Research Note: The Resources of Culture
By Graeme Macdonald
âI should have thought of it before, itâs too late now.â
Italo Calvino, The Petrol Pump
The opening sentence of Italo Calvinoâs 1974 story âThe Petrol Pumpâ expresses a regret wearily familiar to 21st century energy-angst.
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Atoning, Reconciling, and Forgiving: Interdisciplinary Investigations of Justice
By Jill Scott
Linda Radzik. Making Amends: Atonement in Morality, Law, and Politics. Oxford University Press, 2009.
Joanna R. Quinn. Reconciliation(s): Transitional Justice in Postconflict Societies. McGill-Queenâs University Press, 2009.
Julie McGonegal. Imagining Justice: The Politics of Postcolonial Forgiveness and Reconciliation. McGill-Queenâs University Press, 2009.
The three books under review in this essay are united by their concern for justice and reconciliation in the aftermath of conflict and wrongdoing, but each addresses these questions with a unique disciplinary lens.
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Research Note: Reimagining Creative Economy through the lens of Multiple Colonialisms
By Adam Saifer
In April 2017, I traveled to Edmonton, Canada to sit in on the Reimagining Creative Economy: Transnational Histories, Local Practices, Regional Struggles workshop (RCE) at the University of Alberta. Two weeks earlier, Richard Floridaâoriginator of the celebrated and derided (depending on who you ask) theory of the creative classâpublished his newest tome, The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Classâand What We Can Do About It (2017).
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Regarding Feelings and Forms
By Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst
Eugenie Brinkema. The Forms of the Affects. Duke University Press, 2014. 347 pp.
Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu, eds. Feeling Photography. Duke University Press, 2014. 397 pp.
As a psychoanalytic cultural theorist, thinking about these books together ensnares me in my familiar oscillating trap: between the visceral imagery of Freud and the hygienic schemas of Lacan. Reading Freud is to vicariously feel his theories of psyche; I am seduced by this provocation of idiosyncratic feeling.
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An Archive for Affect Theory
By Russ Leo
Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds. The Affect Theory Reader. Duke University Press, 2010. 416 pp.
“There is no single, generalizable theory of affect: not yet, and (thankfully) there never will be” (3): Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth insist on this point, and The Affect Theory Reader demonstrates its critical import in contemporary debates concerning that most slippery term, “affect.” Seigworth and Gregg, under the artfully provocative heading “An Inventory of Shimmers,” attend in brief to a wide variety of theories of affect—from phenomenology, psychoanalysis, psychology, and post-Cartesian philosophies (read: Spinozism) to Marxism, feminism, science and technology studies, queer studies, and various histories of emotion.
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The Mass Reading Event and the Citizen-Reader
By Sarah Brouillette and Lina Shoumarova
Danielle Fuller and DeNel Rehberg Sedo. Reading Beyond the Book: The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture. Routledge, 2013. 370 pp.
Reading Beyond the Book presents the results of an extensive program of research into what the authors call mass reading events (MREs). It features case studies of the Richard and Judy Book Club, Canada Reads, and a variety of One Book, One Community (OBOC) programs: from Seattle Reads, which was the first program of its kind, and went on after its 1999 launch to become the basic toolkit for OBOC programs all over the world, to Get Into Reading, a grassroots program that aims to have Liverpoolâs underprivileged communities reading classic literature together.
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Americaâs Primitive Turn: Capital and the âWar on Terrorâ in Post-9/11 America
By Jaafar Aksikas
Paul Smith. Primitive America: The Ideology of Capitalist Democracy. University of Minnesota Press, 2007. 176 pp.
The field of contemporary cultural studies, especially with its importation into the American academy, often assumes a scepticism toward the uses of Marxist political economy and of Marxist approaches to culture, including more robust, non-reductive Marxist approaches and models, where cultural phenomena and cultural forms are understood within the context of their social totality—economic, political, and cultural. Paul Smith is one of the very few cultural studies scholars writing today who does not share this scepticism in the least and the result, in the case of his latest book Primitive America, is a provocative, original, and unorthodox critique of contemporary American capital and culture.
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Under the Hood of Wolfgang Ernstâs Media Archaeology
By Liam Young
Wolfgang Ernst. Digital Memory and the Archive. Jussi Parikka, ed. University of Minnesota Press, 2013. 265 pp.
The allure of the archive as a concept, space, form, and metaphor has proven irresistible for continentally inflected media and cultural studies over the last two decades. The “archive fever” diagnosed by Derrida in 1995 has only become more acute as the ever-accelerating digitization of culture, memory, and history has fundamentally reconfigured archives, both real and imaginary.
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Subject of Desire/Subject of Drive: The Emergence of ŽiŞekian Media Studies
By Matthew Flisfeder
Jodi Dean. Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive. Polity, 2010. 140 pp.
Paul A. Taylor. ŽiŞek and the Media. Polity, 2011. 192 pp.
