Abstract:In Our Aesthetic Categories (2012), Sianne Ngai theorizes the "cute," interpreting the turn to the small object in twentieth-century avant-garde poetry as a symptom of late capitalism's hyper-commodification. In response, this essay argues that the cute fails to accurately describe the projects of some avant-garde poets such as Lorine Niedecker. While Ngai's theory presumes a bourgeois subject who projects a sensuous relationship onto objects, obscuring the reality of commodification, Niedecker's poems do not enjoy the luxury of this projection. As a working-class poet, she is aware of objects' impact on her comfort and survival as part of her daily labors. Instead, Niedecker's poems offer a portrait of objects in use, recognizing the poet's reliance on material conditions to live, and further, to create.
{"title":"The Limits of the Cute: The Persistence of Use in Lorine Niedecker's Poetics","authors":"Kelly Hoffer","doi":"10.1353/cul.2023.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2023.0015","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In Our Aesthetic Categories (2012), Sianne Ngai theorizes the \"cute,\" interpreting the turn to the small object in twentieth-century avant-garde poetry as a symptom of late capitalism's hyper-commodification. In response, this essay argues that the cute fails to accurately describe the projects of some avant-garde poets such as Lorine Niedecker. While Ngai's theory presumes a bourgeois subject who projects a sensuous relationship onto objects, obscuring the reality of commodification, Niedecker's poems do not enjoy the luxury of this projection. As a working-class poet, she is aware of objects' impact on her comfort and survival as part of her daily labors. Instead, Niedecker's poems offer a portrait of objects in use, recognizing the poet's reliance on material conditions to live, and further, to create.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87675504","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}
M. Miguel, Edward Guetti, H. Skott-Myhre, S. Kouri, Kathleen S. G. Skott-Myhre, Benjamin Schreier, T. J. Nez, Kelly Hoffer, Maxwell Woods, Benjamin Williams, Elizabeth Wijaya, T. Conley
Abstract:Deligny's practical theory can be envisioned as a materialism. This materialism is based on the dialectical, conflictual, symbiotic, and bipolar coexistence of the "human" and the "Man-that-we-are," of the innate and the acquired, and of the milieu of the human and that of the animal. It is founded with a view to the space—the conditions and circumstances—that make it so that the individual becomes what they are. In brief his materialism is heir to a thought of the milieu as a determinate dimension of the production of the individual. This article was originally published in French in "Lenine," Actuel Marx, no. 62 (2017): 124–39.
{"title":"Editorial Statement","authors":"M. Miguel, Edward Guetti, H. Skott-Myhre, S. Kouri, Kathleen S. G. Skott-Myhre, Benjamin Schreier, T. J. Nez, Kelly Hoffer, Maxwell Woods, Benjamin Williams, Elizabeth Wijaya, T. Conley","doi":"10.1353/cul.2023.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2023.0010","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Deligny's practical theory can be envisioned as a materialism. This materialism is based on the dialectical, conflictual, symbiotic, and bipolar coexistence of the \"human\" and the \"Man-that-we-are,\" of the innate and the acquired, and of the milieu of the human and that of the animal. It is founded with a view to the space—the conditions and circumstances—that make it so that the individual becomes what they are. In brief his materialism is heir to a thought of the milieu as a determinate dimension of the production of the individual. This article was originally published in French in \"Lenine,\" Actuel Marx, no. 62 (2017): 124–39.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86756950","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}
Abstract:This article critically examines the development and machinery of a Jewish studies–based literary historical approach to Israel-Palestine organized by the largely unexamined assumption that all things "Israel" are fundamentally or properly "Jewish," in the sense of being primarily or even exclusively Jews' responsibility to face and/or address. This includes the political and moral debate that the state and the occupation occasions but also the discursive frameworks in which representations of Israel, Zionism, and the condition of Palestinians are elaborated and analyzed. The article elaborates this assumption as a Zionist form of intellectuality—"Zionist" because it colonizes a field of discourse in the name of Jewish self-consciousness. Like the presumption that American Jews see Zionism and an attachment to Israel as simply part of the experience of Jewish identity—which went hand in hand with a wider American embrace of Zionism and Israel—a Jewish American literary interest in Israel, and the hegemonic rise of Jewish American literary Zionism, are not self-evident, and they have histories. It should be the work of a critical Jewish studies to destabilize the practice and protocols of this epistemological privilege.
