Abstract:Hortense Spillers's famous essay "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe" (1987) cathects black masculinity to death, both social and biological, and simultaneously to femininity, the latter articulation enacting the maternal influence—the female "handing"—so central to the rearing of black men. This convergence of morbidity and femininity at the site of black masculinity, I argue—especially given the essay's publication date—necessarily evokes the HIV/AIDS epidemic, whose literalization of that convergence had by the late 1980s become culturally salient. Most counterintuitively and provocatively, however, Spillers's circuit of signification invests the epidemic with reparative and generative gravity, installing it as an objective correlative of the baroque vibrancy of black expressive culture under conditions of social death. HIV/AIDS here condenses a black cultural idiom anchored in environmental exposure, vulnerability, and risk—a political–ecological openness that is always a gamble with death.The present essay excavates this logic from Spillers's slippery essay and proceeds to trace it through the more thoroughgoing emergences in Sapphire's avant-gardist novel Push and in the poetry of Gary Fisher. Finally, it leverages this literary discourse into a reflection on the queer–ecological predicates animating the putatively ontological problematic of Afropessimism.
{"title":"The Fateful Gamble: Autoimmunity and the Mattering of Black Life","authors":"T. Alexander","doi":"10.1353/crt.2022.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/crt.2022.0000","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Hortense Spillers's famous essay \"Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe\" (1987) cathects black masculinity to death, both social and biological, and simultaneously to femininity, the latter articulation enacting the maternal influence—the female \"handing\"—so central to the rearing of black men. This convergence of morbidity and femininity at the site of black masculinity, I argue—especially given the essay's publication date—necessarily evokes the HIV/AIDS epidemic, whose literalization of that convergence had by the late 1980s become culturally salient. Most counterintuitively and provocatively, however, Spillers's circuit of signification invests the epidemic with reparative and generative gravity, installing it as an objective correlative of the baroque vibrancy of black expressive culture under conditions of social death. HIV/AIDS here condenses a black cultural idiom anchored in environmental exposure, vulnerability, and risk—a political–ecological openness that is always a gamble with death.The present essay excavates this logic from Spillers's slippery essay and proceeds to trace it through the more thoroughgoing emergences in Sapphire's avant-gardist novel Push and in the poetry of Gary Fisher. Finally, it leverages this literary discourse into a reflection on the queer–ecological predicates animating the putatively ontological problematic of Afropessimism.","PeriodicalId":42834,"journal":{"name":"FILM CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78551244","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}
Abstract:This article explores John Steinbeck's Vietnam War journalism as a way of understanding how hawks—those who favor military intervention—read the world with what affect theorists would call a "strong theory" of aggression. I argue that hawkish reading weaponizes the rhetorical precepts of synecdoche, taking its premise that a part can represent a whole as a means to escalate and invade. Steinbeck's journalism demonstrates how hawkish reading occurs not only in a hawk's depiction of the enemy abroad, but inevitably becomes a way of depicting protestors at home. What hawkish reading shows is how the hawk is dedicated to maintaining his strong theory of aggression at any cost, even when the hawk's depictions perpetuate cliché, stereotype, and ultimately, demagoguery. To explore texts like Steinbeck's for their hawkish reading is to better understand not only how the hawk uses facile language to create intense attachments, but also to better understand how the hawk's language creates dissensus at home.
{"title":"Hawkish Reading: John Steinbeck and the Vietnam War","authors":"Douglas Dowland","doi":"10.1353/crt.2022.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/crt.2022.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores John Steinbeck's Vietnam War journalism as a way of understanding how hawks—those who favor military intervention—read the world with what affect theorists would call a \"strong theory\" of aggression. I argue that hawkish reading weaponizes the rhetorical precepts of synecdoche, taking its premise that a part can represent a whole as a means to escalate and invade. Steinbeck's journalism demonstrates how hawkish reading occurs not only in a hawk's depiction of the enemy abroad, but inevitably becomes a way of depicting protestors at home. What hawkish reading shows is how the hawk is dedicated to maintaining his strong theory of aggression at any cost, even when the hawk's depictions perpetuate cliché, stereotype, and ultimately, demagoguery. To explore texts like Steinbeck's for their hawkish reading is to better understand not only how the hawk uses facile language to create intense attachments, but also to better understand how the hawk's language creates dissensus at home.","PeriodicalId":42834,"journal":{"name":"FILM CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91236030","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}
{"title":"Queer Theory in the Bardo","authors":"H. Lukes","doi":"10.1353/crt.2022.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/crt.2022.0005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42834,"journal":{"name":"FILM CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89708972","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}
Abstract:Tracking similarities between film and money, specifically focusing on connections between the financial economy and the films of Charlie Chaplin, this essay examines the dynamics between the movement of the Tramp and the movements of financial markets. It explores the power of lifeless money to activate and command people, driving them to labor, starvation, and even death, yet also providing them a gold rush of stimulation. What does the power of money and what Deleuze calls its obverse, film, mean for democratic politics, especially in terms of the challenges that it presents to conceptions of political action centered on human sovereignty? Cinematic conceptions—such as movement, emotion, and time—help us think of monetary activity in a new light, as an activity shared between organic and inorganic objects. Moreover, thinking becomes less about isolating objects and more about categories that cannot be nailed down as singularities, like movement or time—realities that escape our ability to conceptualize them as objects. Money is a rush—of emotion and time—and we should begin to use it that way.
