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The Illusion Of Control: Reinvigorating Colonial Desire Through Fantasy Football's Procedural Rhetoric, R. Kyle Kellam

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This essay examines the online game of fantasy football as a collection of rhetorical procedures that present a particular ideology through how the game is played. Unlike traditional forms of rhetoric, Ian Bogost argues that games are rhetorically unique because they make arguments using procedures, or programmed processes that require the audience to take distinct and discrete actions. I argue that the procedures of fantasy football, from the transformation of human action into numeric representation to trading players with other fantasy owners, are processes that bear the marks of its dominant messages: commodification and ownership. The game of fantasy football …

Introduction To The Special Issue: New Directions In Fantasy Sports Studies, Andrew J. Ploeg, Mihaela P. Harper

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In 1989, my uncle invited me to join his rotisserie baseball league. I was thirteen years old at the time, and, already an avid sports fan, extremely excited to play. As the game was new to me, I prepared for the draft by combing through my baseball card collection and ranking players in my notebook at every position. The auction draft was held around my uncle's dining room table with a handful of his friends, many of whom were armed with the most recent edition of Glen Waggoner's guide to player value. Each of us bid on players, …

Communities Of Practice, Media Dependency, And Surveillance: A Virtual Search For Supremacy In Fantasy Football, Travis R. Bell, Alexander W. Morales, And Jaime Robb W. Morales, Jaime Robb

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Technology has re-defined fantasy football as a mediated participatory culture fueled by three foundational concepts: community, information, and surveillance. This article explores how technology has shifted the focus of fantasy football participation from its origins in community to an obsession with competition driven by capital and a desire for supremacy. The Internet affords a symbolic construction of community that involves public discussion, human interaction, and relationships, and fantasy football communities were some of the first to navigate this space. The merger of virtual solidarity and real football allows us to understand these spaces as mediated and negotiated fantasy communities of …

Review Of Fantasy Sports And The Changing Sports Media Industry: Media, Players, And Society, Andrew J. Ploeg

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Fantasy Sports and the Changing Sports Media Industry: Media, Players, and Society is a volume of essays dedicated to fantasy sports, games that, in 2016, attracted 57.4 million participants in North America alone. Nicholas David Bowman (Associate Professor of Communication Studies at West Virginia University), John S. W. Spinda (Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Clemson University), and Jimmy Sanderson (Director of Marketing, Communications, and Faculty Relations for Clemson Online at Clemson University) serve as the volume's editors. Together they have gathered the most comprehensive single collection of essays published on fantasy sports to date.

Introduction: Six‐Pack Twinks, Lipstick Dipsticks And Twice‐Touched Teases: Queering The Stereotype In Asian Cinema, James A. Wren

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Long before I began thinking about the issues of regionalism and regional identity, I found myself concerned with the mechanics of and the possibilities inherent to representation, first on the stage and later in film. I well recall having seen Miss Saigon on Broadway and, in spite of a number of exceptional performances, walked away with one very real concern: I found the character of Tran Van Dinh, The Engineer, disconcerting. True to his profession as the owner of "Dreamland," he was clearly a sleazy hustler, but that was not my concern. This ethnicity, as half-Vietnamese and half-French, …

The Seductive Power Of Digital Technology: Gay (Re)Presentations And The 'Coming Out' Of Independent Film In Philippine Cinema, Roberto Reyes Ang

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Mimicking how the good cop in Filipino movies arrives on the scene just a moment before it is too late, similarly a new generation of filmmakers has emerged in The Philippines to rescue an industry in decline, equipped of late with a new weapon of choice, digital technology. An effective means by which filmmakers might combat the rising costs of producing a film without studio backing, this technology heralds a dramatic change in direction for Philippine Cinema, so much so that the industry appears to have reestablished its footing. But there would be an unexpected turn, especially in self-depictions of …

Dolls, Dreams, And Drives: Sexual Subjectivity In The Films Of Kim Kyung‐Mook, Earl Jackson, Jr.

