{"title":"Decolonizing Travel(ing Theory): Vernacular Travels in (Post)Colonial India","authors":"Avishek Ray","doi":"10.1353/cul.2024.a926823","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2024.a926823","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Postcolonial scholars, in general, institute a clear distinction between the \"pre-modern-religious\" and the \"modern-secular\" practices of travel. The problem is not so much with using this framework as with the pervasive tendency to unreflectively project it onto certain alternative travel performances that do not fit into the taxonomy. In this essay, I argue that this framework is inadequate in making sense of the alternative imaginaries and conditions that rendered possible the emergence of a new decolonial episteme of traveling in the Indian context that occasioned the articulation of vernacular modernity. Here, I insist that, within the remit of postcolonial scholarship, vernacular travel cults, when approached from a longue durée perspective, become subservient to the telos of postcoloniality. Conversely, I situate the decolonial travel(er)s beyond the prevailing postcolonialist regime. I also furnish a preliminary but provocative framework for decolonial thinking as a gesture toward alternative imageries of vernacular travel.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141234243","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Techno-Romanticism and Early German Film","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/cul.2024.a926824","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2024.a926824","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141234469","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Aesthetics of Social Reproduction: Silences in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower","authors":"Martin Aagaard Jensen","doi":"10.1353/cul.2024.a926821","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2024.a926821","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This essay interprets novels by Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler as the authors engage with social reproduction theory, a field concerned with the relationship between productive labor—\"value\"-producing work, such as that of the factory—and reproductive labor (or so-called women's work), including housework. Charting the impact of Tillie Olsen's essay \"Silences in Literature,\" the essay argues that subsequent authors of the 1980s and 1990s adapted Olsen's concept of silences to their own purposes. What was originally a mode of interpreting the missing contributions of women to literary history became for later writers an invitation to think about lapses as an aesthetic strategy. In The Handmaid's Tale and Parable of the Sower , Atwood and Butler reimagined Olsen's silences as developing a \"trope of inarticulacy,\" a technique by which narrators insert gaps or occlusions in place of conveying events such as sex, pregnancy, or care work. The essay concludes that such a trope is the means by which these authors repeat the procedure that subordinates women's work to waged labor.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141232680","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Things of Order: Affect, Material Culture, Dispositif","authors":"D. Schaefer","doi":"10.1353/cul.2024.a926818","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2024.a926818","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Commenting on Frantz Fanon's account of the material culture created by European colonizers in the aftermath of invasion, Achille Mbembe notes that the colony is fundamentally a state of war, a contest of forces, in which \"sensory life\"—the continuum of bodies, objects, and landscapes—is a battlefield. \"From this point of view,\" he writes, \"colonial domination requires an enormous investment in affect and ceremony and a significant emotional expenditure.\" This essay argues for a reappraisal of the work of Michel Foucault as a theory of material culture. Linking Foucault's work on power to studies of material culture, it reviews Foucault's late concept of the dispositif , which specifies the ways power is projected by objects like the scaffold and the panopticon. The article then puts Foucault's approach to material culture in conversation with two strands of contemporary critical thought—New Materialism and affect theory—to show how a full-fledged analytics of power–matter–affect might emerge. What Foucault calls the \"analytics of power\" supports the critical study of affect and ceremony—the streams of force that constitute subjectivity above, beneath, or outside of language. By way of example, this article explores how this emergent framework can provide new resources for moving beyond liberal approaches to the problem of Confederate monuments. Although Foucault is often read as a theorist preoccupied with discourse, a reconsideration of the dispositif shows that Foucault's analytics of power enhances our understanding of the role of material culture in guiding political affects.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141230369","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bataille at the Limit of Rapture and Rigor","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/cul.2024.a926826","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2024.a926826","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141229846","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Can Feminism Think Black Incapacity? On Resistance, Ambivalence, and the Ungendered Reading of Blackness and Sexuality: Revisiting Judith Butler and Hortense Spillers","authors":"Linette Park","doi":"10.1353/cul.2024.a926820","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2024.a926820","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: The article explores claims of resistance and ambivalence in discourses of feminisms. By contemplating these two terms as they are positioned in different feminist articulations (as well as in black critical theory, psychoanalysis, and literary studies), it argues that Blackness's negativity of the real gives rise to representations of race, gender, sexuality, and the body. Closely examining central works by Judith Butler and Hortense Spillers, the article further ruminates on how the incapacity of Blackness might yield an ungendered reading of these differences. In doing so, it pursues questions such as what might be the implications of such readings concomitant with the effects of trans - and Blackness's (non-)appearance in language and writing. The article visits meditations by Frantz Fanon and recent interventions in Afro-pessimism to consider an aporia that underlines the triangulation of Blackness, sexuality, and ungendering.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141232687","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The City as an Archive of Doing and Undoing: The Case of Istanbul's Atatürk Cultural Center","authors":"Vuslat D. Katsanis","doi":"10.1353/cul.2024.a926819","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2024.a926819","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This article traces the recent debates around the preservation or demolition of the Atatürk Cultural Center (AKM) in Istanbul's Taksim Square as a case example of urban visual memorial projects. In doing so, it argues that the city of Istanbul, and Taksim Square in particular, archive processes of political doing and undoing, with implications on the claims to public life and political futurity. Not only a site of compulsive preservation, the archive is also an expression of the drive to incorporate the memorable or to annihilate its very possibility. As such, the discourse over AKM and its evocations of remembering, forgetting, ruin, or renovation, position it as an especially poignant cultural artifact, bringing into visibility the politicity of the city as an archive that chronicles its own internal incongruence.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141229890","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hamlet and the Saying of What Is Said","authors":"P. Saval","doi":"10.1353/cul.2024.a926822","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2024.a926822","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: On the one hand, Hamlet resists a propositional and objectified approach to meaning and draws us toward shared and rooted historical contexts of saying and appearing. On the other hand, the inherent reproducibility of early modern drama frustrates Hamlet's capacity to belong to history in a meaningful way. Historical time in Hamlet is therefore out of joint, and this time is at the root of the play's tragic promise and frustration.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141234861","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ambivalent Attachments: Queer and Trans Histories of Lesbian Feminism","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/cul.2024.a926825","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2024.a926825","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141231394","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}