POSTMODERN CULTURE最新文献

• Notes on Contributors

Omid Bagherli is a graduate student in English and 2024–25 Dissertation Fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University. His work focuses on representations of thwarted historical recovery and redress in contemporary literature and film.

Bobby Benedicto is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies and the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at McGill University.

Tim Dean is the James M. Benson Professor in English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking and, most recently, Hatred of Sex (coauthored with Oliver Davis). He is completing a book titled After Pandemics: COVID-19, AIDS, and the Literature of PrEP.

Sandip K. Luis is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History & Art Appreciation at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. He teaches critical theory and historiography, focusing on modernism and global contemporary art. Luis received a Ph.D. in Visual Studies from the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and has taught at Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University, Delhi, and the University of Kerala. His areas of research and publication include the theories of the avant-garde, biennials, and historiography of contemporary art.

Josephine Taylor is Postdoctoral Fellow in Energy Narratives and Coastal Communities at University College Dublin. Her research is in environmental humanities and she is currently working on her first monograph on Nonhuman Narratives of Energy, contracted with Palgrave Animal and Literature Series. She has published in the areas of science fiction, petroculture, gender and affect theory. She is also a member of the research collective Beyond Gender, which carries out joint projects focused on queer and feminist science fiction.

Federico Pous is Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Elon University, and works on the politics of memory, human rights, and contemporary social movements in Latin America and Spain. He published Eventos carcelarios (UNC Press 2022), about the experience of political prisoners during the 1970s in Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil; and co-edited the volume, Authoritarianism, Cultural History, and Political Resistance in Latin America: Exposing Paraguay (Palgrave Macmillan 2017), about Paraguayan cultural history and the status of democracy in this country.

Tom Roach is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies and Coordinator of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in the

• Retracing Disappearance: Literary Responsibility and the Return of the Far RightA review of Karen Elizabeth Bishop, The Space of Disappearance: A Narrative Commons in the Ruins of Argentine State Terror
• Federico Pous (bio)

The Space of Disappearance offers a profound reflection on the figure of disappearance as a literary mode of depicting, unraveling, and subverting the modus operandi of political life in Argentina. Through detailed analyses of singular literary works by Rodolfo Walsh, Julio Cortázar, and Tomás Eloy Martínez, Karen Elizabeth Bishop outlines a very suggestive hypothesis that traces a collective literary construction of different modes of disappearance. Following Maurice Blanchot's idea that "the goal of literature is to disappear," Bishop identifies "dissimulation" (Walsh), "doubling and displacement" (Cortázar), as well as "suspension" and an "embodied superabundant" (Martínez) as literary modes of disappearance which are, at the same time, "symptoms and products" of the disappearance of literature itself. Ultimately, Bishops argues that there is a "narrative commons" in which disappearance operates, not only by denouncing the actual systematic killing and disappearance of dead bodies perpetrated by the state during the last dictatorship (1976-83), but also by putting to work an "ethical commons" that aims to dismantle, bear witness, and eventually cope with the profound terror generated during that historical period in Argentina. Bishop's interventions touch on multiple angles of the role of literature in the construction of political narratives with clever close-readings, relevant socio-political connections, and dense theoretical reflections that make the book worth reading. From my point of view, her most interesting reflections refer to the tensions between the role of the writer and the political interpellations at the time.

Grounding Disappearance

From a historical perspective, the desaparecidos have become a tragic imprint for recent Argentinean cultural and political history. The systematic production of enforced disappearance carried out during the last military and civic dictatorship included the political persecution of militants and political opponents, who were kidnapped, tortured, and assassinated, followed by the disappearance of their bodies. The proliferation of clandestine centers of detention and extermination (CCDE) was at the center of these repressive practices, leaving a profound wound in Argentinean society. A partial reconstruction of the events carried out by the CONADEP and published f

Abstract:

This essay argues that Bersani's attempts to articulate a non-Cartesian form of knowledge production spur him to speculate anew about epistemology and ontology. Specifically, Bersani's late theory and practice of recategorization, a recursive engagement with thinkers and concepts that reveals thought's virtual potential, affords him the opportunity to conceive of a cognitive temporal unity and an immanentist conception of being. After exploring Bersani's theory of recategorization and his textual recategorizing practice, I turn to the work of multimedia artist Juan Pablo Echeverri to offer a dialogic example of recategorization as aesthetic practice.

• Cultural Reflections on an Embodied Life of BreathA review of Caterina Albano, Out of Breath: Vulnerability of Air in Contemporary Art
• Josephine Taylor (bio)

The Wellcome Collection's exhibit in 2022, In the Air, emphasizes how the act of breathing, our common immersion in air, is a problem of politics, justice, and culture. Revealing the ways that air can be weaponized, and focusing on breathlessness as a site of racial political struggle, In the Air contends with how art and cultural work render visible air's stratification and the invisible pollutants that shape our atmosphere. Caterina Albano's Out of Breath: Vulnerability of Air in Contemporary Art opens with a similar premise, arguing for cultural and artistic responses to the significance of breath as a site creativity, life, and struggle. Writing during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, a time in which the air we breathe, and breathlessness, becomes all the more urgent, she explores the "intrinsic relation of life to air and breathing" (ix). Albano views art as a key site to critique and challenge today's atmosphere of breathing and her analysis interweaves explorations of specific art works with an emphasis on the commonality yet individual nature of breathing. Considering the encroachment on breath, Albano's work is an important intervention in the ways that art and culture think through the problem of air toxicity, as well as an examination into the philosophical implications of an embodied ethics of breathing.

