been informed by them, including works by Adrian Piper, Toni Cade Bambara, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Zadie Smith, The Reorder of Things argues for the need to recognize the vulnerabilities of cultural studies to co-option by state power and to develop modes of debate and analysis that may be in the institution but are, unequivocally, not of it.
Nature
Jeffrey Kastner - 2012
With the dislocation of disciplinary boundaries in visual culture, art that is engaged with nature has also forged connections with a new range of scientific, historical, and philosophical ideas. Developing technologies make our interventions into natural systems both increasingly refined and profound. Advances in biological and telecommunication technology continually modify the way we present ourselves. So too are artistic representations of nature (human and otherwise) being transformed.This anthology addresses these issues by considering how the rise of transdisciplinary practices in the postwar era allowed for new kinds of artistic engagement with nature. These include the postminimalist inscriptions associated with Land art; environmentally engaged practices designed to propose novel forms of stewardship; and more recent projects concerned with relationships between the most subtle and minute components of life and the large-scale appearance of the world. These projects unsettle the most basic operations of "natural" personhood and identity.Including a wide range of writings by and about artists, juxtaposed with influential texts from diverse theoretical bases, this collection provides an overview of the eclectic scientific and philosophical sources that inform contemporary art's investigations of nature.
Pure Filth
Jamie Gillis - 2012
Completed just before his death in February 2010, Gillis contributed an introduction to each transcript to shed light on his ideas and plans, as well as anecdotal details and personal commentary. The book has more to do with an artist's understanding of sex than the mere views of a flesh peddler. The careful language and brutal intelligence that Jamie brought to interviews are what separates the conversations from any other work that might have more academic or prurient pretensions.Extreme novelist Peter Sotos, perhaps better known and appreciated in France and the United Kingdom than his home country, was a good friend of Jamie Gillis, and Sotos' unusual perspective makes this volume possible.
Cityscapes
Jacob SteinbergAlice May Connolly - 2012
They are the palette on which we develop our lives, our beliefs, and our feelings. The great twentieth-century Kabbalist Rav Ashlag explains that “just as the seed that is sown in the ground manifests its potential only through its environment,” that is, the quality of the soil, the amount of water or sunlight available, “once the individual has chosen his environment, he is subjected to it like clay in the hands of a potter.” It is well known that people ascribe different cities with their own identities; our urban landscapes most certainly have their own unique way in which they are represented in culture, film, and writing. But what interested me for this project was how those identities are so often transplanted onto their inhabitants. And while dispute continues over terminology to define contemporary literature, there is an undeniable shared quality in how we write, publish, and take in literature in the internet era.The “cityscapes” in this project are reflections on the urban environments that we all know and how the current generation of writers relates to them.
Reading for the Body: The Recalcitrant Materiality of Southern Fiction, 1893–1985
Jay Watson - 2012
In Reading for the Body, he calls for the field to be rematerialized and grounded in an awareness of the human body as the site where ideas, including ideas about the U.S. South itself, ultimately happen.Employing theoretical approaches to the body developed by thinkers such as Karl Marx, Colette Guillaumin, Elaine Scarry, and Friedrich Kittler, Watson also draws on histories of bodily representation to mine a century of southern fiction for its insights into problems that have preoccupied the region and nation alike: slavery, Jim Crow, and white supremacy; the marginalization of women; the impact of modernization; the issue of cultural authority and leadership; and the legacy of the Vietnam War. He focuses on the specific bodily attributes of hand, voice, and blood and the deeply embodied experiences of pain, illness, pregnancy, and war to offer new readings of a distinguished group of literary artists who turned their attention to the South: Mark Twain, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Katherine Anne Porter, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Walker Percy.In producing an intensely embodied U.S. literature these writers, Watson argues, were by turns extending and interrogating a centuries-old tradition in U.S. print culture, in which the recalcitrant materiality of the body serves as a trope for the regional alterity of the South. Reading for the Body makes a powerful case for the body as an important methodological resource for a new southern studies.
Two Worlds: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects
Trace A. DeMeyer - 2012
Trace DeMeyer-Hentz and Patricia Cotter-Busbee, the co-editors and adoptees, located other Native adult survivors of adoption and asked them to write a narrative. The adoptees share their unique experience of living in Two Worlds, surviving assimilation via adoption, opening sealed adoption records, and in most cases, a reunion with their tribal relatives. Indigenous identity and historical trauma takes on a whole new meaning in this adoption anthology. This anthology covers the history of Indian child removals in North America, the adoption projects, their impact on Indian Country and how it impacts the adoptee and their families. Since 2004, DeMeyer-Hentz was writing her historical biography "One Small Sacrifice: A Memoir." She was contacted by many adoptees after stories were published about her work. More adoptees were found after "One Small Sacrifice" had its own Facebook page and her blog on American Indian Adoptees was started in 2009. In 2011, Trace was introduced to Patricia and asked her to co-edit the anthology. Two Worlds is the first book to expose in first-person detail the adoption practices that have been going on for years under the guise of caring for destitute Indigenous children. Every reader will be intrigued since very little is known or published on this history. As DeMeyer-Hentz writes in the Preface, "The only way we change history is to write it ourselves... and the truth shall set us free...
