The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies最新文献

{"title":"Interstitial Spaces: Social Collage and the Zimbabwe Cultural Center of Detroit","authors":"Lisa Gordillo","doi":"10.17077/2168-569X.1468","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17077/2168-569X.1468","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":448595,"journal":{"name":"The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124853054","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Protesting Too Much: Revealing Repetitions in Barry Hannah's Interviews","authors":"M. Blackwell","doi":"10.17077/2168-569X.1466","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17077/2168-569X.1466","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":448595,"journal":{"name":"The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114752339","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Souls All Unaccompanied: Enacting Levinasian Feminine Alterity in Housekeeping","authors":"Makayla Steiner","doi":"10.17077/2168-569X.1473","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17077/2168-569X.1473","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":448595,"journal":{"name":"The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134130013","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Critical Psychosis: Genre, Détournement, and Critique in Mr. Plinkett's Star Wars Reviews","authors":"Benjamin Kirbach","doi":"10.17077/2168-569X.1430","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17077/2168-569X.1430","url":null,"abstract":"Who's the more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him?-Obi-Wan KenobiWhen Harry S. Plinkett uploaded a review of Star Wars: Episode I-The Phantom Menace to YouTube in 2009, he became a brand of Internet celebrity. It is difficult, however, to detach \"review\" from rather large scare quotes. Posted in seven parts, Plinkett's rant is as smart as it is genre-bending. Yoking audio commentary to film theory, the review ostensibly takes the shape of a nonfiction video essay: a detailed, scene-by-scene analysis of the CGI-saturated Star Wars prequel. But simultaneously, as if unable to sustain the necessary level of repression, the review fractures into the narrative of Plinkett himself-a wheelchair-bound centenarian who murders his wives, actively abducts people, and offers to mail Totino's Pizza Rolls to viewers who comment on his \"webzone.\" Plinkett is a fictional character, voiced by independent filmmaker Mike Stoklasa and produced by Stoklasa's Milwaukee-based RedLetterMedia. RLM's website boasts many short films and webseries, but the Plinkett reviews are among the most highly anticipated.1 Plinkett's takedown of The Phantom Menace alone has received more than five million views on YouTube, and was even screened at the CPH PIX film festival in Denmark (\"Mike's Coming\"). Through Plinkett, Stoklasa stitches his reviews together using schizophrenic metalepsis and intentionally awkward editing. Overlaying tropes from video essay, mockumentary, mash-up, and even horror, Plinkett blurs the line between art and armchair criticism. And at seventy minutes, The Phantom Menace review is, by most accounts, a feature-length film unto itself. By recontextualizing supplemental footage and other Star Wars marketing material, Plinkett is a subversive response to a garishly overcommoditized film industry. His reviews are evidence that cultural producers do not possess ultimate control over the identities of their products. Stoklasa moreover uses a \"deranged\" mind as the template for defamiliarizing the hegemonic logic of consumerism. Psychosis is figured as a form of catharsis in response to the colossal disappointment of the Star Wars prequels, but it is simultaneously a form of critique. By fictionalizing his critic, Stoklasa reveals the lengths to which criticism is not merely derivative, but generative-a \"productive mutation,\" as media critics Anne Burdick et al. might call it (11), detourned from extant cultural forms and morphed into an eclectic performance of argument.\"Star Wars: The Phantom Menace was the most disappointing thing since my son,\" Plinkett begins. \"And while my son eventually hanged himself in the bathroom of the gas station, the unfortunate reality of the Star Wars prequels is that they'll be around. Forever\" (Stoklasa, Episode I). These opening lines of The Phantom Menace review attest to the indelible inscription of Star Wars upon our cultural imaginary, just as the figure of paternal authority might enroll us into a drama of imminent","PeriodicalId":448595,"journal":{"name":"The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124122626","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Flow of Narrative: Misleading Structures and Uncertain Faiths in Wieland","authors":"Justin Cosner","doi":"10.17077/2168-569X.1436","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17077/2168-569X.1436","url":null,"abstract":"Misleading CausalityIn the last years of the eighteenth century, Charles Brockden-Brown wrote