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 …
Literature And Economy In Portuguese-Speaking Southern Africa,
2022
University of Nottingham
Literature And Economy In Portuguese-Speaking Southern Africa, Thomas Waller
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In “Literature and Economy in Portuguese-speaking Southern Africa”, Thomas Waller offers a comparative reading of literary responses to neoliberalization in Portuguese-speaking southern Africa. Reading the proliferation of spectral effects in the Mozambican literature of the late 1980s alongside dystopian depictions of societal collapse in contemporary Angolan fiction, he suggests that writers in the two states have used distinctive aesthetic idioms to register the reintegration of southern Africa into the neoliberal world-system. In the fiction of Mozambican writers Aldino Muianga and Aníbal Aleluia, he shows how the legacy of colonial underdevelopment and its role in the transition to neoliberalism in Mozambique …
Conjunctures, Commodities, And Social State Marxism,
2022
University of Warwick
Conjunctures, Commodities, And Social State Marxism, Stephen Shapiro
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In their article, “Conjunctures, Commodities, and Social State Marxism,” Stephen Shapiro discusses our current moment as the conjuncture of three temporalities: a secular trend of centrist liberalism, a Kress cycle of managerial capitalism, and three Kondratieff waves. These can be understood by the addition of implied terms in Marx’s advanced discussion of the commodity-form through an approach that Shapiro calls Social State Marxism.
Periodizing The Present: The 2020s, The Longue Durée, & Contemporary Culture,
2022
University College Dublin
Periodizing The Present: The 2020s, The Longue Durée, & Contemporary Culture, Treasa De Loughry, Brittany Murray
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided.
Rendering Documentary Portraiture: An Interrogation Of Archival Discourse Through A Critical Exploration Of Nineteenth Century Stage Actress Charlotte Cushman’S Material Memory,
2022
Duquesne University
Rendering Documentary Portraiture: An Interrogation Of Archival Discourse Through A Critical Exploration Of Nineteenth Century Stage Actress Charlotte Cushman’S Material Memory, Skyler Sunday
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Visual depictions of nineteenth century stage actress Charlotte Cushman, such as photographs, engravings, and painted portraits assist researchers in re-envisioning her both as an actress and as a person, but what do her remaining archival possessions further reveal to researchers about her memory? How do different objects operate as portraits that allow the researcher to tap into and remember specific moments and memory? How does the effort to preserve memory take different forms? This project argues that, when viewing the archive through its stored objects, our collective notion of portraiture can be expanded and used to interrogate existing methods of …
The Fallacy And Verification Of Criticism On Contemporary Chinese Confessional Poetry,
2022
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
The Fallacy And Verification Of Criticism On Contemporary Chinese Confessional Poetry, Lei Wei
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Contemporary Chinese confessional poetry has engaged much academic attention despite its short existence between the 1980s and the 1990s. The confessional poetry has been related with female poetry by scholars since the beginning, and they have been criticized for lacking Chinese cultural characteristics, skills or aesthetic values etc.. However, contemporary Chinese confessional poetry is not exclusively the product of female poets, as there are quite a few male poets who created some fine confessional poems. Chinese confessional poetry of new period turned out to be embodied with a literary form of strong nationalistic features and contain rich elements of traditional …
Pioneers Of Evacuation, Pioneers Of Resettlement: The Photographic Archive Of The Japanese American Incarceration And The Settler Colonial Imaginary,
2022
CUNY Hunter College
Pioneers Of Evacuation, Pioneers Of Resettlement: The Photographic Archive Of The Japanese American Incarceration And The Settler Colonial Imaginary, Christina Hobbs
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis reexamines the photographic archive of the Japanese American incarceration during World War II produced by the US government, arguing that these images “restage” the evacuation, incarceration, and resettlement periods through a settler colonial “pioneer” mythology, thereby obscuring the precarity of Japanese Americans' racial positionality between “settler” and “native.”
Re-Visioning The Modern/Ist Body: Literature, Women, And Modern Dance,
2022
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Re-Visioning The Modern/Ist Body: Literature, Women, And Modern Dance, Marisa Higgins
Doctoral Dissertations
This project explores the connections between modern dance and modernism Though initially, these connections might seem inchoate, modern dance provides a way to consider how expressive movement in modernism and gender restrictions prompts a physical response. Dance is inherently stylistic movement, and it is vital to explore how movement offers women a way to engage or respond to modernity. By investigating the role of movement in modernist literature and the particular tension between constraint and freedom that characterized female movement during this period, I argue that expressive movement and embodied performance offers a means of self-exploration and self-actualization. Specifically, it …