Inhuman Citizenship: Traumatic Enjoyment and Asian American Literature
Juliana Chang - 2012
In the national imaginary, according to Chang, racial subjects are often perceived as the source of jouissance, which they supposedly embody through their excesses of violence, sexuality, anger, and ecstasy—excesses that threaten to overwhelm the social order.To examine her argument that racism ascribes too much, rather than a lack of, humanity, Chang analyzes domestic accounts by Asian American writers, including Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone, Brian Ascalon Roley’s American Son, Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker, and Suki Kim’s The Interpreter. Employing careful reading and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Chang finds sites of excess and shock: they are not just narratives of trauma; they produce trauma as well. They render Asian Americans as not only the objects but also the vehicles and agents of inhuman suffering. And, claims Chang, these novels disturb yet strangely exhilarate the reader through characters who are objects of racism and yet inhumanly enjoy their suffering and the suffering of others.Through a detailed investigation of “family business” in works of Asian American life, Chang shows that by identifying with the nation’s psychic disturbance, Asian American characters ethically assume responsibility for a national unconscious that is all too often disclaimed.
Lacan and the Concept of the 'Real'
Tom Eyers - 2012
Philosophers and political theorists have engaged Lacan's concept of the 'Real' in particular, with Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou deriving profound philosophical and political consequences from what is the most difficult of Lacan's ideas. This is the first book in English to explore in detail the genesis and consequences of Lacan's concept of the 'Real', providing readers with an invaluable key to one of the most influential ideas of modern times, combining as it does a seemingly paradoxical attention to the contingency and impossibility of human existence.
Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership
Erica R. Edwards - 2012
If we understand this, Erica R. Edwards tells us, we will better appreciate the dramatic variations within both the modern black freedom struggle and the black literary tradition.By considering leaders such as Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Barack Obama as both historical personages and narrative inventions of contemporary American culture, Edwards brings to the study of black politics the tools of intertextual narrative analysis as well as deconstruction and close reading. Examining a number of literary restagings of black leadership in African American fiction by W. E. B. Du Bois, George Schuyler, Zora Neale Hurston, William Melvin Kelley, Paul Beatty, and Toni Morrison, Edwards demonstrates how African American literature has contested charisma as a structuring fiction of modern black politics.Though recent scholarship has challenged top-down accounts of historical change, the presumption that history is made by gifted men continues to hold sway in American letters and life. This may be, Edwards shows us, because while charisma is a transformative historical phenomenon, it carries an even stronger seductive narrative power that obscures the people and methods that have created social and political shifts.
Queer Necropolitics
Jin Haritaworn - 2012
It assembles writings that explore the new queer vitalities within their wider context of structural violence and neglect. Moving between diverse geopolitical contexts—the US and the UK, Guatemala and Palestine, the Philippines, Iran and Israel—the chapters in this volume interrogate claims to queerness in the face(s) of death, both spectacular and everyday.Queer Necropolitics mobilises the concept of 'necropolitics' in order to illuminate everyday death worlds, from more expected sites such as war, torture or imperial invasion to the mundane and normalised violence of racism and gender normativity, the market, and the prison-industrial complex. Contributors here interrogate the distinction between valuable and pathological lives by attending to the symbiotic co-constitution of queer subjects folded into life, and queerly abjected racialised populations marked for death. Drawing on diverse yet complementary methodologies, including textual and visual analysis, ethnography and historiography, the authors argue that the distinction between 'war' and 'peace' dissolves in the face of the banality of death in the zones of abandonment that regularly accompany contemporary democratic regimes.The book will appeal to activist scholars and students from various social sciences and humanities, particularly those across the fields of law, cultural and media studies, gender, sexuality and intersectionality studies, race, and conflict studies, as well as those studying nationalism, colonialism, prisons and war. It should be read by all those trying to make sense of the contradictions inherent in regimes of rights, citizenship and diversity.
Political Writings
Simone de Beauvoir - 2012
The writings in this volume range from Beauvoir's surprising 1952 defense of the misogynistic eighteenth-century pornographer, the Marquis de Sade, to a co-written 1974 documentary film, transcribed here for the first time, which draws on Beauvoir's analysis of how socioeconomic privilege shapes the biological reality of aging. The volume traces nearly three decades of Beauvoir's leftist political engagement, from exposés of conditions in fascist Spain and Portugal in 1945 and hard-hitting attacks on right-wing French intellectuals in the 1950s, to the 1962 defense of an Algerian freedom fighter, Djamila Boupacha, and a 1975 article arguing for what is now called the "two-state solution" in Israel.Together these texts prefigure Beauvoir's later feminist activism and provide a new interpretive context for reading her multi-volume autobiography, while also shedding new light on French intellectual history during the turbulent era of decolonization.
Composition, Non-Composition
Jacques Lucan - 2012
However, it is not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that the notion of composition becomes truly associated with architectural conception, notably under the influence of Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand and his statement on the Marche a suivre dans la composition d'un project quelconque [Procedure to be followed in the composition of any project]. The concept quickly erodes during the twentieth century, with the adoption of neutral architectural devices, the use of aggregative processes, and the adoption of "objective" operations, all of which can be understood as an attempt to move beyond compositional principles.In Composition, Non-Composition, Jacques Lucan invites his readers to consider this novel historical perspective of architectural theory. The author describes the interaction of ideas that often clash with one another, with some that fade away as others emerge, thus offering invaluable keys to understanding contemporary architecture. Although this book is primarily addressed to students of architecture, it will also appeal to architects, historians of architecture, as well as to the interested public.
Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology
Arne de Boever - 2012
Complete with a contextualising introduction and a glossary of technical terms, it offers an entry point to this important thinker and will appeal to people working in philosophy, philosophy of science, media studies, social theory and political philosophy. Contributors include: Miguel de Beistegui, University of Warwick; Elizabeth Grosz, Rutgers University, New Jersey; Anne Sauvagnargues, Ecole Normale Sup�rieure, Lyon and Bernard Stiegler, Pompidou Centre, Paris.
Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction
Jill Talbot - 2012
Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction is the first collection to combine metawriting in both fiction and nonfiction. In this daring volume, metawriting refers to writing about writing, veracity in writing, the I of writing and, ultimately, the construction of writing. With a prologue by Pam Houston, the anthology of personal essays, short stories, and one film script excerpt also includes illuminating and engaging interviews with each contributor. Showcasing how writers perform a meta-awareness of self via the art of the story, the craft of the essay, the writings and interviews in this collection serve to create an engaging, provocative discussion of the fiction-versus-nonfiction debate, truth in writing, and how metawriting works (and when it doesn’t). Metawritings provides a context for the presence of metawriting in contemporary literature within the framework of the digital age’s obsessively self-conscious modes of communication: status updates, Tweets, YouTube clips, and blogs (whose anonymity creates opportunities for outright deception) capture our meta-lives in 140 characters and video uploads, while we watch self-referential, self-conscious television (The Simpsons, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Office). Speaking to the moment and to the writing that is capturing it, Talbot addresses a significant and current conversation in contemporary writing and literature, the teaching of writing, and the craft of writing. It is a sharp, entertaining collection of two genres, enhanced by a conversation about how we write and how we live in and through our writing. ContributorsSarah BlackmanBernard CooperCathy DayLena DunhamRobin HemleyPam HoustonKristen IversenDavid LazarE. J. LevyBrenda MillerAnder MonsonBrian OliuJill TalbotRyan Van Meter
Varieties of Presence
Alva Noë - 2012
But, as Alva Noë contends in his latest exploration of the problem of consciousness, it doesn't show up for free. The world is not simply available; it is achieved rather than given. As with a painting in a gallery, the world has no meaning--no presence to be experienced--apart from our able engagement with it. We must show up, too, and bring along what knowledge and skills we've cultivated. This means that education, skills acquisition, and technology can expand the world's availability to us and transform our consciousness.Although deeply philosophical, Varieties of Presence is nurtured by collaboration with scientists and artists. Cognitive science, dance, and performance art as well as Kant and Wittgenstein inform this literary and personal work of scholarship intended no less for artists and art theorists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and anthropologists than for philosophers.Noë rejects the traditional representational theory of mind and its companion internalism, dismissing outright the notion that conceptual knowledge is radically distinct from other forms of practical ability or know-how. For him, perceptual presence and thought presence are species of the same genus. Both are varieties of exploration through which we achieve contact with the world. Forceful reflections on the nature of understanding, as well as substantial examination of the perceptual experience of pictures and what they depict or model are included in this far-ranging discussion.
Sources Of Vietnamese Tradition
Jayne S. Werner - 2012
Strategic selections illuminate key figures, issues, and events while building a thematic portrait of the country's developing territory, politics, culture, and relations with neighbors. The volume showcases Vietnam's remarkable independence in the face of Chinese and other external pressures and respects the complexity of the Vietnamese experience both past and present.The anthology begins with selections that cover more than a millennium of Chinese dominance over Vietnam (111 B.C.E.-939 C.E.) and follows with texts that illuminate four centuries of independence ensured by the Ly, Tran, and Ho dynasties (1009-1407). The earlier cultivation of Buddhism and Southeast Asian political practices by the monarchy gave way to two centuries of Confucian influence and bureaucratic governance (1407-1600), based on Chinese models, and three centuries of political competition between the north and the south, resolving in the latter's favor (1600-1885). Concluding with the colonial era and the modern age, the volume recounts the ravages of war and the creation of a united, independent Vietnam in 1975. Each chapter features readings that reveal the views, customs, outside influences on, and religious and philosophical beliefs of a rapidly changing people and culture. Descriptions of land, society, economy, and governance underscore the role of the past in the formation of contemporary Vietnam and its relationships with neighboring countries and the West.
Biennials and Beyond: Exhibitions that Made Art History: 1962-2002
Bruce Altshuler - 2012
With an introductory essay and concise overviews of each exhibition by art historian Bruce Altshuler, Biennials and Beyond is a unique sourcebook that offers direct access to the most influential exhibitions of the last 50 years.It is the companion volume to Phaidon's 2008 Salon to Biennial – Exhibitions that Made Art History: 1863–1959, winner of the Bannister Fletcher Award for best new book on art or architecture.
Artist at Work, Proximity of Art and Capitalism
Bojana Kunst - 2012
Only then can it be revealed that what is a part of the speculations of capital is not art itself, but mostly artistic life. Artist at Work examines the recent changes in the labour of an artist and addresses them from the perspective of performance.
