POSTMODERN CULTURE最新文献

{"title":"Unlovable Oneness","authors":"John Paul Ricco","doi":"10.1353/pmc.2023.a931362","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2023.a931362","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>This essay highlights the centrality of the concept of \"incongruity\" in Leo Bersani's thinking of ethical relation. It is structured by the incongruous coupling of Eimear McBride's novel <i>A Girl is a Half-formed Thing</i> and Ellsworth Kelly's paintings, especially <i>Blue Black</i> (2000), as it considers the ethical value of going along with the unwatchable and unreadable (e.g., gender and sexual violence), and with monochromatic abstraction in the context of race. According to Bersani, incongruity is the syntax of undivided being. By looking at ungrammatical literary syntax (McBride) and chromatic oneness (Kelly), the essay argues for ethical alignments absent of predication or congruity as it affirms an antisocial aesthetics of incongruous oneness as opposed to the often-murderous fixation on identity and difference.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":55953,"journal":{"name":"POSTMODERN CULTURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141754148","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":"Musings of a Split Subject: A review of Brahma Prakash, Body on the Barricades: Life, Art and Resistance in Contemporary India","authors":"Sandip K. Luis","doi":"10.1353/pmc.2023.a931365","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2023.a931365","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Musings of a Split Subject<span>A review of Brahma Prakash, <em>Body on the Barricades: Life, Art and Resistance in Contemporary India</em></span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Sandip K. Luis (bio) </li> </ul> Prakash, Brahma. <em>Body on the Barricades: Life, Art and Resistance in Contemporary India</em>. Leftword Books, 2023. <p><em>Body on the Barricades: Life, Art and Resistance in Contemporary India</em> (2023), by theater and performance studies scholar Brahma Prakash, came to its readers already winning blurb praises for being \"an insightful, and unusual guidebook\" (Arundhati Roy), a \"work of passion,\" and an invitation \"to get enraged\" (Santhosh Dass). It was presented as a \"lyrical and searing … witness to the darkest, but also the most inspiring moments in the history of India\" (Nivedita Menon). The numerous reviews of the book, which entered its third edition just a few months after release, were similarly laudatory. Prakash's extraordinary intellectual feat was received, to quote a reviewer, as a \"literary haven, where philosophy and poetry intertwine, where the written word carries us on wings of thought\" (Rani).</p> <p>It is worth emphasizing, however, that this \"literary haven,\" when originally conceived and taken up by the author, was anything but a place of intellectual retreat. Many of the book's chapters were written and published during the COVID-19 pandemic in the middle of the lockdown. As Prakash himself admits, quoting an anonymous reader's observation, \"The book is written in a way as though the writer is gasping\" (Prakash, \"Conversations\"). This unique feature, the practice of \"visceral thinking\" as Prakash puts it (<em>Body</em> 33), makes the book's overall contents, \"the work\" in other words, radically <em>unworked</em>—an \"inoperative\" text so to speak. Its carnal thoughts are expressed in a poetic style that is inevitably broken and elliptical, at times caught inside the infinity mirror of language. Demonstrating Alain Badiou's axiom of \"democratic materialism\" that \"there are only bodies and languages\" (<em>Logics</em> 1), and being deliberately devoid of prescriptions let alone \"ideas,\" <em>Body on the Barricades</em> is anything but a \"guidebook,\" contrary to Roy's estimation.</p> <p>Yet, there is a guiding motto in Prakash's elegant and persuasive prose, silently undercutting the overarching and gloomy theme of curtailment experienced under a myriad of repressive conditions. That motto, which I express as a Beckettian dictum (Badiou, <em>Logics</em> 89), is simply to \"Go on!\", to continue fighting every form of <em>cordon sanitaire</em>. Anchored on this single maxim, which is the <em>point de capiton</em> of an otherwise nebulous text, Prakash undertakes a daunting project that is at once poetic and philosophical. To fully appreciate the author's efforts, one needs to start from the very t","PeriodicalId":55953,"journal":{"name":"POSTMODERN CULTURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141754149","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":"Not Just Antisocial, Inhuman","authors":"John Paul Ricco","doi":"10.1353/pmc.2023.a931357","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2023.a931357","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Not Just Antisocial, Inhuman <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> John Paul Ricco (bio) </li> </ul> <p>Why the antisocial? Given the pervasiveness of social media and constant reminders in the wake of COVID isolation and social-distancing policies and in the midst of \"the loneliness epidemic\" that human beings are innately social and communal creatures, the proposition of the antisocial, let alone any prospect of its relevance today, would seem to be implausible and improbable. So why would one want to take up the notion of the antisocial and its afterlives (in the plural) now? Good reasons might lie in the ongoing dismantling of the social welfare state, the privileging of the entrepreneurial individual in neoliberal political economy, the rise of anti-democracy movements and authoritarianism, and weekly mass shootings—all easily labelled as \"antisocial.\" But also because of the great amount and diversity of political action against sexual violence, gender discrimination and segregation, the assault on the very being of trans-subjects, the fight for reproductive rights and other forms of bodily autonomy, state and police violence, and the insistence within the polity that Black Lives Matter. In other words, all those activities whereby the political entails the fundamental questioning of the way in which the social is currently constituted (as discriminating, marginalizing, and inequitable), <em>and</em> whereby the social's configuration is radically re-imagined according to principles of justice for all.</p> <p>Looking back nearly twenty years to Robert Caserio's framing of \"the antisocial thesis in queer theory\" for the conference roundtable debate he organized at the MLA conference in 2005—and specifically his identification of Leo Bersani's book <em>Homos</em> as the Ur-text of that thesis, published ten years earlier (1995)—we note that a different yet historically related set of political attitudes motivated both Bersani's critique of the social as it was known and Caserio's interest in returning to that critique ten years later: the politics of respectability that had come to dominate gay and lesbian politics in the 1990s, a trend that shows no signs of subsiding (\"Love is love!