FILM CRITICISMPub Date : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1353/crt.2022.a899717
Daniel M. Radus
{"title":"Pipestone Books: Indigenous Materialisms and Bibliographical Methods","authors":"Daniel M. Radus","doi":"10.1353/crt.2022.a899717","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/crt.2022.a899717","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article argues that the methods of bibliographical scholarship would be enriched with further attention to Indigenous ontological traditions. It does so via an analysis of a small tablet of pipestone that in 1957 was carved into the shape of an open book by Ephraim Taylor, a Dakota artist. The article first establishes that, for the Dakotas, pipestone is a vibrant and animate material, a sentient trace of ancestral kin. The article then aligns the pipestone sculpture with an archive of books whose material traits have been altered by Indigenous readers, arguing ultimately that a sophisticated account of these books—and the stories and relations that inhere within their vibrant material form—requires that bibliographers appeal in particular not to the materialist philosophies that have defined the recent \"material turn,\" but instead to the Indigenous ontologies that predate and even inform this later philosophical tradition.","PeriodicalId":42834,"journal":{"name":"FILM CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87358627","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
FILM CRITICISMPub Date : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1353/crt.2022.a899736
Jehan L. Roberson
{"title":"\"Come Think with Me\": Finding Communion in the Liberatory Textual Practices of Kameelah Janan Rasheed","authors":"Jehan L. Roberson","doi":"10.1353/crt.2022.a899736","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/crt.2022.a899736","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Defining text as anything that can be read, self-identified learner and artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed explores reading as radical communion within her multifaceted textual practice. A 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, Rasheed's work spans vast bodies of knowledge and temporalities to interrogate both the aesthetic and the limits of the text. At times producing collages with letters cut out from books in her own expansive library, and at other times posting scans from various books that are marked up with her rigorous note-taking, Rasheed approaches the text as an invitation to commune with the author in order to collectively arrive at new ways of knowing and being. Rasheed's work maps both her own hypertextual engagements while simultaneously enacting a Black feminist approach to literacy, one that recognizes Black women's textual practices as mapping geographic, corporeal, and psychological sites of resistance.","PeriodicalId":42834,"journal":{"name":"FILM CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82685240","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
FILM CRITICISMPub Date : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1353/crt.2022.a899718
Paul J. Benzon
{"title":"On the Black Book as Durational: Noah Purifoy's Desert Library","authors":"Paul J. Benzon","doi":"10.1353/crt.2022.a899718","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/crt.2022.a899718","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:What happens to a library in the desert? How does it transform as a material object under these pressures, and what might these transformations tell us about its capacity for bearing and registering history? This article considers these questions in relation to the artist Noah Purifoy's found-object installation Library of Congress, one of approximately thirty works that make up the ten-acre space of the Noah Purifoy Desert Art Museum of Assemblage Art in Joshua Tree, California. The museum consists of a wide range of found-object sculptures, all deeply enmeshed within the space of the desert. The museum, and indeed Purifoy's work as a whole, are deeply invested in a complex social and political dialogue with assemblage and thing theory of the sort popularized by Bill Brown and Jane Bennett, constellating objects within space as a way of mapping the shape of postwar Blackness. Library in particular consciously asks what happens to the racial stakes of assemblage when the things in question are books and the site in question is a library.","PeriodicalId":42834,"journal":{"name":"FILM CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73974019","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
FILM CRITICISMPub Date : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1353/crt.2022.a899721
J. Erickson