The Eye of the Crocodile
Val Plumwood - 2012
Her book Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1992) has become a classic. In 1985 she was attacked by a crocodile while kayaking alone in the Kakadu national park in the Northern Territory. She was death rolled three times before being released from the crocodile’s jaws. She crawled for hours through swamp with appalling injuries before being rescued. The experience made her well placed to write about cultural responses to death and predation. The first section of The Eye of the Crocodile consists of chapters intended for a book on crocodiles that remained unfinished at the time of Val’s death. The remaining chapters are previously published papers brought together to form an overview of Val’s ideas on death, predation and nature.
Baroque Sovereignty: Carlos de Sig�enza Y G�ngora and the Creole Archive of Colonial Mexico
Anna More - 2012
Nexus of both Atlantic and Pacific trade routes and home to an ethnically diverse population, Mexico City produced a distinctive Baroque culture that combined local and European influences. In this context, the American-born descendants of European immigrants--or creoles, as they called themselves--began to envision a new society beyond the terms of Spanish imperialism, and the writings of the Mexican polymath Carlos de Sig�enza y G�ngora (1645-1700) were instrumental in this process. Mathematician, antiquarian, poet, and secular priest, Sig�enza authored works on such topics as the 1680 comet, the defense of New Spain, pre-Columbian history, and the massive 1692 Mexico City riot. He wrote all of these, in his words, out of love for my patria.Through readings of Sig�enza y G�ngora's diverse works, Baroque Sovereignty locates the colonial Baroque at the crossroads of a conflicted Spanish imperial rule and the political imaginary of an emergent local elite. Arguing that Spanish imperialism was founded on an ideal of Christian conversion no longer applicable at the end of the seventeenth century, More discovers in Sig�enza y G�ngora's works an alternative basis for local governance. The creole archive, understood as both the collection of local artifacts and their interpretation, solved the intractable problem of Spanish imperial sovereignty by establishing a material genealogy and authority for New Spain's creole elite. In an analysis that contributes substantially to early modern colonial studies and theories of memory and knowledge, More posits the centrality of the creole archive for understanding how a local political imaginary emerged from the ruins of Spanish imperialism.
Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress
Jennifer Henderson - 2012
As the first scholarly collection to explore the intersections and differences between a range of redress cases that have emerged in Canada in recent decades, Reconciling Canada provides readers with the contexts for understanding the phenomenon of reconciliation as it has played out in this multicultural settler state.In this volume, leading scholars in the humanities and social sciences relate contemporary political and social efforts to redress wrongs to the fraught history of government relations with Aboriginal and diasporic populations. The contributors offer ground-breaking perspectives on Canada's 'culture of redress, ' broaching questions of law and constitutional change, political coalitions, commemoration, testimony, and literatures of injury and its aftermath. Also assembled together for the first time is a collection of primary documents - including government reports, parliamentary debates, and redress movement statements - prefaced with contextual information. Reconciling Canada provides a vital and immensely relevant illumination of the dynamics of reconciliation, apology, and redress in contemporary Canada.
Dirt
Megan Born - 2012
Rooted in the landscape architect's perspective, Dirt views dirt not as repulsive but endlessly giving, fertile, adaptive, and able to accommodate difference while maintaining cohesion. This dirty perspective sheds light on social connections, working processes, imaginative ideas, physical substrates, and urban networks. Dirt is a matrix; as a book, it organizes contributions from architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning and design, historic preservation, fine arts, and art history.The chapters predict and report on city waterfronts revamped by climate change, the reinvention of suburbia, and cityscapes of ruins; dish the dirt with yet-to-be proven facts; make such unexpected linkages as ornament to weed growth and cell networks to zip-ties; examine the work of innovative thinkers who have imagined or created, among other things, a replica of Robert Smithson's famous earthwork Spiral Jetty in "table-top scale," live models of the Arctic ice caps, and an inhabitable "green roof"; and describe an ecological landscape urbanism that incorporates the natural sciences in its processes.
Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era
Francesca T. Royster - 2012
The book's innovative readings of performers including Michael Jackson, Grace Jones, Stevie Wonder, Eartha Kitt, and Meshell Ndegeocello demonstrate how embodied sound and performance became a means for creativity, transgression, and social critique, a way to reclaim imaginative and corporeal freedom from the social death of slavery and its legacy of racism, to engender new sexualities and desires, to escape the sometimes constrictive codes of respectability and uplift from within the black community, and to make space for new futures for their listeners. The book's perspective on music as a form of black corporeality and identity, creativity, and political engagement will appeal to those in African American studies, popular music studies, queer theory, and black performance studies; general readers will welcome its engaging, accessible, and sometimes playful writing style, including elements of memoir.
Concept and Form, Volume 1: Selections from the Cahiers pour l'Analyse
Peter Hallward - 2012
Inspired by their teachers Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan, the editors of the Cahiers sought to sever philosophy from the interpretation of given meanings or experiences, focusing instead on the mechanisms that structure specific configurations of discourse, from the psychological and ideological to the literary, scientific, and political. Adequate analysis of the operations at work in these configurations, they argue, helps prepare the way for their revolutionary transformation.This first volume comprises English translations of some of the most important theoretical texts published in the journal, written by thinkers who would soon be counted among the most inventive and influential of their generation: Alain Badiou, Yves Duroux, Alain Grosrichard, Serge Leclaire, Jacques-Alain Miller, Jean-Claude Milner, and François Regnault.The book is complemented by a second volume, consisting of essays and interviews that assess the significance and legacy of the journal, and by an online edition of the full set of original Cahiers texts, produced by the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London and accessible at cahiers.kingston.ac.uk.