the first major American Gothic novel, reworking a famous criminal case of arson and murder into a dizzying narrative of mystery, religious fanaticism, and the inexplicable. Beyond these interests in uncertainty, much of the novel's notorious difficulty stems from its fractured narrative, rendering it more a series of set-pieces than a cohesive story. The first set-piece is Wieland Sr.'s solitary temple, built on a hill of the property to which he retreated from religious persecution in Europe, which subsequently recalls the formative imagery of Winthrop's \"shining city on a hill\". Yet while there is indeed an inexplicable luminescence in Wieland's temple, it is not that of radiant peace but in fact, the flicker which preempts a mysterious conflagration, a spontaneous combustion which kills the elder Wieland. This unexplained event and the temple of lonely meditation which houses it models some of the complex interactions between belief, uncertainty, and violence in the text even as the optimistic ideologies of American destiny and Enlightenment progress are called into question.The novel's Gothic qualities question such totalizing structures as Brown reworked the Gothic form to fit the US landscape and the conflicts inherent to its expansionist and Enlightenment projects. Lacking the castles and cathedrals of Europe and the political or religious controversies which haunt them. Brown defends his alterations, dismissing the \"[pjuerile superstition and exploded manners. Gothic castles and chimeras,\" of European practitioners and instead invokes \"incidents of Indian hostility, and the perils of the Western wilderness, [as] far more suitable\" subjects for Americans (Brown, Edgar Huntlv 3). But despite dismissing chimeras and super- stitions, which suggests a skeptic's disenchantment of the Gothic world, Brown's oeuvre manifests a striking, critical approach toward the comfortable rationalist subject. Indeed, supernatural forces and even madness hover at the fringes of civilization and the civilized. Far from evacuating the Gothic of the power of irrational and supernatural forces, Wieland describes the susceptibility of figures of comfortable surety and provokes an acceptance of uncertainty, and the possibility of an accompanying faith, as necessary qualities of openness to non-material values and to others. But the primary way in which Brown's Gothic poses an uncertain alternative to totalizing and concreted structures of certainty comes in the manner of the story's telling, the text's meticulously reconstructed narration by Clara, which clashes with the thematic interest in Gothic ambiguities.Wieland Sr.'s death left his two children, Clara and her brother, the younger Wieland, each half the property, including that lonely temple which they convert into an outdoor parlor for company and lively talk. But their group's educated society is marred by inexplic","PeriodicalId":448595,"journal":{"name":"The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115438584","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction: (Mis)Leading","authors":"Miriam Janechek, D. Kennedy","doi":"10.17077/2168-569X.1449","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17077/2168-569X.1449","url":null,"abstract":"This special issue of the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies marries together two of the most important aspects of graduate student development - conference participation and publication. To celebrate the high standard of scholarship produced by graduate students at not only the University of Iowa but also schools around the nation, the Journal created a special issue specifically for scholars who present at the Craft Critique Culture Conference. This conference, hosted by the English department graduate students at the University of Iowa, offers graduate students the unique opportunity to present research as well as creative writing and art. This issue is the first time the three have come together, and it is an exemplar of the high quality work graduate students generate.The Craft Critique Culture Conference is in its fifteenth year as a graduate student-run organization. It has a long tradition of creative, innovative conference themes as well as attracting brilliant senior scholars to participate as keynote speakers. The 2014 CCC collected together presenters under the theme \"Mis-Leading\" and brought Dr. Marah Gubar to Iowa. Dr. Gubar, herself an enthusiastic supporter of graduate student work, offered a unique keynote address that worked through the complexities and rewards of forging new paths in scholarship, a path she called the \"third way.\" Her talk encouraged young scholars to trust their instincts about the texts they work with and their personal reactions to scholarship they read. It is in those reactions, she argued, that one can find something different and new to bring to the conversation. In the spirit of her talk, Journal editors took to the conference panels to identify strong papers that create new ways in scholarship.Following the theme of the conference, the articles collected here each illustrate a new way of considering literature, historical events, or contemporary culture that illuminate complexities, demonstrate misleading assumptions, and engage \"third ways.