Pub Date : 2023-12-19DOI: 10.1353/cul.2024.a915446
David Coughlan
Abstract:On March 11, 2004, Madrid was hit by devastating train bombings. The attacks and the resulting protests play an important part in Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), but the novel is not simply about them. Instead, Lerner addresses the relationship between literature and politics. Discussing the influence of John Ashbery's and Allen Grossman's work on Lerner, this article shows how the novel develops an understanding of literature as an immediate mediation between the virtual and the actual. Responding to Lerner's challenge to consider "literature now," and drawing on Jacques Derrida's work on democracy to come, the article then explores how an experience of reading is, for Lerner, an experience of temporality and of exposure to an event to come that requires a decisive, improvised response. Concluding with the novel's recontextualization of the Spanish government's response to the Madrid bombings, the article argues that an experience of literature is an experience of deciding the meaning of what is happening here and now, mirroring an experience of democratic politics.
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Pub Date : 2023-12-19DOI: 10.1353/cul.2024.a915447
Roderick Cooke
Abstract:This article discusses the implications of farmers' insurrections suppressed by state power in Michel Houellebecq's Sérotonine (2019) and Frank Norris's The Octopus (1901). In both cases, the disparity in scale between the farmers' organization and the larger forces set against them (the European Union and the French police, for Houellebecq; the railroad trust and U.S. marshals, for Norris) not only dictates the narrative outcome but also animates a set of questions around globalization, masculinity, the sociological meaning of place, and the relationship between the natural and mechanized worlds. Both novels' conclusions can be read as a surrender to scale, although the two authors' perspectives treat that surrender with ostensibly opposed reactions.
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Pub Date : 2023-08-26DOI: 10.1353/cul.2023.a905080
P. Ellis
I once visited the home of two kaleidoscopecollecting sisters, and spent the morning looking through a wide range of scopes: kaleidoscopes, artisanmade and factoryissued; kaleidoscopes, telescopicantique and modern electronic; kaleidoscopes in miniature, small enough to hang on a necklace; and one enormous kaleidoscope that would not fit anywhere indoors. It was a dizzying, kaleidoscopic array of kaleidoscopes, a wild range of fractured and symmetrized images— a psychedelic Wunderkammer. This experience came to mind when reading Meredith Bak’s Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Children’s Media Culture, which is also something of a Wunderkammer— or better, perhaps, a toy chest. An optical toy chest. In it, beyond the kaleidoscope, we find jigsaw puzzles, rebuses, spinning tops, stereoscopes, thaumatropes, zoetropes, and beyond. Each of these artifacts receives due attention, and along the way, Bak untangles the famously elaborate mockGreek naming conventions of optical toys, as well as the who’swho of the devices’ makers— all those Bradleys and Brewsters, Parises and Plateaus whose names swirl alongside the arcane lexicon of the objects. Playful Visions is topnotch media history, bringing to vivid life those strange objects one may only distantly remember from screenings of Werner Nekes’s Film before Film (1986). Patrick Ellis
我曾经拜访过两个收集万花筒的姐妹的家，花了一个上午的时间浏览了各种各样的范围:万花筒，手工制作的和工厂发行的;万花筒、望远镜、古董和现代电子;迷你万花筒，小到可以挂在项链上;还有一个巨大的万花筒，根本装不下室内的任何地方。这是一个令人眼花缭乱的，万花筒的万花筒阵列，一个破碎和对称的图像的狂野范围——一个迷幻的奇迹。在阅读梅雷迪思·巴克的《好玩的愿景:光学玩具和儿童媒体文化的出现》时，我想到了这一点，这本书也算是一本奇迹般的书——或者更好的说法是，也许是一个玩具箱。光学玩具箱。在书中，除了万花筒，我们还发现了拼图、圆形、旋转陀螺、立体镜、异色镜、西洋镜等等。每一件工艺品都受到了应有的关注，在此过程中，巴克解开了光学玩具著名的仿希腊命名惯例，以及这些设备制造商的名人表——所有那些布拉德利和布鲁斯特，巴黎和高原的名字都在这些物品的神秘词典中旋转。《俏皮的视觉》是一部一流的媒体史，将那些人们可能只在1986年维尔纳·内克斯(Werner Nekes)的《电影之前的电影》(Film before Film)放映中隐约记得的奇怪物体栩栩如生地呈现出来。帕特里克·埃利斯