Fabio Vighi. Sexual Difference in European Cinema: The Curse of Enjoyment. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 256 pp.
Those familiar with Slavoj ŽiŞek will know that a great deal of his work is bound up with later theories of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. While Lacan has long been an influential figure in media and cultural theory, the three books reviewed here demonstrate an emerging field of ŽiŞekian media studies that is distinct from the earlier Lacanian media studies.
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Strategy and Experimentation in a Dangerous Present
By Gabriel Piser
McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. Verso, 2015. 304 pp.
The contentious concept of the Anthropocene asks us to examine the role of human activity in transforming the earth. Beyond recognizing and understanding these transformations, however, the Anthropocene demands intervention on the level of everyday human practices.
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The Art Worldâs Dark Matter
By Bruce Barber
Gregory Sholette. Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture. Pluto Press, 2011. 240 pp.
In Lana Jokel’s 1972 film monograph on Andy Warhol (Blackwood Films), the artist is asked to conjecture what he considers will become the next major international art movement. With his voice stammering a little under the weight of the question, Warhol responds in a familiar affected manner with “ah…it’ll be…ah…p ….
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The Indelible Mark of Exile
By Veronica Thompson
F. Elizabeth Dahab. Voices of Exile in Contemporary Canadian Francophone Literature. Lexington Books, 2009. 246 pp.
In Voices of Exile in Contemporary Canadian Francophone Literature, Elizabeth Dahab introduces readers to a relatively unexamined field of Canadian literature – Québécois writers of Arabic origin – a field she describes as “weakly institutionalized and largely unknown to mainstream scholarship” (vii).
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Queering the Politics of Life and Death
By Christine Quinan
Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, and Silvia Posocco, eds. Queer Necropolitics. Routledge, 2014. 216 pp.
In the opening to his celebrated essay âNecropolitics,â Achille Mbembe invokes a series of questions that offer a corrective to Michel Foucaultâs established notion of biopower:
But under what practical conditions is the right to kill, to allow to live, or to expose to death exercised?
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Figuring Those Who Have Already Been Dead: Destructive Plasticity and the Form of Absence
By Richard Iveson
Catherine Malabou. The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage. Trans. Steven Miller. Fordham University Press, 2012. 268pp.
For nearly twenty years, French philosopher Catherine Malabou has been exploring the unpredictable terrain of metamorphosis, through which she has evolved the important concept of plasticity (plasticitĂŠ) understood as the hermeneutic motor scheme of our ânew age.â By this, she means that plasticity is a singular scheme or motive that opens the door to the current epoch by enabling the interpretation of phenomena and major events as they arise.
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The Pig Stays in the Picture: Visual/Literary Narratives of Human-Animal Intimacies
By Sarah OâBrien
Susan McHugh. Animal Stories: Narrating Across Species Lines. University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 280pp.
Some of the most productive work currently being done in the emerging field of Animal Studies responds in earnest to the title of John Berger’s essay “Why Look at Animals?” (1980).
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A Queer Time for Television
By R. Gabriel Dor
Amy Villarejo, Ethereal Queer: Television, Historicity, Desire. Duke University Press, 2014. 203 pp.
In Ethereal Queer, Amy Villarejo confronts the visibility of LGBT characters featured in recent programming, and the scholarship around these representations, by rejecting the notion that todayâs television operates in a particularly queer time.Â
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Moving Mountains: Art History for the Neoliberal Era
By Danielle Child
Nato Thompson, ed. Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011. Creative Time Books and MIT Press, 2012. 280 pp.
Living as Form is an important volume for anyone interested in understanding the complexities of socially engaged art. The volume accompanies an exhibition of the same name held in Essex Street Market, Manhattan, curated by Nato Thompson and co-authored by Creative Time—a New York-based non-profit arts organization—and Independent Curators International, NY.
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Housing Whiteness
By Lisa Uddin
Dianne Harris. Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America. University of Minnesota Press, 2013. 392 pp.
Last year marked a milestone in my life as a multiracial immigrant to the United States who has thus far warded off steep downward mobility. The purchase of a modest ranch-style house located on the corner lot of a quiet, leafy street was arguably the most explicit investment in whiteness our family had ever made.
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Middle Games and Possible Communisms
By Ryan Culpepper
Lucio Magri. The Tailor of Ulm: Communism in the Twentieth Century. Trans. Patrick Camiller. Verso, 2011. 434 pp.
The trickiest and most demanding moment in chess is the one that separates the middle game—when many pieces are still on the board, forces still appear level in positions not codified in theory, and each player has a plan of action—from the approach to the endgame.
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Framed
By Johanna Skibsrud
Catherine Zuromskis. Snapshot Photography: The Lives of Images. MIT Press, 2013. 264 pp.
Like its subject, Catherine Zuromskisâs Snapshot Photography: The Lives of Images straddles the realms of public and private, high and low art. She considers the âsnapshotâ within an American, middle-class context: those who bought the first Brownie cameras and, over the course of the latter half of the twentieth century, took the requisite photos.