Albano's contribution to the field of environmental humanities is to consider air from a cultural and social lens, and how artistic and creative work can contribute to and unpack the centrality and importance of clean airwaves to our physical and mental livelihoods. Just as branches of environmental humanities such as the blue humanities, energy humanities, and now the soil humanities begin to grow in importance and significance, does Albano's work help us consider another central aspect of our ecology through the lens of culture? This work invites us to ask if air has been left outside the critical lens of the field of environmental humanities. Achille Mbembe's "The Universal Right to Breathe," for instance, requires us to consider the racial significance and politics of breath in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic, demanding a sense of urgency to consider the politics of airwaves. Research centres such as the Wellcome Trust alongside Bristol and Durham University also held an exhibition on the Life of Breath asking similar questions of the role of air in our lives beyond the medical and physical arenas. What is unique in Albano's approach i

• Beyond the Grave
• Austin Svedjan (bio)

Some of us came to bury antirelational queer theories at the 2005 special session on the antisocial thesis.

—José Esteban Muñoz, "Thinking Beyond Antirelationality and Antiutopianism in Queer Critique"

I want to wager the following indecency: Leo Bersani welcomed his death and avoided his dying but importantly failed at both. One initial justification for so crass a claim could be that, despite a prolific career, he never edited a special issue. The generic injunction of special issues, after all, is to stake their import on the refusal to bury things. Even as titles flirt with the possibility of theoretical demise, special issues often justify their own publication by animating emergent concepts, resuscitating old ones, and immortalizing key figures in attendant debates.¹ In the case of the 2014 special issue of Social Text commemorating the life and thought of José Esteban Muñoz, this editorial tendency toward the conceptual extends to Muñoz himself. As one contributor notes, "the problem that animates this special issue: José Esteban Muñoz should not have died, but how do we continue to think and live with him (and each other) in spite of this loss?" (Chambers-Letson 14). But in saying that Bersani might have advocated for his death but not his dying, I don't mean to revivify queer theory's love of hagiography and claim that while the body of the man has died, the body of his work lives on. Instead, that distinction evokes Bersani's continual grappling with a problem over the course of his career through his speculation on how to loosen the death-grip that difference and its violent dramas have on our available modes of relationality. The hope was that such a loosening need not necessitate our physical deaths. As Bersani wrote in the closing paragraphs of 1987's "Is the Rectum a Grave?": "if the rectum is the grave in which the masculine ideal (an ideal shared—differently—by men and women) of proud subjectivity is buried, then it should be celebrated for its very potential for death. Tragically, AIDS has literalized that potential as the certainty of biological death" (222). But the attempt to wrest relationality from its variously murderous, suicidal, or otherwise death-driven violences and the threatening differences that incite it, we shall see, proves overwhelmingly problematic. In this special issue that problematic inheres in the term "the antisocial."

The Citational Gimmick

In referring to "the antisocial" in this way, especially in proximity to Bersani—and partly against the inclination of special issues—this special issue attempts to lay to rest what has been termed "the antisocial thesis in queer theory" by reclassifying it as conceptu

Abstract:

This essay offers a critical examination of the established opposition between queer of color critique and the antisocial thesis. It challenges the widely rehearsed claim that the ethics of negativity associated with the antisocial thesis is premised on a position of (white gay male) privilege and questions the corollary, conceptual alignment of racialized queer subjects with repair and affirmation. Ultimately, the essay argues that saying no to negativity in the name of race means depriving the "queer of color" of that which allows it to say that it is other than the difference it represents.

Abstract:

Is "queer now to be taken as delineating political rather than erotic tendencies?" Leo Bersani laments in Homos, his 1985 text that helped launch his reputation as the god father of queer theory's now famed anti-social thesis. For Mikko Tuhkanen, Bersani's critique of queer theory and its reverberations engender a crucial distinction: Bersani is forever "a queer thinker," not a "queer theorist." Reading with Tuhkanen's distinction, this essay explores Bersani's investment in queer thinking as a mode of anti-institutional critical practice in order to track the centrality of the conflict between the political and erotic in the past and present work of queer scholarship.

Abstract:

This essay identifies two modes of "escape" in the "gay fugues" of Pet Shop Boys, differentiated by their (non)fascist potential. To trace this potential, the essay engages the work of Lee Edelman, Leo Bersani, and Ernesto Laclau, while extracting further lessons from Stefan Zweig, Village People, Russian history, Fourierism, AIDS eulogies, West Side Story, and the mathematics of zero.

Abstract:

This Afterword takes stock of the antisocial thesis by reconsidering the significance of Jean Laplanche's influence on Leo Bersani's work. Emphasizing the distinctness of Laplanche's theory of sexuality, the essay differentiates among four positions in the antisocial thesis debate: Bersani's, Lee Edelman's, José Muñoz's, and Dean's own. Contending that the death drive does not exist as such, Dean argues that negation involves more than negativity and therefore should be understood not merely as destructive but also as creative. Discriminating among claims that have tended to become conflated, the essay connects Bersani's version of the antisocial thesis to his account of aesthetic subjectivity.

Abstract:

Lee Edelman is the Fletcher Professor of English Literature at Tufts University and a key figure in queer theory. This interview was conducted in December 2022, a month before Edelman's fourth book, Bad Education, was published by Duke University Press. In this discussion, Edelman revisits the "antisocial" debate in queer theory and assesses his understanding of negativity and antisociality in relation to the positions of Leo Bersani and José Esteban Muñoz, among others. Edelman also outlines how his thought in No Future and Bad Education interacts with contemporary politics and strands of Afropessimism, feminism, and family abolition.