{"title":"Slouching Toward Bethlehem: A Critique of Jewish American Literary-Historical Zionism","authors":"Benjamin Schreier","doi":"10.1353/cul.2023.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2023.0013","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article critically examines the development and machinery of a Jewish studies–based literary historical approach to Israel-Palestine organized by the largely unexamined assumption that all things \"Israel\" are fundamentally or properly \"Jewish,\" in the sense of being primarily or even exclusively Jews' responsibility to face and/or address. This includes the political and moral debate that the state and the occupation occasions but also the discursive frameworks in which representations of Israel, Zionism, and the condition of Palestinians are elaborated and analyzed. The article elaborates this assumption as a Zionist form of intellectuality—\"Zionist\" because it colonizes a field of discourse in the name of Jewish self-consciousness. Like the presumption that American Jews see Zionism and an attachment to Israel as simply part of the experience of Jewish identity—which went hand in hand with a wider American embrace of Zionism and Israel—a Jewish American literary interest in Israel, and the hegemonic rise of Jewish American literary Zionism, are not self-evident, and they have histories. It should be the work of a critical Jewish studies to destabilize the practice and protocols of this epistemological privilege.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72491878","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}
Abstract:The figure of the refugee has long been shaped by visual grammars that codify distance, overdetermine corporeality, and constrain affect. Attending to this issue, the subversive photobook Human Archipelago pairs Fazal Sheikh's photography with Teju Cole's commentary to reframe the refugee as a site of critique, destabilize the state-citizen hierarchy, and reorient the imagined spectator. Rather than being positioned away from the refugee, the spectator is intimately with the refugee. Thus, the relation between embodied and distant is disrupted, creating what Laura Marks calls a "haptic visuality." Ultimately, this article argues that Human Archipelago mimics the intimate archives of the family photo album to (re)envision those who might be considered kin. In doing so, Cole and Sheikh attest to the imbricated process of colonization, dispossession, and racialization.
{"title":"\"Who Is Kin to Me?\": Textual and Textural Intimacies in Teju Cole and Fazal Sheikh's Human Archipelago","authors":"Benjamin Williams","doi":"10.1353/cul.2023.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2023.0017","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The figure of the refugee has long been shaped by visual grammars that codify distance, overdetermine corporeality, and constrain affect. Attending to this issue, the subversive photobook Human Archipelago pairs Fazal Sheikh's photography with Teju Cole's commentary to reframe the refugee as a site of critique, destabilize the state-citizen hierarchy, and reorient the imagined spectator. Rather than being positioned away from the refugee, the spectator is intimately with the refugee. Thus, the relation between embodied and distant is disrupted, creating what Laura Marks calls a \"haptic visuality.\" Ultimately, this article argues that Human Archipelago mimics the intimate archives of the family photo album to (re)envision those who might be considered kin. In doing so, Cole and Sheikh attest to the imbricated process of colonization, dispossession, and racialization.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82717076","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}
Abstract:This article argues that Toll of the Sea (1922), the first film to use the two-strip (red and green) Technicolor system—and also the first to star Anna May Wong—is a work whose manifestation of color is inherently linked to its understanding of interracial relations. While the film's Madame Butterfly–inspired narrative and usage of Orientalist mise-en-scène would appear to imply that color is used to allegorize racial evidence, this article proposes instead that the film's color is aligned with the autoerotic, uncoupled position of Wong's character Lotus Flower. This article seeks to establish a historiography of this racialized loneliness that persists not only within the film but also across contemporaneous immigration law and the problematics of white/Asian miscegenation that informed Wong's career. In elaborating sexual consummation as a racialized structure, the article presents a means of aligning—although not necessarily reconciling—Asian American critiques of sexual teleology with accounts of anti-Asian legislation and formal analyses of early Technicolor ornamentation.
