University of Massachusetts Amherst
Georgia Southern University
Germanna Community College
Portland State University
St. John Fisher University
University of the Pacific
Syracuse University
Chapman University
Purdue University
Belmont University
The Social Sinthome,
2023
Pomona College
The Social Sinthome, Ryan Engley
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Much of the critical discourse on social media misidentifies its problematic features as bugs, or problems to solve. Supposed solutions to these problems tend to focus on individual actions. We should delete the apps, own our own data, never click on recommended videos, and realize that we are the product. But if predatory algorithms succeed by individuating people—selling people “choice” and “options” as it harvests user data—then an entire online ecosystem arranged through the logic of that design can neither be meaningfully challenged nor effectively understood at the level of the individual alone. Transformative action addressing social media can only …
Lacan And The Algorithm,
2023
Simon Fraser University
Lacan And The Algorithm, Clint Burnham
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Exploring the development of algorithms in Lacanian theory, specifically the "R schema" in the 1950s, I argue that psychoanalysis, read through contemporary debates about the "algorithmic cult" of Netflix and other avatars of popular culture, can be said to reveal the inhuman, machinic essence of subjectivity. The etiology of algorithms, mathemes, and other formulae and diagrams in Lacan’s oeuvre has been under-studied, in part because for some readers they are not as attractive as his more bravura flourishes of word play as exegetical excess, and in part because they derive largely from the ‘hard’ structuralist moment of his work in …
Platform Psychoanalysis: What Does The Algorithm Want?,
2023
University of Winnipeg
Platform Psychoanalysis: What Does The Algorithm Want?, Matthew Flisfeder
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided.
Identity And Perception Among Aspec Consumers Of Mass Media,
2023
University of Kentucky
Identity And Perception Among Aspec Consumers Of Mass Media, Jericho Franke
Theses and Dissertations--Communication
The portrayals of sex and romance, as well as asexuality and aromanticism, in mass media can have a profound impact on the way asexual and aromantic media consumers view relationships and their own identities, and affect the perception and treatment of the aspec community as a whole. This study uses mixed qualitative methods of online discourse analysis and participant interviews to examine the how mass media has shaped the self-perception and life experiences relating to sex and romance among aspec audience members.
Biblography For George Takei Display,
2022
Chapman University
Biblography For George Takei Display, Ruby Blakesleay
Library Displays and Bibliographies
A bibliography created to accompany a display about George Takei in November 2022 at the Leatherby Libraries to commemorate his visit to Chapman University.
Audiovisual Afterlives: The Soundtrack Of Liberal Nostalgia,
2022
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Audiovisual Afterlives: The Soundtrack Of Liberal Nostalgia, Max W. Kaplan
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Following the 2016 American Presidential election, celebrity endorsements proved to be a more narrow gauge of public opinion than ever. The symbolic alignment with popular musicians, which had long abetted the Democratic Party’s standing with youth and particular identity groups, seemed only to reaffirm the party’s establishment status, drawing disavowal in a wave of anti-establishment sentiment on both the left and right. ‘Retromania,’ a term first coined by Simon Reynolds in 2010, can be tracked conceptually from the nostalgic inclinations of twenty-first century popular culture to the ideological sphere, where nostalgic, essentialized constructions of community, identity, and progress have coalesced …
Pallavi Rastogi, Postcolonial Disasters: Narrating Catastrophe In The Twenty-First Century (2020): Review Essay,
2022
University of Edinburgh
Pallavi Rastogi, Postcolonial Disasters: Narrating Catastrophe In The Twenty-First Century (2020): Review Essay, Sourit Bhattacharya
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
This review essay reads literary-critical works of what is broadly understood as ‘postcolonial disasters’. It outlines how literary critics in the last decades have drawn upon cultural-geographical and anthropological readings of disasters to develop critical frameworks around how literary writers have used style, form, and aesthetics to represent postcolonial catastrophes. It then offers a detailed review of Pallavi Rastogi’s 2020 monograph, Postcolonial Disasters: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century. Through an engaged and critical reading, the essay attends to Rastogi’s insightful theorizing of the topic of ‘Disaster Unconscious’ and her wide-ranging interrogation of fiction from South Asia and Southern …
Incendiary Devices: Imagining E-Waste Frontiers And Africa’S Digital Futures,
2022
University College Dublin
Incendiary Devices: Imagining E-Waste Frontiers And Africa’S Digital Futures, Treasa De Loughry
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article, “Incendiary Devices: Imagining E-Waste Frontiers and Africa’s Digital Futures,” Treasa De Loughry focuses on different visual responses to e-waste in West Africa, from eco-documentary film and photography responses to the infamous Agbogbloshie e-waste yard in Ghana; to techno-utopian visions of e-waste bricoleurs, and e-waste as a signifier and artefact of the neocolonial nature of the capitalist world-ecology. The first half of this article focuses on Florian Weigensamer and Christian Krönes’ documentary film, Welcome to Sodom (2018), grounding it in critiques of the transmedial influence of the documentary form, while attending to the film’s pyrotechnical “optical regime” (Schoonover). …