\"). Meaning that Bersani's and Caserio's targets were the gay and lesbian policymakers of various stripes wanting to prove themselves and the cohort in whose name they spoke to be worthy and exemplary citizens and indeed patriots of the state (especially in, but not limited to the context of, the United States). In his 1997 lecture, \"Gay Betrayals,\" (a double-edged title that should be read as referring to both those gays and lesbians who betrayed the radical queer tradition by pursuing assimilationist politics, and to those queers who betrayed identity politics and the state-sanctioned sociality for which that politics works) Bersani scathingly tak","PeriodicalId":55953,"journal":{"name":"POSTMODERN CULTURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141754144","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":"Built on Sand: Situating Extractive Economies in the Mekong Delta","authors":"Michaela Büsse","doi":"10.1353/pmc.2022.a915390","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2022.a915390","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract\u0000<p>This essay discusses the author’s experience doing field work in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, and suggests that the messy entanglements between sand mining, real estate development, and local life afford an analysis that is both situated in and attentive to the global economies of sand. Thinking along the ecological, social, economic, and political dimensions of shifting sands not only challenges systematic analysis; it also affects how we conceive of ourselves as researchers and the responsibility that comes with doing research.</p>","PeriodicalId":55953,"journal":{"name":"POSTMODERN CULTURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138691968","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":"Terrains of Struggle: Grounding the Open Field","authors":"Fred Carter","doi":"10.1353/pmc.2022.a915392","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2022.a915392","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract\u0000<p>Grounded in the material and historical specificity of the Durham Coalfield, this essay engages two unlikely modes of field theory: the vein of radical poetry associated with the “open field” in the 1970s, and the parallel resurgence of a vernacular Marxism committed to reorienting the critique of capital “from below.” Tracing the intersection of open field poetics and partisan knowledge through Barry MacSweeney’s <em>Black Torch</em> (1978) and Bill Griffiths’s <em>Coal</em> (1990–91) as practices that come to militate against dominant methods of reading or rendering the coalfield, field theory is recast against a critical terrain of struggle over labor, energy, and infrastructure in the twentieth century.</p>","PeriodicalId":55953,"journal":{"name":"POSTMODERN CULTURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138692082","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":"Fields of Commitment: Research Entanglements beyond Predation","authors":"Mareike Winchell","doi":"10.1353/pmc.2022.a915391","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2022.a915391","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract\u0000<p>The boundaries of fieldwork not only define the scope of research but also circumscribe and delimit the bounds of responsibility. This essay proposes a return to the whereness of the field as an antidote to treating the powers of description and historical dispersal as absolute and uncontested. Linking classic critiques of social science’s mapping of nature and culture, of the authors and subjects of research, to contemporary debates about the ethics of field research and anthropology’s complicity with colonial systems of rule, it offers a reappraisal of the field as a ground from which to build new solidarities across incommensurable political and scholarly commitments. By approaching fields not as empty retainers but as comprised of and defined by research interlocuters and their politics, scholars can better account for global slippages and dispersals without subtly reviving the figure of an inert nature under duress, in/organic or otherwise.</p>","PeriodicalId":55953,"journal":{"name":"POSTMODERN CULTURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138691976","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":"Meadowing in Common: Towards a Poethics of Overgrowth","authors":"Maria Sledmere","doi":"10.1353/pmc.2022.a915393","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2022.a915393","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract\u0000<p>Building on Daniel Eltringham’s notion of the “kinetic commons,” this essay offers “meadowing” as an experiment in putting to creative-critical work the multi-sensory dreamscape of abundance, desire, exposure, and biodiversity signified by meadow. Through close readings of contemporary texts by Verity Spott, Tom Raworth, and Myung Mi Kim, and drawing on Sedgwick’s “reparative reading” and other critical concepts, it explores how meadowing works as a poethic practice. It proffers a lyric architecture whose fieldwork of study and dream is ongoing, whose bounds are messily incomplete, and whose orientations are improvisatory and immersive.</p>","PeriodicalId":55953,"journal":{"name":"POSTMODERN CULTURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138691686","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":"An Oral History of the American Sacrifice Town","authors":"Lauren Bajek","doi":"10.1353/pmc.2022.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2022.0019","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":55953,"journal":{"name":"POSTMODERN CULTURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46844401","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":"How to Inherit the Earth: A Primer for Aspiring Futurologists","authors":"Rotimi Babatunde","doi":"10.1353/pmc.2022.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2022.0017","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":55953,"journal":{"name":"POSTMODERN CULTURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46249861","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":"Contradictory Heterofaggeneity as a Critical Cuy(r) Tool in Andean Academic Studies","authors":"D. Trávez, Robin Myers","doi":"10.1353/pmc.2022.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2022.0012","url":null,"abstract":"The article discusses “cuy(r),” a Spanish mistranslation of “queer” with a defiant connotation combining sexual dissent and an anti-colonial discourse in the twenty-first-century Andean context. Coining the word “cuy(r)” represents a mutation of the concept of “contradictory heterogeneity” developed by Antonio Cornejo Polar in the twentieth century, turning it into “contradictory hetero fag geneity”. This new concept revives the anti-universalist potential of the Peruvian theorist that validates local aesthetics but also criticizes them for their total lack of gender perspective, especially in regard to sexual dissidence. The article briefly analyzes some twentieth-century Andean works that exemplify “contradictory hetero sodomite geneity” to conclude with some reflections on the cultural and semantic translations of “queer” in the Andes and the rest of Abya Yala.","PeriodicalId":55953,"journal":{"name":"POSTMODERN CULTURE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41779132","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}