Understanding Marxism
Geoff Boucher - 2012
No social theory or political philosophy today can be taken seriously unless it enters a dialogue, not just with the legacy of Marx, but also with the innovations and questions that spring from the movement that his work sparked, Marxism. Marx provided a revolutionary set of ideas about freedom, politics and society. As social and political conditions changed and new intellectual challenges to Marx's social philosophy arose, the Marxist theorists sought to update his social theory, rectify the sociological positions of historical materialism and respond to philosophical challenges with a Marxist reply. This book provides an accessible introduction to Marxism by explaining each of the key concepts of Marxist politics and social theory. The book is organized into three parts, which explore the successive waves of change within Marxist theory and places these in historical context, while the whole provides a clear and comprehensive account of Marxism as an intellectual system.
Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema
Daniel Morgan - 2012
Through detailed analyses of extended sequences, technical innovations, and formal experiments, Morgan provides an original interpretation of a series of several internally related films—Soigne ta droite (Keep Your Right Up, 1987), Nouvelle vague (New Wave, 1990), and Allemagne 90 neuf zéro (Germany 90 Nine Zero, 1991)—and the monumental late video work, Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998). Taking up a range of topics, including the role of nature and natural beauty, the relation between history and cinema, and the interactions between film and video, the book provides a distinctive account of the cinematic and intellectual ambitions of Godard’s late work. At the same time, Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema provides a new direction for the fields of film and philosophy by drawing on the idealist and romantic tradition of philosophical aesthetics, which rarely finds an articulation within film studies. In using the tradition of aesthetics to illuminate Godard’s late films and videos, Morgan shows that these works transform the basic terms and categories of aesthetics in and for the cinema.
I Hope I Join the Band: Narrative, Affiliation, and Antiraciset Rhetoric
Frankie Condon - 2012
. . . White antiracist epistemology needs to begin not with our beliefs, but with our individual and collective awakening to that which we do not know."Drawing on scholarship across disciplines ranging from writing and rhetoric studies to critical race theory to philosophy, I Hope I Join the Band examines the limits and the possibilities for performative engagement in antiracist activism. Focusing particularly on the challenges posed by raced-white identity to performativity, and moving between narrative and theoretical engagement, thebook names and argues for critical shifts in the understandings and rhetorical practices that attend antiracist activism.
The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry Since 1945
Jennifer Ashton - 2012
Registering an important shift in the way scholars contextualize modern and contemporary American literature, this Companion explores how American poetry has documented and, at times, helped propel the literary and cultural revolutions of the past sixty-five years. Offering authoritative and accessible essays from fourteen distinguished scholars, the Companion sheds new light on the Beat, Black Arts, and other movements while examining institutions that govern poetic practice in the United States today. The text also introduces seminal figures like Sylvia Plath, John Ashbery, and Gwendolyn Brooks while situating them alongside phenomena such as the "academic poet" and popular forms such as spoken word and rap, revealing the breadth of their shared history. Students, scholars, and readers will find this Companion an indispensable guide to post-war and late twentieth-century American poetry.
Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect
Mel Y. Chen - 2012
Chen draws on recent debates about sexuality, race, and affect to examine how matter that is considered insensate, immobile, or deathly, animates cultural lives. Toward that end, Chen investigates the blurry division between the living and the dead, or that which is beyond the human or animal. Within the field of linguistics, animacy has been described variously as a quality of agency, awareness, mobility, sentience, or liveness. Chen turns to cognitive linguistics to stress how language habitually differentiates the animate and the inanimate. Expanding this construct, Chen argues that animacy undergirds much that is pressing and indeed volatile in contemporary culture, from animal rights debates to biosecurity concerns.Chen's book is the first to bring the concept of animacy together with queer of color scholarship, critical animal studies, and disability theory. Through analyses of dehumanizing insults, the meanings of queerness, animal protagonists in recent Asian/American art and film, the lead toy panic in 2007, and the social lives of environmental illness, Animacies illuminates a hierarchical politics infused by race, sexuality, and ability. In this groundbreaking book, Chen rethinks the criteria governing agency and receptivity, health and toxicity, productivity and stillness—and demonstrates how attention to the affective charge of matter challenges commonsense orderings of the world.Mel Y. Chen is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley."Animacies is a book about 'reworldings,' as Mel Y. Chen traces the myriad ways that objects and affects move through and reshape zones of possibility for political transformation and queer resistance to neoliberal biopolitics. At the same time, Animacies itself generates such transformations: grounded in a generous, expansive understanding of queer of color and disability/crip critique, Chen's study reworlds or reorients disability studies, gender and sexuality studies, critical race theory, animal studies, affect studies, and linguistics. In all of these critical spaces, Animacies might be described as the breathtaking and revivifying book we have been waiting for."—Robert McRuer, author of Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability"This ambitious transdisciplinary analysis of the relations between humans, nonhuman animals, and matter charts a compelling and innovative rethinking of the biopolitics of 'animacy.' Mel Y. Chen animates animacy, a concept of sentience hierarchy derived in linguistics, to offer a far-ranging critique that implicates disability studies, queer of color critique, and postcolonial theory. The generative result is a timely and crucial intervention that foregrounds the oft-occluded import of race and sex in the rapidly growing fields of posthumanist theory, new materialisms, and animal studies."—Jasbir K. Puar, author of Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times
THE THIRD TABLE
Graham Harman - 2012
The English text occupies just eleven and a half pages (p4-15). The content is quite engaging as he manages to expound his ideas in the form of a response to Sir Arthur Eddington’s famous two table argument, which can be found in the introduction to his book THE NATURE OF THE PHYSICAL WORLD, first published in 1928. This allows him to couch his arguments in terms of a running engagement with reductionism, in what Harman sees as its humanistic and scientistic forms.
