Media Theory at the Limits of Communication
By Aleksandra Kaminska
Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker and McKenzie Wark. Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation. University of Chicago Press, 2014. 210 pp.
âBy being off the radar, you move in a different space, a jubilee zone of exception.â
âJohn Durham Peters, âSpeaking Into the iPhoneâ
Like all such rare and catastrophic events, the disappearance of flight MH370 during a routine flight between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing in March 2014 spurred a frenzy of media coverage and public fascination.
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Spinoza and the Politics of the Future
By Miriam Tola
Antonio Negri. Spinoza for Our Time. Columbia University Press, 2013. xix + 125 pp
Hasana Sharp. Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization. University of Chicago Press, 2011. xii + 241 pp.
Nowhere has the capacity of Baruch Spinozaâs philosophy to enable radical politics been asserted more forcefully than in Antonio Negriâs The Savage Anomaly. Published in 1981, the book marked a turning point in Spinoza scholarship by establishing Spinoza as a thinker of revolutionary immanence.
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âIntellectual Craftworkâ: Reading Barbara Godard
By Erin Wunker
Barbara Godard. Canadian Literature at the Crossroads of Language and Culture. Ed. Smaro Kamboureli. NeWest Press, 2008.
I met Barbara Godard once. She was the plenary speaker at the McGill English Graduate Students’ Conference when I was in the first year of my Master’s. I remember being awed first by the vertigo-inducing complexity of her plenary paper, and then, later, when I was able to talk with her at the evening reception.
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A Latent History of Everything: Hillel Schwartz’s “Reverb: Notes”
By John Melillo
Hillel Schwartz. âReverb: Notes,â the endnotes to Making Noise: From the Big Bang to Babel and Beyond. Zone Books, 2011. 349 pp.
Hillel Schwartzâs 2011 history of noise, Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond, offersâthrough more than 900 pages of sonorous, often punning proseânothing less than what the titles of its three main âroundsâ suggest: a history of sound âeverywhere,â âeverywhen/everyoneâ and âeveryhow.â In this review, however, I will examine the bookâs 349 pages of endnotes, entitled âReverb: Notes,â that, because of printing costs, could not be included with the published text.
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How to Save the World: A Politics of the People
By Mathias Nilges
Enrique Dussel. Twenty Theses on Politics. Duke University Press, 2008. 184 pp.
At the center of Enrique Dussel’s Twenty Theses on Politics stand a series of basic yet monumental questions. What is power? What is politics? Can power be held? Can it be taken?
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Eating as Practice: Consumption Between Agency and Predictable Performance
By Irina D. Mihalache
Alan Warde. The Practice of Eating. Polity Press, 2016. 203 pp.
In cultural studies and media studies, the question of consumer agency continues to be contested with respect to the role played by context (cultural, political, social, economic, etc.), identity (gender, race, ethnicity, class, etc.), media (institutions and content), and material culture (technology, environment, food, fashion, etc.).Â
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Queering Animal Acts
By Miranda Niittynen
Una Chaudhuri and Holly Hughes, eds. Animal Acts: Performing Species Today. University of Michigan Press, 2014. 246 pp.
âAnimal Actsâ writes Una Chaudhuri, âare a powerful way to change the worldâ (1). Performance arts, in particular, create room for political discussion, as well as forging alternative spaces, places, time, and creatures.
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A Call to Theoretical Indiscipline
By Carolyn Elerding
Jonathan Sterne. MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Duke University Press, 2012. 341 pp.
The last decade has been a truly exciting one in cultural studies of sound, largely due to the generous and catalytic contributions of Jonathan Sterne. These include several significant articles, a strong intellectual and activist web presence, and a provocative genealogy of early sound reproduction and transmission entitled The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction.
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Reassembling Democracy in the Parliament of Things
By Jaime Yard
Bruce Braun and Sarah J. Whatmore, eds. Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy and Public Life. University of Minnesota Press, 2010. 328 pp.
The ambitious task of this volume, edited by geographers Bruce Braun and Sarah Whatmore, is to bring science and technology studies and political theory into more direct dialogue with each other in order to compose a “more fully materialist theory of politics” (x).
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Inconveniently Yours
By Karl Jirgens
Thomas King. The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America. University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 287 pp.
Thomas Kingâs book was released shortly before the final Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings held in Edmonton (March, 2014) and more recently, in Ottawa (June, 2015), at which survivors of Canadaâs Indian Residential Schools recounted abuse, suffering and hardship (1).