{"title":"Lotus Flower's Colors: Interracial Autoeroticism and The Toll of the Sea","authors":"Erin Nunoda","doi":"10.1353/cul.2023.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2023.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article argues that Toll of the Sea (1922), the first film to use the two-strip (red and green) Technicolor system—and also the first to star Anna May Wong—is a work whose manifestation of color is inherently linked to its understanding of interracial relations. While the film's Madame Butterfly–inspired narrative and usage of Orientalist mise-en-scène would appear to imply that color is used to allegorize racial evidence, this article proposes instead that the film's color is aligned with the autoerotic, uncoupled position of Wong's character Lotus Flower. This article seeks to establish a historiography of this racialized loneliness that persists not only within the film but also across contemporaneous immigration law and the problematics of white/Asian miscegenation that informed Wong's career. In elaborating sexual consummation as a racialized structure, the article presents a means of aligning—although not necessarily reconciling—Asian American critiques of sexual teleology with accounts of anti-Asian legislation and formal analyses of early Technicolor ornamentation.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75659555","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":"\"The Mad (Wo)Man in Black Studies\"","authors":"Megan L. Finch","doi":"10.1353/cul.2023.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2023.0004","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85333591","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}
Abstract:This essay explores nineteenth-century European architectural designs in relation to vision, surveillance, and spectatorship. It contributes to the material and posthuman turn in humanity studies. Focusing on Ledoux's design of the salt factory Saline de Chaux, Schinkel's panoramic facilities, the ancient Roman theater described by Vitruvius, and Boullée's Cenotaph of Newton, this essay takes these architectures as optical apparatuses with a clear awareness of the light path setting and power regimes. Challenging the divisions between surveillance and spectatorship, the amphitheater and the panoptic machine, this essay argues for a subject-object position that merges these regimes in the act of seeing within the operation of communities. In showcasing how architecture, as established codes of articulation, visualizes the grids within which actions and interpretations are situated, this essay suggests a detailed historical reading that complicates the architectural space as heterotopias—the sites of struggle between reality and virtuality that open to the future.
摘要:本文探讨了19世纪欧洲建筑设计与视觉、监视和观赏性的关系。它有助于人类研究的物质转向和后人类转向。本文以Ledoux设计的盐厂Saline de Chaux、Schinkel设计的全景设施、Vitruvius描述的古罗马剧场、boulle设计的牛顿纪念碑为重点,将这些建筑作为光学装置,对光路设置和权力制度有清晰的认识。这篇文章挑战了监视和观看、圆形剧场和全景机器之间的分歧,提出了一个主客体的立场,将这些制度融合在一起,在社区的运作中观察。通过展示建筑,作为既定的表达规范,如何将行动和解释所在的网格可视化,本文提出了一种详细的历史解读,将建筑空间复杂化为异托邦——现实与虚拟之间的斗争场所,向未来开放。
{"title":"The Desire to See: Binary Systems, Architectural Space, and the Ontology of Being-with","authors":"Yijun Sun","doi":"10.1353/cul.2023.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2023.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay explores nineteenth-century European architectural designs in relation to vision, surveillance, and spectatorship. It contributes to the material and posthuman turn in humanity studies. Focusing on Ledoux's design of the salt factory Saline de Chaux, Schinkel's panoramic facilities, the ancient Roman theater described by Vitruvius, and Boullée's Cenotaph of Newton, this essay takes these architectures as optical apparatuses with a clear awareness of the light path setting and power regimes. Challenging the divisions between surveillance and spectatorship, the amphitheater and the panoptic machine, this essay argues for a subject-object position that merges these regimes in the act of seeing within the operation of communities. In showcasing how architecture, as established codes of articulation, visualizes the grids within which actions and interpretations are situated, this essay suggests a detailed historical reading that complicates the architectural space as heterotopias—the sites of struggle between reality and virtuality that open to the future.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88557420","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}
Abstract:To see is to observe, to attend to. It is essentially to understand, to stand under what hides itself in the field of vision. However, to the extent that understanding implies nonknowing, seeing brings with it an unseeing that haunts the horizon of the visible. This essay addresses the idea of the invisible by looking at four images—a simple line drawing, two photographs, and a painting—and unpacks them according to their modes of presentation and varying degrees of verisimilitude. This is to show how unseeing makes possible the insight that the image is but also the absence that the act of vision necessarily incurs. The essay's objective is to elucidate what "seeing something" actually means, especially when the images one faces are often twice removed from the objects they represent, as is increasingly the case in today's digitalized or mediated world.
{"title":"Seeing … What? Four Images and Their (In)Visibility","authors":"Briankle G. Chang","doi":"10.1353/cul.2023.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2023.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:To see is to observe, to attend to. It is essentially to understand, to stand under what hides itself in the field of vision. However, to the extent that understanding implies nonknowing, seeing brings with it an unseeing that haunts the horizon of the visible. This essay addresses the idea of the invisible by looking at four images—a simple line drawing, two photographs, and a painting—and unpacks them according to their modes of presentation and varying degrees of verisimilitude. This is to show how unseeing makes possible the insight that the image is but also the absence that the act of vision necessarily incurs. The essay's objective is to elucidate what \"seeing something\" actually means, especially when the images one faces are often twice removed from the objects they represent, as is increasingly the case in today's digitalized or mediated world.","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88988411","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":"Parting Ways: With Werner Hamacher","authors":"Kevin Newmark","doi":"10.1353/cul.2023.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2023.0003","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46410,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Critique","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80682369","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}