{"title":":<i>The Politics of Art: Dissent and Cultural Diplomacy in Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan</i>","authors":"Maysoon Shibi","doi":"10.1086/726296","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726296","url":null,"abstract":"shaped contemporary Beirut. Visions of Beirut builds a compelling case for its detailed study of images, media, and the city of Beirut. The book makes two important contributions to the study of media in the Middle East. First, it provides a provocative theory of concealment to understand the relationship between images and absences. This line of thinking extends broader discussions in media studies that have attempted to understand the politics of visibility. Second, in Visions of Beirut El-Hibri takes a sweeping view of media, examining everything from photographs to maps to television to cinema to billboards to museums. Studies of media in the Arab world often have been confined to a limited number of technologies and forms. I hope that Visions of Beirut will serve as an invitation for more scholars of the Middle East to analyze a wide range of media, including objects that may not seem like media at first glance. It is only natural that a book as ambitious as Visions of Beirut leaves something minor to be desired. In this case, I had hoped the book would deliver more on its subtitle: The Urban Life of Media Infrastructure. Although El-Hibri claims an infrastructural approach, there could have been a more systematic attempt to understand Beirut’s media infrastructure, including fiberoptic cables, satellite dishes, electrical grids, antennas, and cellphone towers. He depends, for example, on Brian Larkin’s oft-cited definition of infrastructure as “matter that enable the movement of other matter” (5). Yet the two ideas at the heart of this definition—materiality and circulation—do not figure prominently in the book. Thinking about how media as lived, material objects have helped shape Beirut would have been an interesting addition. Ultimately, Visions of Beirut offers a lot to its readers. It will be of great interest to scholars of global media, Middle Eastern studies, and urban studies and will make an excellent addition to many graduate-level syllabi. I have already begun imagining how I can use it in my own graduate teaching at the American University of Beirut. One thing is certain, Visions of Beirut has changed how I see the city that I have called home for the better part of a decade.","PeriodicalId":48130,"journal":{"name":"Critical Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135150064","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Distributing Legibility","authors":"Frances Ferguson","doi":"10.1086/726306","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726306","url":null,"abstract":"Stenography had been used for centuries to capture the words of orators, lecturers, and royals, but there was a significant expansion of the use of stenography in the eighteenth century. During the period when Samuel Richardson held the contract to report on decisions reached in the House of Commons, Thomas Gurney began transcribing the testimony of many speakers at trials in the Old Bailey. In this article, I suggest that Richardson, increasingly aware of stenography as a technology for capturing many different speakers’ words verbatim, ratcheted up epistolarity to establish a high-water mark for the multivoiced novel. He depicted characters who weren’t merely using stenographic concisions to keep up with the pace of speech but were essentially taking dictation from themselves. In a final section I consider Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold-Bug” as a repudiation of the multivoiced novel as a literary form and an effort to humiliate its voice-centeredness.","PeriodicalId":48130,"journal":{"name":"Critical Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42056700","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":":Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory","authors":"Julius L. Jones","doi":"10.1086/726301","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726301","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48130,"journal":{"name":"Critical Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48915940","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Old Trees, Wild Rivers: CI at Fifty","authors":"W. J. T. Mitchell","doi":"10.1086/726270","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726270","url":null,"abstract":"This kind of writing always gives me the creeps. Rather than seize the day (my favorite genre) it is haunted by the passage of time and the burden of the past. It marks an occasion of dubious significance, perhaps even an overdue date, or (worst of all) a deadline. Is it really fifty years? So what? And what does that mean? Is this the time for elegiac expressions, nostalgic, sentimentalizing, melancholy, tired, irrelevant? Has Critical Inquiry grown old? No, actually. That was me. I got old, but CI did not. Thanks to its longstanding policy of bringing young people into the editorial group, the journal is as young as ever. In fact the founding generation in 1973–74 (all full professors) was probably the oldest group that ever ran it. I got old and irrelevant, not to say irreverent, so they asked me to say something from beyond the grave. So what should I talk about? If I try reciting the history of the journal, I will be forced to name names, and that will take upmy entire word allotment. I was advised to limit the length of this to a thousand words, a tenth of what I would need to chronicle the wild ride of Critical Inquiry through the rise of new disciplines and methods, new topics and questions in the humanities and social sciences over the last fifty years. But I must not even start naming the numerous intellectual movements that have rustled through the leaves of this journal and fertilized its roots, or that would take up my entire word allotment as well. And besides, it’s all there, accessible online. Look it up. So what is there to say, then? Some lines of the late John Prine immediately came to mind when I received this invitation:","PeriodicalId":48130,"journal":{"name":"Critical Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49139850","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Truth of Value: A Conversation with Theaster Gates","authors":"Zachary Cahill","doi":"10.1086/726274","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726274","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48130,"journal":{"name":"Critical Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43039479","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":":Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion","authors":"Benjamin Morgan","doi":"10.1086/726304","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726304","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48130,"journal":{"name":"Critical Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60729635","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Granular Worlds: Situating the Sand Table in Media History","authors":"Matthew Kirschenbaum","doi":"10.1086/726299","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726299","url":null,"abstract":"A sand table is an intentional structure that is an early, indeed ancient, interactive platform for visualization and simulation. An intellectual furnishing that is also a tangible instance of speculative infrastructure, the sand table offers a tactile space for the rehearsal of tactics, staccato words whose roots lie in haptics and arrangement. While common in military settings, sand tables have also been used to teach the blind, train wilderness firefighters, conduct therapy for trauma victims, illustrate stories to children, and play imaginative games. Today there is a direct line from this seemingly modest technology—an implementation of what has been called elemental media—to augmented reality and other tangible interfaces. Part media history, part media archaeology, this article argues that sand tables belong to the lineage of platforms for speculative thinking and world-building that culminated in the rise of the digital computer amid a Cold War complex of scenario-driven futurology (whose centerpiece was the so-called situation room). It also suggests that sand, in its literal granularity—the physical affordances of the minute particulars of its particulate matter—offers an alternative to the binary regimen of ones and zeros that is the extractive product of the refined silica out of which semiconductors are still made.","PeriodicalId":48130,"journal":{"name":"Critical Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47500252","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":":Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age","authors":"Athanassia Williamson","doi":"10.1086/726305","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726305","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48130,"journal":{"name":"Critical Inquiry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60729862","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}