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Canadian Ghosts and the Narratives of Nation Building
By Shaun Stevenson
Margot Francis. Creative Subversions: Whiteness, Indigeneity, and the National Imaginary. University of British Columbia Press, 2011. 252 pp.
Soon after relocating to Vancouver, British Columbia, I made an obligatory tourist excursion to Capilano Suspension Bridge Park on the North Shore. While struck by the beauty and lushness of a West coast rainforest, the enormity of the trees, and the vastness of the cliffs traversed via narrow, swinging bridges, I found my attention drawn to other things residing in the these dense, damp woods.
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Glorious and Brave: An Americanâs Take on Canadian Art
By Mary Elizabeth Luka
Denise Markonish, Ed. Oh Canada: Contemporary Art from North North America. The MIT Press, 2012. 400 pp.
From the first images and words of the Oh, Canada catalogue, it is evident that Denise Markonish is a curator in love with the thousands of artistic works, the 800 artists, and the dozens of critics, commentators and curators she has discovered, considered, and pulled together in a relatively idiosyncratic manner from a country abutting her own.
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âA Second Innocenceâ: Deactivating the Debt Machine
By Bruno GullĂ
Maurizio Lazzarato. The Making of the Indebted Man. Trans. Joshua David Jordan. Semiotext(e), 2012. 199 pp.
At the outset of The Making of the Indebted Man, in its foreword, Maurizio Lazzarato points out the necessity to âconstruct the theoretical weapons for the struggles to comeâ (2012: 11).
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No Exit? Imagining Radical Refusal
By Erin Wunker
Simon During. Exit Capitalism: Literary Culture, Theory, and Post-Secular Modernity. Routledge, 2010. 280 pp.
How do we refuse capitalism? Should we? This is Simon During’s central question in his temporally vast and historically deep book Exit Capitalism: Literary Culture, Theory, and Post-Secular Modernity. The book begins with a reflection on his experience at the Sydney Museum of Modern Art’s 2008 Biennale exhibition.
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Breeding âPost-Imperialâ Nations
By Leslie Allin
Nadine Attewell. Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Afterlife of Empire. University of Toronto Press, 2013. 324 pp.
This work is a refreshing and timely intervention in the ongoing process that nation states formerly part of the British Empire use to determine who belongs within a political community. Nadine Attewell’s Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Afterlife of Empire investigates how ideas about British and settler citizenship in the 20th and 21st centuries are forged through the policing and politics of reproduction.
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Short-Circuiting the Virtuous Circle
By ERIC VĂZQUEZ
Fernando Ignacio Leiva. Latin American Neostructuralism: The Contradictions of Post-Neoliberal Development. University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 312pp.
Denouncing neoliberalism’s manifestations has become a boom industry for left-wing academics. It has become a practice so prevalent that even fusty establishmentarians like Stanley Fish have deigned to comment on the uses and abuses of “neoliberalism” as a moniker for the predominance of the market over politics, society, and culture in the present moment.
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Approaching Animals: Multispecies Ethnography and the Biocultural Hope of Entanglement
By Jordan Sheridan
Eben Kirksey, ed. The Multispecies Salon. Duke University Press, 2014. 306 pp.
Between 2008 and 2010 the art show called the Multispecies Salon traveled through San Francisco, New Orleans, and New York City. Whether individual pieces involve human/goat milk cheese, raw donkey soap, dandelions raised on human blood infected with Hepatitis C, or life-sized sculptures of transgenetic companion animals, each challenge preconceived notions of species division.
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The Shape of Things
By Sam Han
Peter Sloterdijk. Bubbles: Spheres Volume I: Microspherology. Trans. Wieland Hoban. Semiotext(e), 2011. 664pp.
For anyone even remotely interested in philosophy, when a figure sets out to “correct” Heidegger, you want to pay attention. This is not necessarily out of admiration for the author of Being and Time, or his ideas, but rather out of a genuine curiosity made up of equal parts amazement and horror.
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Starting from Scratch
By Justin Wyatt
James G. Webster. The Marketplace of Attention: How Audiences Take Shape in a Digital Age. MIT Press, 2014. 268 pp.
The task of understanding media consumption today is fraught by endlessly-morphing means of distribution, ways of engaging, and abilities to co-create media content. To think that four decades ago, media consumption was led primarily by three television networks, local print newspapers, and a handful of national magazines!Â
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Critical Bottoming: Repositioning Male Effeminacy and its Racialization
By John Paul Stadler
Nguyen Tan Hoang. A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation. Duke University Press, 2014. 287 pp.
