For those who didn't yet know, we are proud to announce that Maggie Hennefeld has joined Cultural Critique as a senior editor. Maggie is the author of Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes, as well as a co-editor of Unwatchable. We are excited to have her join us!
We are devastated to hear of the passing of Laurent Berlant. Their work shapes the landscapes of affect, humor, and feminist theory (to name only a few). Remind yourself of how good Berlant's work was--and how crucial it remains. CI articles below are OA:
We the senior editors of Cultural Critique would like to apologize for a recent incident that has understandably caused some concern. We mistakenly excluded from consideration an article submitted by a scholar on the basis of their university affiliation. (1/x)
We are incredibly excited to share the latest work in the Cultural Critique Book Series: THE RHYTHM OF IMAGES: CINEMA BEYOND MEASURE, by Domietta Torlasco.
Coming in early June!
"A trip to an aquarium is a unique form of spectatorship. More than looking, it is a sensational experience of being brought to another world." Read
@goingHan
on
@jamesleocahill
's Zoological Surrealism (
@UMinnPress
, 2019) in
@CulturalCritiq1
Online:
"Attuned to media archaeological approaches and their affinity for imaginary media, failed technologies, and other forgotten histories, Galili unearths the rich and complex strands of television’s early phase."—Anne-Katrin Weber in Frame 5, live at !
Hi everyone! Our latest issue (
#109
) is now available on Project Muse. Follow the link for articles by Annemarie Lawless, Nathan Doherty, Niyousha Bastani, Anna Thomas, and Michael Berlin--plus several wonderful book reviews! Full ToC below!
“How rapidly does one spin a praxinoscope? Why do kaleidoscopes have rotating pieces?... Is it a device for adult demonstration, or is it children's independent play?” Patrick Ellis on Bak, live in CC 121!
In short films from the early 20th century, women get carried away, a reminder that gender stereotypes weren’t always the norm in Hollywood, our critic
@manohladargis
writes.
Issue 112 is now available! Essays by Kyle Stevens, Brian Bartell, & Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece. A forum on Kiariana Kordela's Epistemontology w/ essays by Simon Hajdini, Justin Clemens and Joe Hughes, & Warren Montag--responses by Kordela. Frieda Ekotto reviews Kadji Amin!
Be conscious of those around you. If you can, stay home and work on that old essay that you haven't looked at for a while. Then send it to us at Cultural Critique (). Please keep us busy!
As Cultural Critique comes up on its 35th birthday, we are happy to announce that we are now on Twitter! As we celebrate throughout the year, we hope that you'll give us a follow here!
This decision directly contradicted both the editorial policy of the University of Minnesota Press and the guidelines that inform our own editorial actions. (2/x)
We believe deeply in the importance of academic freedom and remain committed to the intellectual project of the journal. Once again, we apologize sincerely for any frustration and distress caused by our actions. (4/4)
- Senior Editors of Cultural Critique
We are indeed extremely excited to host this book launch! Please join us on May 6 at 11 a.m. CDT on Zoom for a panel on The Rhythm of Images: Cinema Beyond Measure by Domietta Torlasco (Cultural Critique Books/
@UMinnPress
, 2021). Details and registration:
Cultural Critique 106 is live! Featuring essays from Matthew Lampert, Jan-Jasper Persijn, Allen MacDuffie, Kimberly Lamm, Michalis Bartsidis, and Thomas Stubblefield. Reviews include Howard Eiland on Jane Blocker and Tom Gunning on Maggie Hennefeld.
#111
is now live on Project MUSE! Featuring critical scholarship by Gayatri Spivak, Małgorzata Stępnik, Patricia Clough, Pieter Vermeulen, Albert Sergio Laguna, Phillip Wegner, Steven Shaviro, Robert Baker, Brendon Nicholls, & Michael Gallope!
Frame 4 is live! featuring book reviews from
@noisypast
, Ila N. Sheren, and
@md_no
, and Sudipta Sen’s essay “Climate and the People Without History"—more at !