\" For example, Justin Cosner engages with the misleading representations of religious faith in Charles Brockden-Brown's Wieland, arguing that the text illuminates a larger critique of the impulse to assert religious certainty and totalizing rational understanding of the world in nineteenth-century America. Turning to more contemporary literature, Faith Avery's discussion of Toni Morrison's Tar Baby argues for the misleading nature of selfishness throughout the novel. Avery argues that Morrison's readers are asked to question whether selfishness in the name of individuality is akin to \"selling out\" in the case of the novel's protagonist, Jadine. Avery points out how this misleading contradiction allows Morrison to direct ethical examination in the novel toward issues of racial and cultural re-appropriation. Together, these articles present the importance of questioning typical or mainstream critical narratives as each demonstrates the way scholarship can redirected from","PeriodicalId":448595,"journal":{"name":"The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125313389","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"We are alive\": (Mis)Reading Joy Harjo's Noni Daylight as a Yellow Woman","authors":"Chelsea D. Burk","doi":"10.17077/2168-569X.1437","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17077/2168-569X.1437","url":null,"abstract":"Running on the Edge of the Rainbow, a 1978 film produced by the University of Arizona, opens with Leslie Marmon Silko sitting on a porch swing, regaling an audience of three with a version of her poem \"Storyteller.\" The poem features three versions of the Yellow Woman, a figure who originates in the Keres Pueblo oral tradition. Delighted giggles punctuate Silko's words, echoing the story's playfulness. As Silko's voice fades, the camera zooms in, framing the storyteller and her fellow porch-swinger, Joy Harjo, whose laughter trails the tale. The film intimates the strong connection to storytelling that binds Silko and Harjo. Harjo named Silko as a particular influence early in her literary career as she added poetry to her artistic repertoire (Bruchac 228).1 Literary criticism that discusses the two artists, however, has surprisingly not followed suit. Beyond comparing Silko and Harjo as women writers of native descent, with some emphasis on thematic overlaps, critics have yet to sustain an exploration into Silko's influence upon Harjo's poetry as contemporary writers interrogating gender norms to which dominant culture and the presiding feminism (also called \"sisterhood feminism\") adhere in the immediate aftermath of the late twentieth-century's women's liberation movement.2By drawing out Noni Daylight's Yellow Woman characteristics, I hope to illuminate another layer of complexity in Harjo's early poetry, which current scholarship predominately overlooks. I also aim to reify the importance of Yellow Woman and Noni Daylight for feminist literary scholarship and teaching. In the midst of sisterhood feminism's universalizing rhetoric that privileged a white liberal agenda, Silko and Harjo approach womanhood as polyvocal and uniquely situated. Like the Yellow Women in Silko's oeuvre, the Noni Daylights of Harjo's poetry insist that wom- en must learn how to tell one's story in order to reject both the normative narratives Anglo-American culture projects that restrict women's sexual expression and the counter-narratives posited by mainstream feminists.3 Noni Daylight and Yellow Woman exist between the phenomenology of their lived experiences and the storytelling event. Somewhere among the differences and similarities that attend each story they tell as representations of the culturally-inflected idea of \"woman,\" Noni Daylight and Yellow Woman legitimize women's unsaid and previously unsayable encounters. In so doing, Yellow Woman and Noni Daylight assert that each woman's experiences, as they simultaneously reflect and reject normative gender narratives, deserve listening. They employ a poetics of survivance, a concept with which Gerald Vizenor describes interventions by people of native descent into dominant identity politics and the inextricable lived violences that accompany colonization. Silko and Harjo's figures, like mainstream feminism, reject exceptionalism in favor of community, but do not repeat sisterhood feminist's liberal homogenizing i","PeriodicalId":448595,"journal":{"name":"The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":"83 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115426408","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"Let Loose the Dogs\": Messiness and Ethical Wrangling in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby","authors":"F. Avery","doi":"10.17077/2168-569X.1434","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17077/2168-569X.1434","url":null,"abstract":"As Toni Morrison's 1981 novel, Tar Baby, draws to a close and the tension between the central characters, Jadine and Son, reaches its peak, the omniscient narration voices the questions that Morrison's readers have been grappling with since the novel's opening pages: \"One had a past, the other a future and each one bore the culture to save the race in his hands. Mama-spoiled black man, will you mature with me? Culture bearing black woman, whose culture are you bearing?