Signs Of The Inhuman: Hauntings And Lost Futures In Verónica Gerber Bicecci’S La Compañía,
2022
Vassar College
Signs Of The Inhuman: Hauntings And Lost Futures In Verónica Gerber Bicecci’S La Compañía, Marcela Romero Rivera
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Current criticism of works of eco fiction maintains that one of the central contributions of this literary genre is a consciousness-raising effect that these works have on their readers by virtue of alluding, with varying degrees of specificity, to real-world environmental problems, implying that this is a central step towards remedying our current planetary climate crisis. This article suggests, conversely, that literary criticism of eco fiction necessitates a more rigorous material analysis—specifically one attentive to class and class antagonism—of these works and their conditions of production to understand their relation to power, as well as their affordances and limitations as …
Returning To The Past To Rethink Socio-Political Antagonisms: Mapping Today’S Situation In Regards To Popular Insurrections,
2022
Universidad de Los Lagos
Returning To The Past To Rethink Socio-Political Antagonisms: Mapping Today’S Situation In Regards To Popular Insurrections, Nicol A. Barria-Asenjo, Slavoj Žižek, Hernán Scholten, David Pavón-Cuellar, Gonzalo Salas, Oscar Ariel Cabeza, Jesús William Huanca Arohuanca, Sergio J. Aguilar Alcalá
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
This article seeks to elaborate a map or cartogram based on a number of protests and social mobilizations that took place in different parts of the world -mainly in Latin America, but also in Europe and Asia. Beyond the data and figures available from various sources, which never speak for themselves, an interpretation is proposed here to reveal the meaning of these events. In other words, by displaying a map of these social movements, the authors propose not only the visualization of a collection of data, but also an illumination of these events in the light of history. From there, …
Necropolitics And Visuality: Remembering ‘Speculative Fictions’ In Hong Kong After Rancière And Mbembe,
2022
Wenzao Ursuline University of Languages, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, R.O.C
Necropolitics And Visuality: Remembering ‘Speculative Fictions’ In Hong Kong After Rancière And Mbembe, Anthony Siu
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In his article, “Necropolitics and Visuality: Remembering ‘Speculative Fictions’ in Hong Kong after Rancière and Mbembe,” Anthony Siu examines images from Defiance.Voices, a two-volume collection that gathers photography and art illustrations about the Hong Kong Protests. He studies how paintings from the second volume register politics and events, arguing that visual art can be viewed as a new form of “speculative fictions,” a material ontology that historicizes modes of sovereign violence in postcolony. The introduction situates the debate of aesthetics in Hong Kong, conjoining Rancière’s thinking on “the people” and Achille Mbembe’s philosophy on “necropolitics.” The first cluster of …
Fredric Jameson And Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’S Periodizing The Black Internal Colony,
2022
Hunter College, CUNY
Fredric Jameson And Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’S Periodizing The Black Internal Colony, Jeremy Matthew Glick
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In “Fredric Jameson and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Periodizing the Black Internal Colony,” Jeremy Matthew Glick reads these authors’ coupling of Black radical struggle with wars of decolonization as engaging against a twenty-first century war on revolutionary memory. This essay examines Jameson’s brief “Maoist Digression” in “Periodizing the Sixties” and discussion of Cuban Revolutionary Foco-theory as “neither in […] nor of it” and Spivak’s planetary turn’s link to Black internal colonialism analysis as a way to talk about the intersections of revolutionary politics and literary form. It concludes with a brief meditation on Amiri Baraka on the centrality of space for …
Beyond ‘Rising Tides’ And ‘Lying Flat’: Emergent Cultural Practices Among Youth In Urban China,
2022
East China Normal University
Beyond ‘Rising Tides’ And ‘Lying Flat’: Emergent Cultural Practices Among Youth In Urban China, Diego Gullotta, Lili Lin
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In their article, “Beyond ‘Rising Tides’ and ‘Lying Flat’: Emergent Cultural Practices Among Youth in Urban China”, Diego Gullotta and Lili Lin examine how Chinese youth are positioned within the dominant culture, how young people appropriate space in their emergent cultural practices, and how they negotiate meaning-making. The article first analyses the rising tides (houlang) video, sponsored jointly by the state and the private sector, and argues that it reduces youth to a homogenous subject inscribed into the discourse of “China’s rise” (zhongguo jueqi) via emotional mobilization. The “lying flat” phenomenon represents young people’s negative response to …
Breadtube Rising: How Modern Creators Use Cultural Formats To Spread Countercultural Ideology,
2022
Fitchburg State University
Breadtube Rising: How Modern Creators Use Cultural Formats To Spread Countercultural Ideology, Jj Sylvia Iv, Kyle Moody
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In their article, “BreadTube Rising: How Modern Creators Use Cultural Formats to Spread Countercultural Ideology,” J.J. Sylvia IV and Kyle Moody analyze the rise of BreadTube. Scholars have argued that YouTube’s algorithms lead to greater radicalization (Ribeiro et al.) and bad actors have weaponized algorithms to draw users into conspiracies (boyd, What Hath We Wrought?). This article adds to this by linking these practices to the commodification of social media that spread misinformation as adaptations of socially and rhetorically mediated technologies. It analyzes how the economics of YouTube and other platforms demand that user-generated content fit within paradigms of …