{"title":"\"In the Cards\": The Material Textuality of Tarotological Reading","authors":"J. Erickson","doi":"10.1353/crt.2022.a899721","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/crt.2022.a899721","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines deep-seated relationships that inextricably bind the material makeup of divinatory card decks to their multifarious literacy functions. Unpacking the deceptive underlying complexities in these objects requires both an ontological analysis of their multicultural rootedness and a speculative exploration of their propensity for memetic adaptation. The concept of \"reading\" cards as textual objects has typically existed on the fringes of Western literacy paradigms. In reality, however, considering the rather commonplace use of pedagogical objects such as alphabet cards and flash cards, the practice of reading cards should be recognized for its considerable role in literacy instruction. In looking at visual elements and sources shared between playing cards and the tarot—specifically, those that combine to form their visual lexicon—this article provides a contemporary survey of how, through its derivatives, the materiality of tarotological print cultures create diverse acts of reading. Discussed are card symbolism, the alchemical amalgamation of visual allegory, allegorical textuality in esoterica, and the transchronological hybridity in these cards as a counternarrative to illusory models of ethnic purity in European material culture.","PeriodicalId":42834,"journal":{"name":"FILM CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89082601","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
FILM CRITICISMPub Date : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1353/crt.2022.a899728
Rebecca Romney
{"title":"On Feminist Practice in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Trade: Buying, Cataloging, and Selling","authors":"Rebecca Romney","doi":"10.1353/crt.2022.a899728","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/crt.2022.a899728","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article seeks to delineate principles for incorporating feminist practices into the three main roles of the antiquarian bookseller: buying, cataloging, and selling. While scholarship in feminist bibliography is growing in the academic sphere, and feminist movements for individuals in the rare book trade (such as the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America's Women's Initiative) have seen success in recent years, few formal explorations of feminism in the everyday practices of the trade have yet followed. Laying this groundwork is an important step in the wider efforts to build a more diverse, inclusive, and accessible rare book trade and body of avocational collectors, both of whom play critical roles in deciding what gets preserved, what ends up in institutional collections, and what is ultimately available for scholarly research. This article surveys principles for feminist practice with examples based on the author's own experience as an antiquarian book dealer and cofounder of a rare book firm. It outlines typically unspoken economic influences that have shaped the culture of the rare book trade, as well as how some traditions of the trade can perpetuate bias that results in unnecessary obstacles to attracting, welcoming, and maintaining relationships with collectors. In providing specific examples, this article also demonstrates how incorporating feminist principles into the fundamental skills of the rare book trade is beneficial to dealers, and thus why every bookseller should be a feminist bookseller. This practice benefits dealers in the short term by enabling them to buy in a more informed manner, as well as reducing the risk of needlessly alienating potential buyers of specific books in their cataloging and selling practices. Further, it benefits dealers in the long term by supporting the growth of a much bigger pool of buyers, as it is they who fundamentally keep the engine of the rare book trade running.","PeriodicalId":42834,"journal":{"name":"FILM CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83260615","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
FILM CRITICISMPub Date : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1353/crt.2022.a899716
Lisa Maruca, Kate Ozment
{"title":"What is Critical Bibliography?","authors":"Lisa Maruca, Kate Ozment","doi":"10.1353/crt.2022.a899716","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/crt.2022.a899716","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This introduction to the special issue, \"New Approaches to Critical Bibliography and the Material Text,\" defines \"critical bibliography\" as a method that, at the intersection of critical theory and bibliographic study, challenges standard histories of the book and bookish objects. Drawing on feminist studies, critical race studies, postcolonialism, Marxism, queer theory, and disability studies, among others, critical bibliography, the authors argue, calls attention to the structures of oppression upholding the circulation, preservation, and organization of material texts—but also the possibilities of liberation therein. Taking up this method from a variety of fields and periods, the articles in this issue take on the very grounds, definitions, and boundaries of traditional bibliography, asking epistemological and ontological questions that interrogate the material and conceptual construction of bibliographic knowledge itself.","PeriodicalId":42834,"journal":{"name":"FILM CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78209721","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
FILM CRITICISMPub Date : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1353/crt.2022.a899719
Mark Alan Mattes