Paul Thek in Process
Susanne Neubauer - 2012
Szeemann had named one section of the Documenta -Individual Mythologies, - describing a new kind of art structured around a mythology invented by individual artists, rather than by a culture. Thek's contribution--the now legendary -Pyramid- installation--came to be seen as the supreme example of Individual Mythology, and is one of Thek's best known works (Documenta 5 is likewise among the most famous of all Documentas to date). Paul Thek in Process stems from an unrealized publication that Thek had hoped to produce for Documenta 5, which would enlarge upon the occasion and the mythology of his -Pyramid.- It comprises a trove of previously unpublished photographs recording the installation at Moderna Museet in 1971-72, all of the surviving correspondence between Thek and the museum, work-related ephemera and press coverage of the work.
Newthink: The Hidden Logic of Progressivism and the Usurpation of the Traditional American Worldview
Gordon Pine - 2012
Its powerful dynamics shape our world. But when you understand it, the seemingly incomprehensible jumble of America's recent history, current events, and likely future become clearer.Under newthink:--Three fundamental unconscious cognitive metaphors form a new worldview tree that changes everything changeable.--Political correctness replaces right-and-wrong.--Progressive virtue replaces goodness.--God has left the building.--Nature and virtue merge.--Appearances are more important than reality.--News is replaced by public opinion management.--Progressive Missionaries work toward and Progressive Crusaders fight for their utopian future.--Omnimarxism shapes society.--The various pseudoppressed groups struggle against their pseudoppressors.--Individual moral struggle is replaced by group political struggle.--Parinciters pit groups against each other.--Cultural codependence goes unchecked.--Prolenmity corrupts the psyche of millions.--The replacement of traditional America is an imperative.--Big Mother, not Big Brother, is the totalitarian future we are progressing toward.
The Literary Lacan: From Literature to Lituraterre and Beyond
Santanu Biswas - 2012
The Literary Lacan: From Literature to ‘Lituraterre’ and Beyond is dedicated to assessing Lacan’s significant contribution to literary studies and the contribution, in turn, of literature to Lacanian psychoanalysis. The first essays in this collection provide close readings of Lacan’s literature-related work, specifically his work on Hamlet, his homage to Marguerite Duras and Lewis Carroll, his concept of Lituraterre, and his seminar on James Joyce. Other essays examine Lacan’s theories in conjunction with works of major writers such as Samuel Beckett. The book concludes with essays that investigate Lacan and literature more broadly, including the applicability of literature to psychoanalysis. With well-known contributors including Slavoj Zizek, Jacques-Alain Miller, Russell Grigg and Ellie Ragland, this volume will appeal not only to specialists in literary and Lacanian theory but also to students and enthusiasts of the master and the literature that inspired him.
Riverpeople
Peter Lamborn Wilson - 2012
Ordinary maps project ideological inscriptions onto the body of landscape -- but a magical map would share essences with that landscape & engage in co-realization with it. Such a map could then act as a pilgrim's guide to the Profane or-- Secular Illumination -- a pagan theory of Sacred Earth as cartomantic spell. Looked at this way, even ordinary maps possess an "invisible" or nocturnal dimension, or rather a set of stars & asterisms that replicate or mirror its topography & hydrography in the sleeping sky -- 'As Above, So Below' -- sciences that (as Novalis says) will then have been poeticized.
African American Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places
Maisha Wester - 2012
Yet the gothic is more than a long list of tropes deployed to terrify. African American Gothic reveals the myriad ways African American writers manipulate the gothic genre to critique traditional racial ideologies. The book investigates fiction from each major era in African American culture, including Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Of One Blood, Cane, Invisible Man, and Corregidora, to show how the gothic—when revised—serves as a useful vehicle for the enunciation of the peculiar terrors and complexities of black existence in America.
Oppression: A Social Determinant of Health
Elizabeth Anne McGibbon - 2012
A recent emphasis on the social determinants of health has focused attention on the causes of the causes of ill health, including systemic forces such as capitalism, globalization, imperialism, medicalization, neo-colonialism and neoliberalism. If we are to change the oppressive practices that cause ill health our analysis must consistently and explicitly integrate these systemic forces and thus reframe growing health inequities within the scope of moral responsibility and social justice. The internationally recognized authors of this book do just this. An important addition to the relatively new field of critical health studies, Oppression is an integration of critical social scientific perspectives and health systems/health sciences knowledge. The goal of the book is to support, enhance and provoke action to interrogate the progress of oppression. It can be done, and it is being done."