\" (269). Much of the initial critical conversation concerning Tar Baby revolves around efforts to determine where the reader's sentiments should lie. Are we to sympathize with Son, a sensitive man deeply attuned to his \"ancient properties,\" whose concern with black folk values, community, and ancestral heritage are primary to his personal identity?1 Or, are we to invest in Jadine, the highly educated black model-the epitome of colonized beauty-who all but rejects her heritage and ancestry as incompatible with the fast-paced, modern, lifestyle that she associates with success? The conflicting forces at work within Tar Baby are, indeed, complex and frustrating. The novel's conclusion-in which Jadine returns to Paris, ostensibly to resume her glamorous lifestyle while Son runs, \"lickety-split,\" away with the mythic blind and naked horsemen on the Isle des Chevaliers-provides no definitive answers (306). The fates of Son and Jadine do not satisfy the desire for a final statement about the possibility (or lack thereof) for reconciliation between modern expectations of Western \"sophistication\" and black cultural tradition. However, the call for a clear resolution to the novel is reductive. Toni Morrison's postmodern technique is such that it never resolves.2 Rather, she consistently pushes her reader toward further ethical wrangling, insisting upon the reader's obligation to struggle with the moral issues at hand.3 With this in mind, Jadine may not only be read as exemplary of the challenges to black identity in a post civil rights moment of racial \"arrival\"-in which civil rights such as equity and equality in the work force, education, etc. are advertised and celebrated as having been completely attained-but she also allows Morrison to confront notions of racial \"selling out\" that have been historically, and still remain, prominent within the African American community. It seems as though Jadine's final departure to Europe indicates a choice of selfishness and therein racial betrayal. However, selfishness is valenced throughout the novel in such a way that it requires Jadine and Morrison's readers to question whether selfishness in the name of autonomous selfhood is, in fact, synonymous with \"selling out.\" This disorienting contradiction allows Morrison to direct both Jadine's and her reader's continued ethical examination toward issues of racial and cultural re-approachment as opposed to reading Jadine's departure to Europe as definitive racial betrayal.Randall Kennedy closely explores ","PeriodicalId":448595,"journal":{"name":"The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117265526","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Pussy Riot vs. Civil Obedience: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Two Texts","authors":"Volha Kananovich","doi":"10.17077/2168-569X.1435","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17077/2168-569X.1435","url":null,"abstract":"In February 2012, at the height of that year's presidential campaign in Russia, a short video was uploaded to YouTube by a member of the Pussy Riot punk feminist band (Matveeva). The video featured four young women in brightly colored masks and short dresses in front of the altar of Russia's major Orthodox temple, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. Lifting their legs, kneeling and crossing themselves, the women lip-synced a \"punk prayer\" that they had set to the music of a sacred Orthodox song,1 in which they pleaded with the Virgin Mary to \"drive Putin,\" who was running for his third presidential term, \"away.\"The clip, which also contained scenes from an earlier Pussy Riot performance in another cathedral, lasted a little less than two minutes. It was nearly twice as long as the actual performance, a fact revealed five months later in court, in which three Pussy Riot members identified by the police as the participants of that performance - Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Mariya Alyokhina, and Ekaterina Samutsevich - were put on trial and charged with hooliganism motivated by religious hatred (\"Opublikovano\"). Heavily covered by the domestic and international media (\"O Pussy Riot\"), accompanied by mass protests (\"Pussy Riot Supporters\"), comments and appeals from government officials (Nakamura and Weiner) and public figures (\"Madonna Urges Russia\"; \"Yoko Ono Awards\") around the world, the trial ended in August 2012. The women were found guilty and sentenced to two years in a penal colony (\"Prigovor\").In October 2012, Samutsevich's term was converted into a suspended sentence (Tsoi and Ledniov). Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina were freed from prison three months before their scheduled release, in December 2013 (\"Jailed Pussy Riot Activ- ists\"). The reason for their release, as the Russian authorities emphasized, was a nationwide amnesty to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Russian constitution, but it was interpreted by the band members as a PR stunt (\"Freed Pussy Riot Activists\") before the Olympic Games that were hosted by Russia in February 2014.The timing and the multitude of the conflicting interpretations of the performance have transformed the Pussy Riot affair - using the term that that Chilton made famous - into a \"critical discourse moment\" (12) that put issues of religious satire, political critique, and the boundaries of free speech at the center of public discourse in Russia.The video footage itself, however, was far from remarkable in terms of the audience reached: two years after the performance, the number of views on YouTube did not exceed 3 million, a figure hardly comparable to that for videos considered viral (Broxton et al.). While the video footage did find its way to a wider audience by other means, such as TV broadcasts or pictures in newspapers, the lyrics were usually mentioned in passing, with references not going far beyond citing the title of the prayer. When demonstrated on mainstream Russian TV as part of the n","PeriodicalId":448595,"journal":{"name":"The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122648449","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"What Alerts, Alters\": Hacking the Narratives of Cultural Memory with Rankine, Eady, and Philip","authors":"J. Shook","doi":"10.17077/2168-569X.1428","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17077/2168-569X.1428","url":null,"abstract":"Poet Harryette Mullen connects the long literary tradition of reference and recycling with more recent versions of \"remix\" culture in her Recyclopedia, arguing that \"poetry... remakes and renews words and images, ideas, transforming surplus cultural information into something unexpected,\" even \"salvages and finds imaginative uses for knowledge,\" a generative re-creation that finds not only new art but also new horizons for the human (Mullen vii). Writers have long found power within historical material, and long leaned upon their audiences' collective knowledge of the past in order to enter and amend cultural memory.1As information theory joins literary and cultural criticism, new vocabularies emerge that can expand our understandings of poetry's aesthetic and ethical potentials for meeting the past and for constructing the future. Looking at poetic projects as \"hacks\" in the dataset of cultural memory changes our understanding of narrative to a technology that can proliferate alternatives, rather than ossifying a dominant paradigm. If we visualize the ideas recycled through poetry as information flow, then a \"hack\" can serve as a productive metaphor for generative intervention. Traditionally, \"hacking\" refers to interference in computer networks. McKenzie Wark, however, recuperates the word from its teen basement computer geek prankster image in A Hacker Manifesto. In Wark's hands, \"hack\" becomes an action applicable to any creative act, metaphorized as tapping into the flow of power or diverting restricted information into avenues of greater access.2 While production merely copies, a hack differentiates (Wark paragraph 160). For Wark \"to hack is to release the virtual from the actual\" (Wark paragraph 74). Wark's interest lies in the value of hacking itself, but I propose a more targeted use of the idea: to hack is to break apart collective memory's seemingly fixed narratives, allowing multiple stories to emerge into actual life.Claudia Rankine, Cornelius Eady, and M. NourbeSe Philip further this expansion of social memory, and their formally demanding hacks may be usefully read with N. Katherine Hayles' formulations of database and narrative. For Hayles the technologies of narrative and database/dataset function symbiotically; applying her vocabulary allows a vision of cultural memory as a malleable dataset holding exponentially more possible narratives than normally visible.Such notions of information offer a structure for reading authors who insist that the past is never truly past, never complete, and never contained in one telling. Strategically applying the computer programming term \"database,\" or more accurately here \"dataset,\" allows a continuation of Eric Havelock's and Rachel Blau DuPlessis' interventions in the archives of memory and culture. After all, a dataset \"is not a stable archive but a constantly shifting set of relationships\" (KochnarLindgren 136). Artworks that call attention to their own construction, as Rankine's, Eady's, ","PeriodicalId":448595,"journal":{"name":"The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127643179","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}