{"title":"Trees and Texts: Indigenous History, Material Media, and the Logan Elm","authors":"Mark Alan Mattes","doi":"10.1353/crt.2022.a899719","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/crt.2022.a899719","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Settler accounts of the Cayuga Native American Soyeghtowa (Logan), such as Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, interpret his famous mourning speech, \"Logan's Lament,\" as the words of a melancholic, noble savage and vanishing Indian. This essay decolonizes settler accounts of Logan's words and deeds such as Jefferson's book by considering Indigenous relationships to a once-living memorial on Shawnee land in central Ohio, the Logan Elm, which nineteenth-century settlers apocryphally identified as the site of Logan's speech. Drawing on scholarly work on Indigenous writing and historical media by Native American and settler intellectuals, as well as local knowledge keepers, sections focus on Indigenous memories of Logan recorded in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century textual archives, early twentieth-century Native American orations, and twenty-first century interpretations of Logan by enrolled members of the Seneca Cayuga Nation. These interpretations, rooted in the sacred and political significance of trees in the Haudenosaunee treaty protocol, the founding of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and the oral tradition of the Haudenosaunee Constitution, figure Logan's speech as an Indigenous history oriented toward Indigenous futures.","PeriodicalId":42834,"journal":{"name":"FILM CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73908513","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
FILM CRITICISMPub Date : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1353/crt.2022.a899737
Kadin Henningsen
{"title":"Making Mary Ann Waters is a Free Black Woman: Critical Fabrication as Bibliographic Method","authors":"Kadin Henningsen","doi":"10.1353/crt.2022.a899737","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/crt.2022.a899737","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article discusses the process of creating an artist's book on Mary Ann Waters, a Black trans woman and sex worker in Antebellum Baltimore. In addition, informed by the author's experience of making the artist's book, he proposes a process of critical fabrication—which brings together Saidiya Hartman's method of \"critical fabulation\" with Natalie Loveless's articulation of \"research-creation\"—as a method for critical bibliography.","PeriodicalId":42834,"journal":{"name":"FILM CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76313820","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
FILM CRITICISMPub Date : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1353/crt.2022.a899720
T. Sharp
{"title":"Warp/Weft/Word: Inscriptive Materiality, Epistemological Violence, and the Inka Khipu","authors":"T. Sharp","doi":"10.1353/crt.2022.a899720","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/crt.2022.a899720","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Many competing theories of the Indigenous inscription practice known as the khipu have been offered, from L. Leland Locke's long-standing postulation that khipus are accounting devices, to Walter Ong's description of them as aide-mémoire, to Gary Urton's more experimental theory that they constituted an early form of binary composition. Just as fraught is the history of the khipu, which were utilized by the Inka, intermediated by Spanish and Catholic authorities in their legal and religious systems, and, finally, banned and burned as seditious and sacrilegious. Contemporary khipus are primarily limited to those used by herders, but Chilean American poet-artist Cecilia Vicuña utilizes the khipu form to compose artworks such as Quipu in the Gutter, Skyscraper Quipu, Quipu That Remembers Nothing, among many others. This article argues that Vicuña utilizes the formal possibilities of khipu materiality, refusing to either limit her khipu-based works as simply mathematical or to romanticize their history. Instead, she intermediates the khipu form with elements of conceptual, visual, and performance art. In doing so, she participates in the colonial history of the khipu—just as Spanish authorities intermediated khipus with written Spanish in colonial courts and in khipu-based religious confessions. However, Vicuña in turn rejects the colonial violence imposed on the khipu in the same process, indicating that the possibilities of the form continue through the form's intermediation and growth.","PeriodicalId":42834,"journal":{"name":"FILM CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75759727","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
FILM CRITICISMPub Date : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1353/crt.2022.a899725
G. Wilson
{"title":"Surface Reading Paper as Feminist Bibliography","authors":"G. Wilson","doi":"10.1353/crt.2022.a899725","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/crt.2022.a899725","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article models a mode of feminist bibliography by \"surface reading\" paper. Taking Ben Jonson's Sejanus His Fall (1605) as a case study, this article reads watermarks as reminders of paper's three-dimensional materiality, whose surfaces and depths model the more and less legible forms of labor which contribute to paper's making. Watermarks here become a creative and critical prompt to recover the interventions of John Spilman (the papermaker whose output was used for Sejanus), Spilman's workers, and especially his female ragpickers. This article fuses close reading of literary texts and archival sources with bibliography and theory to demonstrate fresh affordances of watermarks—both as they alter our reading of Sejanus and as they intervene more broadly in the affective and political models with which we read.","PeriodicalId":42834,"journal":{"name":"FILM CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75638953","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}