Creole Indigeneity: Between Myth and Nation in the Caribbean
Shona N. Jackson - 2012
In Creole Indigeneity, Shona N. Jackson investigates how their descendants, collectively called Creoles, have remade themselves as Guyana’s new natives, displacing indigenous peoples in the Caribbean through an extension of colonial attitudes and policies.Looking particularly at the nation’s politically fraught decades from the 1950s to the present, Jackson explores aboriginal and Creole identities in Guyanese society. Through government documents, interviews, and political speeches, she reveals how Creoles, though unable to usurp the place of aboriginals as First Peoples in the New World, nonetheless managed to introduce a new, more socially viable definition of belonging, through labor. The very reason for bringing enslaved and indentured workers into Caribbean labor became the organizing principle for Creoles’ new identities.Creoles linked true belonging, and so political and material right, to having performed modern labor on the land; labor thus became the basis for their subaltern, settler modes of indigeneity—a contradiction for belonging under postcoloniality that Jackson terms “Creole indigeneity.” In doing so, her work establishes a new and productive way of understanding the relationship between national power and identity in colonial, postcolonial, and anticolonial contexts.
Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity
Marcia Alesan Dawkins - 2012
Not just racial minorities. As Marcia Alesan Dawkins explains, passing has been occurring for millennia, since intercultural and interracial contact began. And with this profound new study, she explores its old limits and new possibilities: from women passing as men and able-bodied persons passing as disabled to black classics professors passing as Jewish and white supremacists passing as white.Already hailed as a pioneering work in the study of race and culture, Clearly Invisible offers powerful testimony to the fact that individual identities are never fully self-determined—and that race is far more a matter of sociology than of biology.
Processes of Life: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology
John Dupré - 2012
Epigenetics and related areas of molecular biology have eroded the exceptional status of the gene and presented the genome as fullyinteractive with the rest of the cell. Developmental systems theory provides a space for a vision of evolution that takes full account of the fundamental importance of developmental processes. Dupre shows the importance of microbiology for a proper understanding of the living world, and reveals howit subverts such basic biological assumptions as the organisation of biological kinds on a branching tree of life, and the simple traditional conception of the biological organism.These topics are considered in the context of a view of science as realistically grounded in the natural order, but at the same time as pluralistic and inextricably integrated within a social and normative context. The volume includes a section that recapitulates and expands some of the author'sgeneral views on science; a section addressing a range of topics in biology, including the significance of genomics, the nature of the organism and the current status of evolutionary theory; and a section exploring some implications of contemporary biology for humans, for example on the reality orunreality of human races, and the plasticity of human nature.
On Teaching Religion: Essays by Jonathan Z. Smith
Jonathan Z. Smith - 2012
Smith has been among the most important voices of critical reflection within the academic study of religion. Smith has also produced a significant corpus of essays and lectures on teaching and on the essential role of academic scholarship on religion inmatters of education and public policy. Education is not a side issue for Smith, and his essays continually shed light on fundamental questions. What differentiates college from high school? What are the proper functions of an introductory course? What functions should a department serve inundergraduate and graduate education? How should a major or concentration be conceived-if at all? What roles should the academic guilds play in public discourse on education and on religion? Most importantly, what does it mean to say that one is both a scholar and a teacher, and whatresponsibilities does this entail?Smith's writings on these crucial issues for education have been largely inaccessible until now. Some pieces in this book appeared in education journals, while others were collected in specialist volumes of conference proceedings. Many were originally delivered as keynote speeches to the AmericanAcademy of Religion and other major scholarly organizations, and although scholars reminisce about hearing Smith deliver them, the works themselves are not readily available. On Teaching Religion collects the best of these essays and lectures into one volume, along with a new essay by Smith.
The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture, and Illness
Eric Cazdyn - 2012
Engaging critical theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, he explores the ways that crisis affects perceptions of time and denies alternative ways of being and thinking. To resist the exploitative crisis state, which Cazdyn terms "the global abyss," he posits the concept of "the already dead," a condition in which the subject (medical, political, psychological) has been killed but has yet to die. Embracing this condition, he argues, allows for a revolutionary consciousness open to a utopian future. Woven into Cazdyn's analysis are personal anecdotes about his battle with leukemia and his struggle to obtain Canadian citizenship during his illness. These narratives help to illustrate his systemic critique, one that reconfigures the relationship between politics, capitalism, revolution, and the body.
The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature
Joe Bray - 2012
How will literature reconfigure itself in the future?The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature maps this expansive and multifaceted field, with essays on:the history of literary experiment from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present the impact of new media on literature, including multimodal literature, digital fiction and code poetry the development of experimental genres from graphic narratives and found poetry through to gaming and interactive fiction experimental movements from Futurism and Surrealism to Postmodernism, Avant-Pop and Flarf. Shedding new light on often critically neglected terrain, the contributors introduce this vibrant area, define its current state, and offer exciting new perspectives on its future.This volume is the ideal introduction for those approaching the study of experimental literature for the first time or looking to further their knowledge.