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This essay will examine Kim Kyung-Mook's films to draw out the inscription of sexual subjectivity and the self-constitution of the subject as object of the Other's desire. Although the primary focus is on male-male sexuality remote from any explicit activism, the struggles for recognition within a given pairing, as well as within a subject's self-understanding, illustrate viscerally that sexuality itself is inherently political-here in its adjudication of submission, dominance, accommodation and resistance.

When Is A Gay‐Themed Film Not A Tongzhi Film? Yaoi, Bl Films And Gay Exploitation Cinema In Chinese Culture, Siu Yan Xavier Tam

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Inspired by the commentaries on Brokeback Mountain, especially Chris Berry's assertion of Boys Love mimicry, and my observation of the multiplicity of Chinese "gay" films, this essay attempts to situate three modalities of "gay" film - tongzhi film, BL film and gay exploitation cinema vis-à-vis yaoi subculture and gay identification.

Review Of Rising Sun, Divided Land: Japanese And South Korean Filmmakers, By Kate E. Taylor-Jones, Hyon Joo Yoo

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Among the questions that should be asked regarding national cinemas outside Hollywood, but that have not yet been properly raised, is whether it is possible or necessary to establish specific conceptual frameworks for understanding different regional cinemas. While conceptual and methodological tools for regional analyses, applicable across various geographical formations, have yet to become widely available, [1] discussions of regional cinemas actually are proceeding. Regarding East Asian cinema in particular, collections of essays have appeared carving out various geographical groupings in single volumes that encompass all or select national cinemas of South Korea, Hong Kong, China and Japan. …

Contributors, James A. Wren

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Information about contributors to articles in volume 16, issue 2 of Reconstruction.

Affordances And Possibilities Around The Personal Portable Library In Art And Research, Henry Warwick

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The Personal Portable Library is basically a very simple device. It is a hard drive or USB memory stick filled with files. What kinds of files depends on curator or librarian's interests. Many people have hard drives filled with music, and they share drives, USB sticks, CDRs and DVDRs filled with music. In fact, according to the RIAA, Offline File Sharing exceeds online file sharing of music. [1] Music files, like font files, are small and easily transferred from one machine to another. Video files are another issue. A film can be 2 or more gigabytes in size …

The Archive Is Not An Archives: Acknowledging The Intellectual Contributions Of Archival Studies, Michelle Caswell

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

I want to begin by discussing archives that are actually on fire. On August 25, 1992, the National and University Library of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo was targeted by Serb nationalist forces, shelled, and set ablaze. Over three days, more than two million volumes of books, archival records, manuscripts, newspapers, maps, and journals were burned to a crisp, despite brave attempts by the people of Sarajevo to rescue them. As librarian Kemal Bakarsic described,

"The fire lasted into the next day. The sun was obscured by the smoke of books, and all over the city sheets of burned paper, …

Introduction: Archives On Fire: Particle, Wave, And Field, W. Scott Howard

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

When Justin Scott-Coe and I were co-editing Water: Resources & Discourses—the multigraph for Reconstruction 6.3 (Summer 2006)—and then again, in 2007 and 2008, when I was organizing the first volumes for Reconfigurations and Appositions, I became increasingly fascinated with integrated circuits, especially the Atmel Diopsis 740 (imaged above and at the top of our TOC for this collection) [i]. I began thinking in new ways about technology and about digital media in particular, and I began asking myself new questions about relationships between content and form, figure and ground, data and interfaces, artifacts and archives. [ii] …

Requiems, Reports, Resurrections: Archives And The Alchemy Of Historical Inquiry, Tayana L. Hardin, Paul M. Farber, Grace L. Sanders-Johnson

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Writing at the "limit of the unspeakable and the unknown" in her 2008 article "Venus in Two Acts," literary critic Saidiya Hartman demonstrates how the "scandal and excess" of literature productively disrupts and unfailingly reifies the status of the archive as the exemplar of historical knowledge. [1] For Hartman, the facts and fictions of history bear traces of power and violence that are evident in what can and cannot be said about historical subjects like Venus, "the emblematic figure of the enslaved woman in the Atlantic world." Despite her ubiquity in "the archive of Atlantic slavery," Venus nonetheless …