#113
is now live on
@ProjectMUSE
! Featuring critical scholarship from Kélina Gotman, Elizabeth Ho, Nancy Luxon, Geeta Patel, Akshya Saxena, John Schneider, Will Schrimshaw, Steven Swarbrick, Dzmitry Tsapkou, M. Ty, Andrzej Warminski, and Jack Zipes:
"Loss shapes, and indeed ruins language in such a way that loss is legible within the sign." Christian Uwe, "Abyssal Beginnings," on Cultural Critique Online:
"long takes allow us ample time to view the wearing out of the body in the process of reproductive labor, to contemplate the remains of laboring bodies and the laboring body as a remainder of its exertions," writes
@laksh_mi
in CC 123!
Join the senior editors of Cultural Critique—Cesare Casarino, Frieda Ekotto, Maggie Hennefeld, John Mowitt, and Simona Sawhney—at the 2024 MLA Annual Convention! Their panel, "Mourning Without End," takes place on Saturday, 1/6, from 1:45pm-3:00pm in Marriott-Liberty.
Video of the panel and book launch for "The Rhythm of Images: Cinema Beyond Measure" by Domietta Torlasco (Cultural Critique Books/
@UMinnPress
, 2021) is now on Cultural Critique Online -- thanks to all who joined us last month!
“The work of the book is to find ways to reclaim Black motherhood as a form of relationality, as a set of practices, as a form of labor, and as an embodied experience…. an exploration of how love moves within and beyond crises.”
@james_isnt
in Frame 7 at
New! Essays from Honig, Lema Habash and Jordán Gonzalez, Ragin, Burns, Hwang, Pittas, and reviews from Berger and Ellis, all live in Cultural Critique 121!
“Just as love invariably involves a complex mixture of emotions—excitement, attachment, worry, uncertainty—so cinephilia, too, involves this mixture."—Kenneth Berger on Keller, live in CC 121
"In many ways, time has been the field-defining concern of photo theory. The photograph is destined to outlive the instant of its production." Rijuta Mehta in CC116:
Issue 116 is now on
@ProjectMUSE
, with essays by Ralph Shain, Jian Xiao and Jim Donaghy, Jenny Stümer, Callie Maidhof, and
@Welshentag
, and reviews from Marta Figlerowicz, Nathaniel Mills,
@elspethrose
, and Stephen Groening. More here:
"The rest of the book unfolds as a consideration of 'black aliveness' through a provocation that is central to the book’s argument and spiritual epistemology: 'imagine a black world' (1)."
@pornoscholar
on Kevin Quashie’s Black Aliveness:
Issue
#108
features essays by Vaheed Ramazani, Toral Gajarawala, Ross Truscott, Wai-Siam Hee, Samantha Morse, and Nathan Lee. Reviews by: Martin Jay , Alsi Calkivik, Paul Youngquist, and Bishnupriya Ghosh.
"We can be saddened or angered by this process, but we should not be surprised. In our society, white vanity is more highly valued than black humanity." George Lipsitz, "From 'Plessy' to Ferguson," in issue 90, now on Cultural Critique Online:
"If we are to confront our historical era’s numerous crises through the mediation of an aestheticized political spectacle, then the ends of cinema must be understood as opportunities to bring the politics of art into momentary focus."—
@md_no
in Frame 4 at !
CC
#110
is on Project Muse! Essays by Timothy J. Huzar, Tim Christiaens, Rajbir Singh Judge, Akshya Saxena, Demetra Demetriou, and Christian Ravela. Reviews by: Tony C. Brown (on Byung-Chul Han) and Jonathan Beller (on Brian Massumi).
"More images will sear themselves onto our collective memory; more answers will be sought." Paula Rabinowitz, "Street/Crime," from issue 90, now on Cultural Critique Online:
"Are the pasts Sedgwick makes one think of real or counterfactual? Can one revive them as more than a feeling of melancholia?" Marta Figlerowicz on 'Reading Sedgwick' (ed. by Lauren Berlant) in CC 116:
"How should we understand the sustained relationship between liberalism and fascism in the context of punctuated climatic events precipitated by global capitalism?"