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Pub Date : 2023-08-26DOI: 10.1353/cul.2023.a905076
Gust Burns
Abstract:This essay stages a three-way encounter between the 1972 anticolonial film Sambizanga, Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of cinema, and a Fanonian and Afropessimist critique of the human. Directed by the Black Caribbean-French filmmaker Sarah Maldoror (1929–2020), who recently passed away from complications of COVID-19, Sambizanga dramatizes a moment in the Black Angolan revolutionary struggle against Portuguese colonialism. This essay explores how the images of Sambizanga both exemplify key aspects of the modernist time-image, as formulated in Deleuze's two books on cinema (1986, 1989), and simultaneously demonstrate the time-image concept's inadequacy in describing global fundamental aspects of Black film; Sambizanga materializes a problematization of the cinematic image itself, and demands a new kind of movement. This reading of Maldoror's film facilitates an encounter between Deleuze and Afropessimism, pointing toward an antimmanent orientation. By appropriating a Deleuzian approach to cinema—the analysis of images as presentations of movement and time—for Afropessimist ends, the essay extends Frank Wilderson's (2010) critique of progressivist film narrative to indict the most basic material components of cinema. Utilizing Fanon's auto-theorizing on time and space in Black Skin, White Masks (1952/2008) to denaturalize temporal capacity itself and argue for its fundamental anti-Blackness, the essay locates within Sambizanga two related images of Blackness: the image of incoherence and the image of persistence.
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Pub Date : 2023-08-26DOI: 10.1353/cul.2023.a905077
Junghyun Hwang
Abstract:The Korean War as seen and shown by Life's photographic eye constitutes a contested geography in mapping the Cold War and locating America's place in it. Seen through the camera obscura of Life, Korea is conceived as a "terra incognita" of American imagination, and in turn, the magazine as the self-proclaimed national looking glass proves itself to be an interesting peep-box—a kaleidoscope of the American ways of "seeing" the war in Korea, the Cold War, and Americans themselves in the world. Specifically, the article situates Life's correspondent David Douglas Duncan's photo-essays on the Korean War in the intersections of American and Korean cultural histories, examining them through the lens of Cold War liberalism, which she argues taps deeper into the American frontier myth.
摘要:《生活》杂志的摄影之眼所看到和展示的朝鲜战争构成了冷战地图和美国在冷战中的位置的一个有争议的地理位置。通过《生活》杂志的暗箱，韩国被认为是美国人想象中的“未知之地”，而这本自称为“国家镜子”的杂志则证明了自己是一个有趣的窥物盒，是美国人“看待”朝鲜战争、冷战以及美国人在世界上的方式的万花筒。具体来说，这篇文章将《生活》杂志记者大卫·道格拉斯·邓肯(David Douglas Duncan)关于朝鲜战争的摄影文章置于美国和韩国文化历史的交叉点上，通过冷战自由主义的视角来审视它们，她认为冷战自由主义更深入地挖掘了美国的边疆神话。
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Pub Date : 2023-08-26DOI: 10.1353/cul.2023.a905078
Konstantinos Pittas
Abstract:Despite the limitations that pertain to the hierarchical nature and regulatory arrangements embodied in and through institutions, this article sets out to envisage museums as agonistic platforms that can contest the neoliberal hegemony and the predominant narratives of the West. To do so, it delves into the political presuppositions and organizing principles of Not An Alternative (a collective that works at the intersection of art, activism, and critical theory) and examines its theory of "institutional liberation" alongside other accounts of institutionality. By inventing a para-institution—the Natural History Museum—to infiltrate the natural history sector and by forging alliances with museum professionals and Indigenous-led campaigns, the article untangles Not An Alternative's understanding of museums as sites to be seized and turned into counterpower infrastructure. In this respect, this article aims to contribute to critical theories that engage with questions of institutionality by reimagining the role of museums in a time of mounting inequalities and climate emergency.