Archimorphosis, Brigitte Ouvry-Vial, Yannick Estève

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Computers now offer opportunities to grasp, store, and explore huge corpora in a matter of weeks or months, and in a proportion ten years ago barely conceivable to scholars in the Humanities who would not have taken up the task of arranging such corpora with traditional archival and documentation tools, less committing themselves to a lifetime of work. Recent algorithms and hardware also allow computer scientists to develop new software tools based on machine learning and artificial intelligence, in order to emphasize inconspicuous links between data contained within very large archives, while such archives are composed by structured …

Programming (Bi)Cultural Memory: Remembrance, Reinvention, And Commemorative Vigilance At The Film Archive, Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, Simon Sigley

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In Sites of Memory (1984-1992), French historian Pierre Nora argues that a nation's identity is rediscovered as a result of reconfiguring the rationality that makes up its 'memory realms'. Nora's work was shaped by the idea that memory today no longer functions as it once did. In premodern times, memory was spontaneously hailed, with ancestors remembered in 'the warmth of tradition, in the silence of custom' (1989: 7). Today, however, a historical sensibility has replaced such a rapport. History reconstructs from the remnants of material and symbolic culture what is no longer closely remembered. Memory sites emerge because …

The Art And Science Of Literary Study, Jamie Carr

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

The discipline of literary studies has recently gained powerful allies in the sciences and popular media. Scholars in the cognitive sciences, including neuroscience and cognitive psychology, have newly taken up literature's defense, conducting empirical studies to prove that literature has value—particularly researching whether fiction reading produces empathy. Both the media reports, and the empirical studies themselves, however, fail to acknowledge a long history of literary criticism and theory that articulate similar claims. Implicit in this subtext, is the privileging of empirical over interpretive or theoretical ways of knowing. In this discourse, literary criticism is broadly criticized for its variability and …

Contributors, Hervé Regnauld, Alan Ramón Clinton

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Information about contributors to articles in volume 15, issue 3 of Reconstruction.

From Ethnographic Surrealism To Surrealist Ethnographies, Anja Schwanhäußer, Stefan Wellgraf

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In his famous essay "On Ethnographic Surrealism" James Clifford describes it as a research perspective shared by anthropologists and artists in Paris during the 1920s and 30s (Clifford 1981). The ethnographic-surrealist perspective focused on the marvelous and the poetic of the everyday instead of its rule- and norm-boundedness. It was characterized by a fascination for the exotic as well as by a playful view toward its own culture and operated with techniques of collage and montage through which disparate elements were artfully combined. While we acknowledge James Clifford's argument that Ethnographic Surrealism is not a scientific program in …

Contributors, Man-Chung Chiu

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Information about contributors to articles in volume 15, issue 2 of Reconstruction.

‘Is It A Teen Film?’: Girl In Hong Kong Cinema, Chui-Ping Iris Kam

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Teen film as a genre is never a spotlight in the Hong Kong cinema, nor does it receive any extended critical attention in film analysis and financial investment. In light of this failure to acknowledge the full significance of the imaginary of young people on screen, it is important to ask how the imaginary of young people is used to communicate ideas about the relationships between mass culture and the everyday life of young people. Most of the gender and cultural studies in Hong Kong have examined the role of social institutions, such as the labour market, education, …

'Not Much Power In A Dead Man's Voice': Perfected Memory, Configured Ideology, And The Representation Of Self In Kawabata Yasunari's Jyurokusai No Nikki, James A. Wren

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Contrary to its title, the 1968 Nobel Laureate for Literature Kawabata Yasunari's early diary Jyurokusai no nikki (Diary of a Sixteen Year Old) is anything but an unassuming chronicle of a single year in a young man's life. The complicated structure of reality in this work is constituted by homologous realities belonging to several distinct discourses which when read together co-signify something that none separately could. Certainly, we become privileged readers who, as we read, share a quest not just to perfect the mandate of self-knowledge but also to perfect the language of memory, identity and culture as the privileged, …

Contributors, Matthew Ryan Smith

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Information about contributors to articles in volume 15, issue 1 of Reconstruction.