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From Virtuality to Actuality: The Power, Wealth and Ambivalence of Video Games
By Lisa Dusenberry
Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter’s Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games deftly merges a critique of Empire and its practices with the social and historical context of video games and the gaming industry.
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Branding in Everyday Life
By Mehita Iqani
Melissa Aronczyk and Devon Powers, eds. Blowing Up the Brand: Critical Perspectives on Promotional Culture. Peter Lang, 2010. 339 pp.
Blowing Up the Brand, an edited collection originating from a conference of the same name held in New York in 2009, does not so much seek to provide definitions for the brand as it does critically engage with “the increasingly central role of brands in contemporary culture” (5).
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Cloud Control
By Ricky dâAndrea Crano
Tung-Hui Hu. A Prehistory of the Cloud. The MIT Press, 2015. xxix, 219 pp.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun. Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. The MIT Press, 2016. xiv, 246 pp.
What do Pony Express stations, Victorian sewers, World War II bunkers, interstate highway truck stops, and the post-9/11 CIA practice of extraordinary rendition all have in common? As Tung-Hui Hu demonstrates in his debut scholarly monograph, they each prefigure and in one way or another sculpt our current conceptions of digitally networked computing.
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Culture, Technology and Hyper-Industrial Capitalism
By Tai Neilson, Lisa Daily, Gavin Mueller and David Rheams
Bernard Stiegler. The Decadence of Industrial Democracies. Trans. Daniel Ross and Suzanne Arnold. Polity Press, 2011. 194 pp.
In The Decadence of Industrial Democracies Bernard Stiegler presents a singular take on the culture industry in the hyper-industrial age and offers a radical understanding of technological and cultural change. Stiegler applies his philosophical approach developed in Technics and Time to the Americanized culture industry at the heart of industrial democracies. Echoing the Frankfurt School, he describes the willingness of consumer citizens to trade leisure time for consumptive habits.
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What Lives On?
By Leisa Desmoulins
Amber Dean. Remembering Vancouverâs Disappeared Women: Settler Colonialism and the Difficulty of Inheritance. University of Toronto Press, 2015. 188 pp.
What remembrances survive after death? For whom? In her 2015 book, Remembering Vancouverâs Disappeared Women: Settler colonialism and the difficulty of inheritance Amber Dean asks what lives on after the violent deaths and disappearances of a group of women.
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Spectral Places, Subjectivities and Politics
By Juliana MartĂnez
MarĂa del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, eds. The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. Bloomsbury, 2013. 569 pp.
With an all-star Table of Contents that includes Giorgio Agamben, Arjun Appadurai, Ulrich Baer, Jacques Derrida, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, among others, The Spectralities Reader compiles the founding texts of what the editors call the âspectral turn,â as well as the more salient critiques that have fuelled one of the more productive debates in the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts over the last twenty-five years.
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Popular Culture in the Classroom
By Christine Bold
Susie O’Brien and Imre Szeman. Popular Culture: A User’s Guide. 2nd Edition. Thomson Nelson, 2009. 398 pp.
Use this book! The second edition of Susie O'Brien and Imre Szeman's Popular Culture: A User's Guide traverses a vast range of popular culture—its slippery definitions, its history as a field of study, the stakes in its production and consumption, its relevance to the construction of the body, community, space, globalization—with specificity, nuance and lucidity.
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Urban Revolution and the âChinese Centuryâ
By Leslie Sklair
Thomas Campanella. The Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Revolution and What it Means for the World. Princeton Architectural Press, 2008.
Xiangming Chen. Shanghai Rising: State Power and Local Transformations in a Global Megacity. University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
Since the 1980s, China has built more skyscrapers; more office buildings; more shopping malls and hotels; more housing estates and gated communities; more highways, bridges, subways, and tunnels; more public parks, playgrounds, squares, and plazas; more golf courses and resorts and theme parks than any other nation on earth—indeed, than probably all other nations combined (Campanella 14).
These words, from the Introduction of Thomas Campanella’s brilliant book, decisively set the scene for what can truly be described as the world-historical phenomenon of how the Chinese authorities working closely with local and transnational entrepreneurs of various types have stormed into the twenty-first century.
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Indigenizing Across Boundaries
By Aubrey Hanson
Chadwick Allen. Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies. University of Minnesota Press, 2012. xxxiv + 302 pp.
Chadwick Allenâs Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies is an exciting new book. Trans-Indigenous earns itself a noteworthy place within the growing body of work on Indigenous approaches to research and cultural studies.
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A Long Chinese Century?
By Peter Hitchcock
Giovanni Arrighi. Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century. Verso, 2007. 420 pp.
This is a brave and provocative book by a writer who gave us some of the most brilliant critiques of geopolitics and geoeconomics of recent years. Arrighi described his projects as comparative historical-sociology which in terms of the works themselves is another way of thinking the world system as such (in contradistinction to the methodologies and conclusions of Wallerstein and Brenner).
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