摘要:尽管在机构中体现的等级性质和监管安排存在局限性，但本文将博物馆设想为一个对抗新自由主义霸权和西方主流叙事的竞争平台。为了做到这一点，它深入研究了政治前提和Not An Alternative(一个在艺术、行动主义和批判理论的交叉点工作的集体)的组织原则，并研究了它的“制度解放”理论以及其他关于制度的描述。通过创建一个准机构——自然历史博物馆——来渗透到自然历史领域，并与博物馆专业人士和土著居民领导的运动建立联盟，这篇文章解开了“非替代”对博物馆的理解，即博物馆是被占领的场所，并被转变为对抗权力的基础设施。在这方面，本文旨在通过重新构想博物馆在日益加剧的不平等和气候紧急情况下的作用，为参与制度性问题的批判理论做出贡献。
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Pub Date : 2023-08-26DOI: 10.1353/cul.2023.a905079
Kenneth E. Berger
In her 1995 essay “The Decay of Cinema,” Susan Sontag famously declares the end not of cinema but of cinephilia. Without cinephilia, without a committed love of cinema as a “distinctively” and “quintessentially modern” art form, the future of cinema itself is cast in doubt. And cinephilia, Sontag asserts, is dead. At the root of the problem, Sontag writes, is both the growth of homeviewing technologies (VHS tapes, DVDs, etc.) and the film industry’s increasing dependence on Hollywood blockbusters, which together spell an inevitable degradation not only of cinematic quality but of meaningful cinematic experience as well. Although Sontag ends the essay on a seemingly optimistic note, with a call for reinventing “cinelove” as the means to “resurrect” a dying cinema, her larger argument is clear: the mode of experience defined as cinephilia can no longer be sustained, and this is an unmistakable symptom of a culture in decline. In this way, Sontag’s argument both reflects and extends the traditional view of cinephilia. Yet “The Decay of Cinema” also marks the moment in which this view starts to be challenged. Indeed, since its publication, Sontag’s essay has been an important reference point for film scholars invested in revising—and reviving—cinephilia, in imagining a new and inclusive cinephilia that rejects the elitism expressed Kenneth Berger
苏珊·桑塔格(Susan Sontag)在1995年的文章《电影的衰败》(The Decay of Cinema)中，著名地宣告了电影的终结，而不是电影的终结。没有电影迷，没有对电影这种“独特的”和“典型的现代”艺术形式的坚定热爱，电影本身的未来就会受到怀疑。桑塔格断言，电影癖已经消亡。桑塔格写道，问题的根源在于家庭观看技术(VHS磁带、dvd等)的发展，以及电影业对好莱坞大片的日益依赖，这两者加在一起不仅不可避免地导致了电影质量的下降，也导致了有意义的电影体验的下降。尽管桑塔格以一种看似乐观的口吻结束了这篇文章，呼吁重新发明“电影之爱”，作为“复活”垂死的电影的手段，但她更大的论点是明确的:被定义为“电影之爱”的体验模式无法再持续下去，这是文化衰落的一个明确征兆。这样，桑塔格的论述既反映又延伸了传统的观影观。然而，《电影的衰败》也标志着这种观点开始受到挑战的时刻。事实上，自从这篇文章发表以来，桑塔格的文章一直是致力于修正和复兴电影迷的电影学者的重要参考点，他们在想象一种新的、包容的电影迷，这种电影迷拒绝了肯尼斯·伯杰所表达的精英主义
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Pub Date : 2023-08-26DOI: 10.1353/cul.2023.a905075
Renée Ragin Randall
Abstract:This article analyzes the function of the archival aesthetic found in the works of prominent contemporary Lebanese artists, particularly the manipulation and use of found documents as part of a new visual narrative. Unlike other interpretations of postmodern art in which found documents are a major component, Lebanese artists subordinate the archive (as both object and practice) to the speculative praxis of arriving at a fictive historiography with archival material. As the article will show, this tendency is mimetic of both a contemporary historiographical problematic particular to Lebanon as well as a product of a condition of ongoing forms of violence.
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Pub Date : 2023-08-26DOI: 10.1353/cul.2023.a905073
B. Honig
Abstract:Singin' in the Rain (Donen and Kelly, 1952) and Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley, 2018) carry a common thread: one (mostly) enacts and the other subverts the "epistemology of the curtain." The curtain, iconic to sound studies' acousmatic sound objects, is a figure of forensic knowing, but Sorry queers it, decentering Singin's curtained couples with a crowd and highlighting, maybe even repairing, the raced dance theft that Carol Clover first traced in Singin'. Harlem's Black Hoofers of early twentieth-century dance, usually unremunerated and uncredited, return with a vengeance in Sorry as the equisapiens that Cash Green first encounters in a men's room. Where Schaeffer named Pythagoras as a figure for sound studies, the queered curtain of sound studies might call, rather, for Pan.
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