{"title":"Gold Rush: Money-Image in Deleuze and Chaplin","authors":"Charles Miller","doi":"10.1353/crt.2022.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/crt.2022.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Tracking similarities between film and money, specifically focusing on connections between the financial economy and the films of Charlie Chaplin, this essay examines the dynamics between the movement of the Tramp and the movements of financial markets. It explores the power of lifeless money to activate and command people, driving them to labor, starvation, and even death, yet also providing them a gold rush of stimulation. What does the power of money and what Deleuze calls its obverse, film, mean for democratic politics, especially in terms of the challenges that it presents to conceptions of political action centered on human sovereignty? Cinematic conceptions—such as movement, emotion, and time—help us think of monetary activity in a new light, as an activity shared between organic and inorganic objects. Moreover, thinking becomes less about isolating objects and more about categories that cannot be nailed down as singularities, like movement or time—realities that escape our ability to conceptualize them as objects. Money is a rush—of emotion and time—and we should begin to use it that way.","PeriodicalId":42834,"journal":{"name":"FILM CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80902848","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}
Abstract:One of the more divisive critical debates that has characterized the reception of James Thomson's famous locodescriptive poem The Seasons (1726–30) has centered around the question of the poem's social vision. One strain of critical responses sees the poem indulging a solipsism that obscures the suffering of the poor in a newly commercialized Britain, whereas other responses see the poem as setting forth a vision of social harmony and a critique of social conditions. In this piece, I argue that, for Thomson, the feeling of melancholy—a mood that performs solitude, genial pensiveness, and sympathy—stages the difficulty of knowing how to sympathize with the rural poor or how to protest the social conditions that lead to poverty, and aestheticizes social life so as better to understand it. To abstract social conditions under the aegis of a stylized melancholy is to run the risk of mischaracterizing or even evading those conditions. Crucially, though, for Thomson, melancholic feeling is not in itself the solution to social problems, but is important because of its staging of the difficulties of critical responses to those problems. The lesson of Thomson's melancholy is that solutions to social problems do not always emerge straightforwardly, but instead in awkward fits and starts. In this way, I argue, the potentially inoperative nature of the critical positions put forth by the melancholic mood may also be the very sign of their force.
{"title":"Melancholy's Ends: Thomson's Reveries","authors":"Jonathan C. Williams","doi":"10.1353/crt.2022.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/crt.2022.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:One of the more divisive critical debates that has characterized the reception of James Thomson's famous locodescriptive poem The Seasons (1726–30) has centered around the question of the poem's social vision. One strain of critical responses sees the poem indulging a solipsism that obscures the suffering of the poor in a newly commercialized Britain, whereas other responses see the poem as setting forth a vision of social harmony and a critique of social conditions. In this piece, I argue that, for Thomson, the feeling of melancholy—a mood that performs solitude, genial pensiveness, and sympathy—stages the difficulty of knowing how to sympathize with the rural poor or how to protest the social conditions that lead to poverty, and aestheticizes social life so as better to understand it. To abstract social conditions under the aegis of a stylized melancholy is to run the risk of mischaracterizing or even evading those conditions. Crucially, though, for Thomson, melancholic feeling is not in itself the solution to social problems, but is important because of its staging of the difficulties of critical responses to those problems. The lesson of Thomson's melancholy is that solutions to social problems do not always emerge straightforwardly, but instead in awkward fits and starts. In this way, I argue, the potentially inoperative nature of the critical positions put forth by the melancholic mood may also be the very sign of their force.","PeriodicalId":42834,"journal":{"name":"FILM CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76222341","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}
Pub Date : 2021-12-24DOI: 10.13110/criticism.63.4.0319
Harrison Adams
Abstract:We can be ashamed and we can feel shame for someone who lacks shame. The essay argues that Peter Hujar's photography explores what it means to feel a truly shameless shamelessness. Each of Hujar's three major bodies of work—his portraits, nudes, and animal pictures—seeks in different ways to overcome what might be otherwise embarrassing about their respective genres: a portrait that is too candid, a nude that verges on naked, and, more subtly, animals that resist anthropomorphism, either as pets or as human doppelgängers. I contend that Hujar's unflinching and candid portrayals make the viewer acutely aware of his or her impulse to be or not to be embarrassed for themselves and/or for the artist's sitters. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's and Silvan Tomkins's idea that shame is something through which identity is constituted provides the essay's theoretical foundation.