The Sociology of Food and Agriculture
Michael S. Carolan - 2012
This book is an introductory textbook aimed at undergraduate students, and is suitable for those with little or no background in sociology.The author starts by looking at the recent development of agriculture under capitalism and neo-liberal regimes and the transformation of farming from a small-scale, family-run business to a globalized system. The consequent changes in rural employment and role of multinationals in controlling markets are described. Topics such as the global hunger and obesity challenges, GM foods, and international trade and subsidies are assessed as part of the world food economy. The second section of the book focuses on community impacts, food and culture, and diversity. Later chapters examine topics such as food security, alternative and social movements, food sovereignty, local versus global, and fair trade. All chapters include learning objectives and recommendations for further reading to aid student learning.
On the King of Prussia and Social Reform
Karl Marx - 2012
Karl Marx (5 May 1818 - 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. Marx's work in economics laid the basis for much of the current understanding of labour and its relation to capital, and subsequent economic thought. He is one of the founders of sociology and social science. He published numerous books during his lifetime, the most notable being The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Kapital (1867-1894). Born into a wealthy middle-class family in Trier in the Prussian Rhineland, Marx studied at the Universities of Bonn and Berlin where he became interested in the philosophical ideas of the Young Hegelians. After his studies he wrote for a radical newspaper in Cologne and began to work out the theory of the materialist conception of history. He moved to Paris in 1843, where he began writing for other radical newspapers and met Friedrich Engels, who would become his lifelong friend and collaborator. In 1849 he was exiled and moved to London together with his wife and children, where he continued writing and formulating his theories about social and economic activity. He also campaigned for socialism and became a significant figure in the International Workingmen's Association. Marx's theories about society, economics and politics - the collective understanding of which is known as Marxism - hold that human societies progress through class struggle: a conflict between an ownership class that controls production and a dispossessed labouring class that provides the labour for production. States, Marx believed, were run on behalf of the ruling class and in their interest while representing it as the common interest of all; and he predicted that, like previous socioeconomic systems, capitalism produced internal tensions which would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system: socialism. He argued that class antagonisms under capitalism between the bourgeoisie and proletariat would eventuate in the working class' conquest of political power and eventually establish a classless society, communism, a society governed by a free association of producers. Marx actively fought for its implementation, arguing that the working class should carry out organised revolutionary action to topple capitalism and bring about socio-economic change. Marx has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history. Many intellectuals, labour unions and political parties worldwide have been influenced by Marx's ideas, with many variations on his groundwork.
The Sound Studies Reader
Jonathan Sterne - 2012
The Sound Studies Reader touches on key themes like noise and silence; architecture, acoustics and space; media and reproducibility; listening, voices and disability; culture, community, power and difference; and shifts in the form and meaning of sound across cultures, contexts and centuries. Writers reflect on crucial historical moments, difficult definitions, and competing accounts of the role of sound in culture and everyday life. Across the essays, readers will gain a sense of the range and history of key debates and discussions in sound studies.The collection begins with an introduction to welcome novice readers to the field and acquaint them the main issues in sound studies. Individual section introductions give readers further background on the essays and an extensive up to date bibliography for further reading in sound studies make this an original and accessible guide to the field.Contributors: Rick Altman, Jacques Attali, Roland Barthes, Jody Berland, Karin Bijsterveld, Barry Blesser, Georgina Born, Michael Bull, Adriana Cavarero, Michel Chion, Kate Crawford, Richard Cullen Rath, Jacques Derrida, Mladen Dolar, John Durham Peters, Kodwo Eshun, Frantz Fanon, Lisa Gitelman, Gerard Goggin, Steve Goodman, Stefan Helmreich, Michelle Hilmes, Charles Hirschkind, Shuhei Hosokawa, Don Ihde, Douglas Kahn, Friedrich Kittler, Brandon LaBelle, James Lastra, Richard Leppert, Michele Martin, Louise Meintjes, Mara Mills, John Mowitt, R. Murray Schafer, Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier, John Picker, Benjamin Piekut, Trevor Pinch, Tara Rodgers, Linda-Ruth Salter, Jacob Smith, Jason Stanyek, Jonathan Sterne, Emily Thompson, Frank Trocco, Michael Veal, Alexander Weheliye
The Derrick Jensen Reader: Writings on Environmental Revolution
Derrick Jensen - 2012
Here for the first time in The Derrick Jensen Reader are collected generous selections from his prescient, unflinching books on the problem of civilization and the path to true resistance.In the acclaimed A Language Older Than Words, Jensen dissects his own abusive childhood to examine the pathology of Western culture and shares with us the power and beauty of an alliance with the natural world. He continues to use the lens of his own experience as well as the wisdom of philosophers, activists, and teachers to expose oppression and call us to action in his other early works, Listening to the Land, A Culture of Make Believe, Strangely Like War, and Walking on Water. We see his analysis deepen when he asks us to accept that the only moral response to biocide is resistance in the two-volume Endgame, a truth he explores further in Thought to Exist in the Wild, What We Leave Behind, the graphic novel As The World Burns, and in his two novels, Songs of the Dead and Lives Less Valuable. And in Dreams, Jensen's latest work, he leads us still further toward his vision for a healed planet, freeing us to see beyond the limits of our present culture to a future luminous with meaning.