@kaibosworth
, in CC 117:
“The subject is the site for mediation and work, for the reproduction of the world, but it is also a boundary dividing and separating out what is properly individuated..."--Read Alex Dubilet in CC 122 at
"Climate change is our historical moment, and so like all historical moments, it contains the seeds of both our undoing but also our remaking." Andrew Baldwin on Ian Baucom, in Cultural Critique Online:
"a book that aspires to see the profession of literary study steadily and see it whole: from the origins of academic literary study... to the collapse of the academic job market."—
@MichaelBerube1
now live in Frame 5!
Please join us this Friday, May 6, at 11 a.m. CDT for the book launch of The Rhythm of Images: Cinema beyond Measure by Domietta Torlasco, part of our series with
@UMinnPress
. Event details and registration here:
"Let us begin by asking, could a study of kinship systems generate foundational principles on which human societies might be said to rest?" Veena Das, "Steps on a Path to Thinking," on Cultural Critique Online:
"For Chandler’s book, the principle of unity is spelled out in the title—that the problem of the 'Negro'—a historically charged word—is a problem for thought." Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Revisions of Ontology," on Cultural Critique Online:
"TV Snapshots presents seemingly trivial and disposable snapshots of anonymous people with their televisions and connects them to larger histories about media, identity, race, gender, and sexuality"—Stiffler on Spigel in CC 123 at !
"Rather than turning its back on such techniques as testimonial exposition, photographic montage, and participant observation, DICTÉE refashions these strategies to expose historical patterns of dislocation, separation and distance." Thomas Johnson Nez at
“This is the way that ‘capitalism can be returned to historical thought from its holiday in eternity’ (99)—the relation between history and eternity being the topic to which we are now turning.” A. Kiarina Kordela, in Cultural Critique Online:
“critics have recently started to envisage museums and cultural institutions as allies in liberation struggles, agonistic platforms where the neoliberal hegemony can be contested” more from Konstantinos Pittas in CC 121!
"...the first declarations of punk’s demise actually came from counter-cultural sources as early as February 1977, when the International Times declared 'PUNK IS DEAD.'" Read more from issue 116: .
"Hating a piece of art is an intense form of scrutiny, but it does not have to be hateful." Kalling Heck, "On the Political Potential of Hating Movies," in CC 117:
"The principal reason Gandhi matters so much today to political thought and action is that he is one of very few figures committed to relinquishing or constantly stepping back from the will."
@AjaySkaria
on Cultural Critique Online:
“the archive is also an expression of the drive to incorporate the memorable or to annihilate its very possibility.”—Katsanis reflects on the demolition of the Atatürk Cultural Center in Taksim Square in CC 124
"As we move through the book, we are struck by what we usually find in intimate archives: those whom we might consider kin." More from Benjamin Williams on HUMAN ARCHIPELAGO in CC 119—live at
"What is needed is to say now to the institutional field what needs to be communicated. The ability to do that depends on, as Benjamin showed, an exceptionally acute historical sense and an unremitting focus on
the particularities of the matter at issue."
"Rather than either advocating or rejecting utopia/nism, Kafka uses it as a means through which to develop… a way of investigating the social and ideological problem of community."—read more from Balasopoulos in CC 123 at !
"Electra, a girl herself, is a focal point for inaugurating the transformation of the world through the power of the mother and, in a further compelling move, provokes the revaluation of relations of human to animal, object and earth."
@elspethrose
in 116:
"we conceptualize rhetoric ontologically in terms of an entangled logic of production that emerges out of matter’s iterative, performative, and indeterminate nature."—Joshua Hanan and Matthew Bost in CC 120, live at
"What is the value of such poetic production, and how should we make sense of the attention to a household object in an avant-garde poem such as this one?" more from Kelly Hoffer's "The Limits of the Cute" in CC 119, live at
"there is a disturbing sense of familiarity in new dystopic projections of the current climatic crisis and their attempts to speak for the common human experience."—Sudipta Sen's essay "Climate and the People Without History" is now live in Frame 4 at !