{"title":"Peter Hujar: Shamelessness Without Shame","authors":"Harrison Adams","doi":"10.13110/criticism.63.4.0319","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13110/criticism.63.4.0319","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:We can be ashamed and we can feel shame for someone who lacks shame. The essay argues that Peter Hujar's photography explores what it means to feel a truly shameless shamelessness. Each of Hujar's three major bodies of work—his portraits, nudes, and animal pictures—seeks in different ways to overcome what might be otherwise embarrassing about their respective genres: a portrait that is too candid, a nude that verges on naked, and, more subtly, animals that resist anthropomorphism, either as pets or as human doppelgängers. I contend that Hujar's unflinching and candid portrayals make the viewer acutely aware of his or her impulse to be or not to be embarrassed for themselves and/or for the artist's sitters. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's and Silvan Tomkins's idea that shame is something through which identity is constituted provides the essay's theoretical foundation.","PeriodicalId":42834,"journal":{"name":"FILM CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90756167","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}
Pub Date : 2021-12-24DOI: 10.13110/criticism.63.4.0435
Kazuki Yamada
{"title":"Towards an Etiology of The Closet: Sexuality Studies \"After Sedgwick\"","authors":"Kazuki Yamada","doi":"10.13110/criticism.63.4.0435","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13110/criticism.63.4.0435","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42834,"journal":{"name":"FILM CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89038726","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}
Pub Date : 2021-12-24DOI: 10.13110/criticism.63.4.0409
Greg Forter
Abstract:This essay contributes to recent materialist efforts at rehabilitating the category of "nature" from critical disparagement (and misapprehension). It does so by linking nature both to sleep and to the temporal heterogeneities that contemporary capital's construal of time seeks but fails to eradicate. To explore these matters, I bring together Jonathan Crary's 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013), Andreas Malm's The Progress of This Storm (2018), and Karen Thompson Walker's The Dreamers (2019). These are works that trace how capital's assault on nature is also an assault on temporal modalities that cannot be subsumed within homogeneous, empty time. They suggest that any reckoning with contemporary capitalism must include a retrieval of temporalities that are "natural" in the sense of belonging to biophysical processes predating and shaping human practice, yet historical inasmuch as they introduce the possibility of punctures into capital's smooth functioning: pausing, interrupting, refusing to be swallowed by, or otherwise disturbing the temporal homogeneity required and enforced by the commodity form. Crary's text and Walker's novel are especially compelling for the way they tether these intimations to a collective experience of sleep.
{"title":"Nature, Capitalism, and The Temporalities of Sleep: On Karen Thompson Walker's The Dreamers","authors":"Greg Forter","doi":"10.13110/criticism.63.4.0409","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.13110/criticism.63.4.0409","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay contributes to recent materialist efforts at rehabilitating the category of \"nature\" from critical disparagement (and misapprehension). It does so by linking nature both to sleep and to the temporal heterogeneities that contemporary capital's construal of time seeks but fails to eradicate. To explore these matters, I bring together Jonathan Crary's 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013), Andreas Malm's The Progress of This Storm (2018), and Karen Thompson Walker's The Dreamers (2019). These are works that trace how capital's assault on nature is also an assault on temporal modalities that cannot be subsumed within homogeneous, empty time. They suggest that any reckoning with contemporary capitalism must include a retrieval of temporalities that are \"natural\" in the sense of belonging to biophysical processes predating and shaping human practice, yet historical inasmuch as they introduce the possibility of punctures into capital's smooth functioning: pausing, interrupting, refusing to be swallowed by, or otherwise disturbing the temporal homogeneity required and enforced by the commodity form. Crary's text and Walker's novel are especially compelling for the way they tether these intimations to a collective experience of sleep.","PeriodicalId":42834,"journal":{"name":"FILM CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83839808","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}
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