Periodizing The Residuality Of A Composite Protest Art Form: The Case Of Telangana Dhoom Dham,
2022
University of Hyderabad
Periodizing The Residuality Of A Composite Protest Art Form: The Case Of Telangana Dhoom Dham, Vamshi Vemireddy, Sasi Kiran R. Mallam
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
The article will document the emergence of the composite art form of “Dhoom Dham” in the state of Telangana, a southern state from India. A mixture of folk song-and-dance routines interspersed with political speeches, Dhoom Dham emerged as a potent form of political protest during the Telangana statehood movement and dominated the cultural imaginary of the movement. It has the characteristics of a residual cultural form as conceptualized by Raymond Williams. Dhoom Dham masterfully combined the elements of folk and repurposed the left protest music traditions to help the cause of the formation of separate state of Telangana. …
Sounding The State Of The World: Interview With Karim Rafi, Summer 2021,
2022
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Sounding The State Of The World: Interview With Karim Rafi, Summer 2021, Matthew Brauer
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Matthew Brauer interviews Moroccan contemporary artist Karim Rafi about postcolonial creation in the 2020s in "Sounding the State of the World.” Beginning with Rafi’s shift to remote performances during the COVID-19 pandemic, the discussion approaches confinement as just the latest in a series of crises in North Africa and the world. The repeated experience of crisis opens a conversation about the contemporary experience of time, broached in relation to modern Moroccan art history, which emerged from and against the conservative institutions of the French Protectorate (1912-1956). The interview touches on a range of distinctive concerns in Rafi’s art practice, from …
A Case Of Pandemic Narrative And The End Of Post-Cold War,
2022
Tibet University
A Case Of Pandemic Narrative And The End Of Post-Cold War, Yongbing Jin, Penghan Zhang
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
The topical book Wuhan Diary, authored by the Chinese writer Fang Fang during the COVID-19 lockdown of Wuhan, is not so much a diary as a “becoming-diary,” given its performative practices. Wuhan Diary’s emphasis on the individual or private nature of its writing activity is attributable to its characteristic realistic conception of authenticity, which resulted historically from the humanist trend within Chinese literature in the 1980s as a significant element of post-socialist realism. Insofar as Wuhan Diary claims an overarching authorship that does not cohere with—or is, indeed, utterly subverted by—its textual complexities, it can be interpreted as …
Biopolitics In The Twenty-First Century: India And The Pandemic,
2022
Lady Shri Ram College for Women
Biopolitics In The Twenty-First Century: India And The Pandemic, _ Swatie, Rashee Mehra
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Swatie and Rashee Mehra discuss in their "Biopolitics in the Twenty-first Century: India and the Pandemic”, the rise of the biopolitical state in India in the 2020s. The article emphasizes the relevance of Michel Foucault’s work on biopolitics for the pandemic in India. The biopolitical governmentality of the Indian state operates at several levels to politicize ‘life itself’: racism (the notion that sections of the population are disposable), economics (the notion of privatization of care), and the logic of contagion (based on ideas of threat perception and risk). The article engages with biopolitics in the 21st century and looks at …
Confinement, Care, And Commodification In Mati Diop’S In My Room,
2022
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Confinement, Care, And Commodification In Mati Diop’S In My Room, Brittany Murray
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In her article, “Confinement, Care, and the Commodification in Mati Diop’s In My Room,” Brittany Murray discusses a short film released in 2020 by the French and Senegalese director, Mati Diop. Shot in the artist’s studio in a Parisian banlieue during mandatory Covid-19 confinement, the film tackles the issues of grief, isolation, and care. The article shows how the film represents these issues, particularly urgent during the pandemic and yet belonging to longstanding concerns about care work and reproductive labor. To mediate between present crisis and a larger historical framework, the article demonstrates how the film’s formal attributes make a …
Reading The Global City: Crisis, Cognitive Mapping And The “Urban Sensorium” In Tom Mccarthy’S Satin Island And Ben Lerner’S 10:04,
2022
University College Dublin
Reading The Global City: Crisis, Cognitive Mapping And The “Urban Sensorium” In Tom Mccarthy’S Satin Island And Ben Lerner’S 10:04, Marty Gilroy
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
“What is the role played by the aesthetics and politics of space,” asks Kanishka Goonewardena, “in producing and reproducing the durable disjunction between the consciousness of our urban everyday life […] and the now global structure of social relations that is itself ultimately responsible for producing the spaces of our lived-experience?” (55). Goonewardena’s account of the “urban sensorium” describes the mediatory, ideological role played by space in this “gap,” informing his adaptation of Jameson’s “cognitive mapping” as a hermeneutics of urban experience vis-à-vis totality. This article considers the mediation of these insights as critical aesthetic strategies in two global city …