Review Of Auto/Pathographies, Edited By Tamar Tembeck, Sandra Lim

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Auto/Pathographies offers a unique perspective on the subject of illness and the body by departing from tendencies to gaze and quickly consume diseased bodies as sites of spectacle, heroic suffering, and victory. Rather, the intention presented here is to activate in the observer a sense of corporality and existential engagement in relation to the unique processes of living, enacting, and even dying through illness and disease. As the cover image of this catalogue suggests, a good portion of the exhibition is devoted to the art and life of British photographer Jo Spence (1934 - 1992) and the body …

Game Studies Round Table, Judd Ethan Ruggill, Tobias Conradi, Steven Conway, Ken S. Mcallister, Rolf F. Nohr, Theo Röhle

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

This conversation began as a salon that was convened in February 2014, just after the 35th annual conference of the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association (SWPACA). The theme for the salon was localism, with a principal focus on how the field of game studies is arrayed across countries, institutions, and time. The participants spanned the experiential spectrum from post doctoral researcher to dean, and represented three of the most developed regions in game studies and the industry it analyzes: Europe (Germany), Australia, and the U.S. The questions were prepared in advance by Ken McAllister and Judd Ruggill, who moderated …

Alfred Hitchcock’S The Rear Window: Cold War, Spatiality, And The Paranoid Subject, Beatrice Kohler

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This article investigates the notion of 'Cold War culture' by discussing Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 classic Rear Window with a particular focus on spatiality and paranoia. The cinematic screen is seen as a site where socio-cultural conflict is negotiated and political reality is transcoded into fictional narratives. Over and beyond the body of criticism that discusses the movie as a prime example of scopophilia and cinematic self-reflexivity, this paper attempts to combine extradiegetic politics with intradiegetic aesthetics: emerging from a culture of McCarthyite furor, post-war anxieties regarding the millions of soldiers returning from WWII and governmental infringement on privacy, Rear Window …

Contributors, Marc Ouellette

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Information about contributors to articles in volume 14, issue 4 of Reconstruction.

Remapping The Present: Dave Eggers's Spatial Virtuality And The Condition Of Literature, Nathan Frank

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Piggy-backing on the spatial turn in literary studies, this paper "remaps the present" by making a parallel spatial turn in virtual theory. Surveying and synthesizing the many invaluable contributions to conceptualizing virtuality - from those of Bergson and Deleuze through to those of Daniel Downes and Brian Massumi - a "spatial virtuality" accounts for an increasing focus on digitization without dismissing the previous (and, at times, prescient) preoccupations with temporal virtualities. But I also frame spatial virtuality in terms of N. Katherine Hayles' compelling work in which virtuality is a condition. Within such a framework, many things happen, not the …

Zola’S Spatial Explorations Of Second Empire Paris, Julia Kröger

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Literary criticism now has several decades of intense research on spatiality behind it. Yet it was only with the paradigm shift of the so-called "spatial turn" (Soja 1989: 39; Jameson 1991: 154) that new ideas regarding the interrelation of space as both conceived and perceived, the dialectics of space and place, and the significance of both to human experience, began to be systematically developed (see Foucault 1984; Lefebvre 2000; Relph 1976; Detering et al. 2012: Lotman 1972; Bachtin 2008). The central premise of much of this work is that space and place are produced through a dialectical interaction …

Textual Geographies: The Real-And-Imagined Spaces Of Literature, Criticism, And Theory, Robert T. Tally Jr.

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Spatial literary studies, the subject of this special issue of Reconstruction, is (or are) quite timely, it seems. Whether considered as a singular subfield within literary scholarship more generally or as diverse examples of multiple critical practices (hence, my reluctance to settle on a verb form), spatial literary studies has or have exploded in recent years, and the number of books and essays that might be legitimately listed on any comprehensive bibliography of spatial literary studies is almost beyond count. [1] The response to the call for papers for this special issue alone so exceeded my expectations, …