The figure of the gay, Asian bottom is often misunderstood. His racial, gender, and sexual identities are typically conflated and maligned for being too submissive and effeminate. This, at least, is the opening contention of Nguyen Tan Hoangâs A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation.
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Becoming Analogical
By Chad Vollrath
Gilbert Simondon. Two Lessons on Animal and Man. Trans. Drew S. Burk. Univocal, 2012. 88 pp.
In 2009, Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy, published a special issue dedicated to “the occasion of the forthcoming publication of the English translation of Gilbert Simondon’s L’individuation psychique et collective” (De Boever et al.
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Trauma and the Limits of Counter-Memory
By Kelli Moore
Dora Apel. War Culture and the Contest of Images. Rutgers University Press, 2012. 273 pp.
War Culture and the Contest of Images comes in the wake of the Bush administrationâs corporatized media production, chiefly represented by Colin Powellâs testimony before the U.N. Security Council on the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the current extension of policies and practices of the Obama administration that continue to drive underground public knowledge and debate about secret detention camps.
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The False Freedom of Rock Stardom
By Sarah Brouillette
Matt Stahl. Unfree Masters: Recording Artists and the Politics of Work. Duke University Press, 2012. 296 pp.
Academic and policy studies of creative labour have tended to suggest that creative work is unique and desirable because it is more autonomous than regular employment, meaning that it is more self-directed, expressive, and self-actualizing, and also more authentically separable from employers’ prerogatives.
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What is Forensic Aesthetics?
By Tim Kaposy
Eyal Weizman. Forensic Architecture: Notes From Fields and Forums. Hatje Cantz. 2012. 44 pp.
Eyal Weizman. Hollow Land: Israelâs Architecture of Occupation. Verso. 2012. 336 pp.
Eyal Weizman and Thomas Keenan. Mengeleâs Skull: The Advent of Forensic Aesthetics. Sternberg Press. 2012. 88 pp.
In the fall of 1996, mere months after the optimism from the Oslo Accords had distilled across the Palestinian population, Eyal Weizman began âa year in the fieldâ in Tel Aviv studying urban planning.
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The Interface is the Message
By Andrew Ventimiglia
Lori Emerson, Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound. University of Minnesota Press, 2014. 222 pp.
In Reading Writing Interfaces, media theorist Lori Emerson demystifies the enchanted world of modern digital devices. As recent technological innovations, from the ubiquitous tablet to fully-networked smart appliances, proliferate in a seductive variety of shapes, sizes, and colors, Emerson exposes the ideological project at the heart of this digital transformation.
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The Trouble With Going Gaga
By Derritt Mason
J. Jack Halberstam. Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal. Beacon Press, 2012. 178 pp.
“Who is Lady Gaga?” asks J. Jack Halberstam in the preface to Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal; “What do her performances mean? And more importantly, what do her gender theatrics have to say to young people about identity, politics, and celebrity?” (xii).
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Relativism and the Politics of Climate Knowledge
By Bob Johnson
Candis Callison. How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts. Duke University Press, 2014. 316 pp.
Bookshelves (well, at least virtual bookshelves) burst, like breached reservoirs, with new literature on climate change. Only a few years ago, our climate scholarship suffered from a long drought, fed only by a limited stream coming out of the natural sciences and political sciences.
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The Trouble with Creativity
By Sarah Brouillette
Andrew Ross. Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times. New York University Press, 2009.
In the first dozen or so pages of his new book, Andrew Ross suggests that high-end creative industries (CI) work and low-level service or manufacturing labour have something in common. Both manifest the spread throughout the workforce of conditions of “precarity,” defined by the absence of social welfare, by “intermittent employment” and by “radical uncertainty about the future” (4).
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Diagramming the Colonial Imagination: Black Subjectivity, Capitalism, and Modernity
By Jason Michelakos
Lindon Barrett. Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity. University of Illinois Press, 2014. 264 pp.
Lindon Barrett (1961-2008) was a Professor of English and African American studies at the University of California, Irvine from 1990 to 2007 before moving to the University of California, Riverside. He was a distinguished scholar and the author of Blackness and Value: Seeing Double (2009), published by Cambridge University Press.
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Shamanistic Marxism: Freud, Benjamin and the Colonial Unconscious
By Sean Homer
DuĹĄan I. BjeliÄ. Intoxication, Modernity & Colonialism: Freud’s Industrial Unconscious, Benjamin’s Hashish Mimesis. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 307 pp.
In An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1986 [1940]), his last published work, Freud characterized the psychoanalytic intervention as a form of colonial conquest:
The ego is weakened by [an] internal conflict and we must go to its help.
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