"Livermon deftly brings South African studies of sound and culture into discussion with the diasporic in ways that, if paid attention, might undo the disciplinary legacies that structure intellectual listening practices."—
@noisypast
in Frame 4 at !
“Fictions, rather than being subordinated to archive or history, are foregrounded—a means of rigorously... taking up the epistemological question of how... one can represent that which has been pronounced over... and yet remains ongoing.”—Ragin in CC 121!
"A dialectical construction and deconstruction of the universal mediated by Hegelian phenomenology also reveals the intimate bonds between dialectics and the tragic." Alberto Toscano on Étienne Balibar:
"the emotional heft of history, the politics of cultural patrimony, the tentacular reach of the security state, and the bureaucratic appropriation of human rights discourse are all issues that artists and activists grapple with today"—Sheren in Frame 4 at !
"This sonic role played by language is… further highlighted through its problematically synchronic (or straightforwardly a-synchronic) relationship with the images."—Lema Habash and Jordán Gonzalez on Ruiz’s LA MALETA in CC 121!
"Here and elsewhere in Phantom Africa, Leiris appears to reproach himself for not even being as good a dominating colonialist as the other Europeans he encounters." Tavia Nyong'o, "Cuck Colonialism," on Cultural Critique Online:
"we would be remiss to think that Marx’s interest in “French novels” (roughly the nineteenth century equivalent of a Netflix binge) was silly or inconsequential."—read more from Charles Barbour in CC 120 at
"What is at stake now are not only the commons of the living forest, but the planetary commons of dead forests’ fossilized remains..." Read Nick Dyer-Witheford in Frame 6 of Cultural Critique Online:
"'Take Ecstasy with Me,' the book’s final chapter, for example, fittingly calls for a queer intoxication, a sort of temporal excess, that melds the exigencies of the here, with the politics of a future delirium." Anjali Arondekar on José Esteban Muñoz:
“The host-parasite is not only one content of K’s thought but also one of the mechanisms by which he comes to witness himself thinking, or indeed perhaps comes to think with a larger and more politically incisive consciousness.” Samolsky in Frame 7, at
"The global order of capitalism demands constant movement and circulation, yet it also requires periods, objects, and spaces of stasis."—Kate Siegfried in CC 120, now live at
"From the text’s beginning, life is established as a risk, indeed as risk itself, something reckless and resistant to calculation."—Bryan Counter on Anne Dufourmantelle's IN PRAISE OF RISK, live in CC 120!
"...the 'disco dispositive' of post ’68 theory in West Germany leaves Felsch predicting in his 'Epilogue: After Theory?' that 'the future of theory is uncertain.'" Read Jeffrey R. Di Leo in Frame 6 of Cultural Critique Online:
"Whether in forms that replicate those of the nineteenth-century slave narrative or in forms that break with its tropes and structures of feeling, the remembrance of slavery has radically shaped contemporary writing in the US and beyond"—Barnard in CC 120!
Issue
#107
also has book reviews by: Rahul Govind (on Sean Meighoo), Sean Meighoo (on Qadri Ismail), Aleksandar Bošković (on Alice Lovejoy), and Moinak Biswas (on Sudhir Mahadevan). Be well everyone!
"If violence is inescapably present to the practitioner of nonviolence at every turn, we should also think of the nonviolence within some forms of violence that signals the reverence for life." Vinay Lal, in Frame
#2
of Cultural Critique Online:
“the social sciences and humanities are literary and rhetorical arts in their own right, with their own distinctive narrative techniques, authorial styles...”—read more from Thomas Kemple's review essay on Silva and Hanke in Frame 8!
"Judy’s work remains sui generis, a work that engages in depth with multiple philosophical, literary, and cultural traditions in order to forge new scenes of making and ways of being, and offering new ways to think about them."—Emma Bianchi in Frame 5!