-
Introduction: Media Archaeology and the Resources of Film Studies boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2022-02-01 Daniel Morgan
The introduction to this special issue traces the interactions between the rise of media archaeology and the field of cinema and media studies. Arguing that media archaeology provided a necessary corrective around the question of media, I aim to show how its focus on historical narratives—especially on models of temporality—has led to a critical stagnation and a blind spot with regard to non-Western
-
The World Union of Documentary and the Early Cold War boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2022-02-01 Alice Lovejoy
This essay traces the evolution of the idea of “international documentary” during the early Cold War through the history of the World Union of Documentary (1947–50), an association spearheaded by documentarian Joris Ivens that aimed to articulate a common purpose for postwar documentary and to facilitate the international exchange of films, professionals, and knowledge in the field. I investigate the
-
The Hitherto Unknown: Toward a Theory of Synthetic Sound boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2022-02-01 Hannah Frank
In the 1920s and 1930s, filmmakers in Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United States created synthetic sounds by printing photographic or drawn patterns directly onto a filmstrip's optical soundtrack. This essay examines these practices alongside the radical film theories of Dziga Vertov and Jean Epstein in order to test the limits of sonic epistemology—and, ultimately, to imagine what it might mean
-
Song Time, the Time of Narratives, and the Changing Idea of Nation in Postindependence Cinema boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2022-02-01 Rochona Majumdar
What changes in our understanding of Indian films when we treat the song sequence as a separate medium situated both within and outside the film text? I argue for treating the song text as operating simultaneously on multiple levels, both within the film and in its afterlife. Through a close reading of select song sequences from both popular and art cinema, I demonstrate how they may be read as allegories
-
Ten Plus Ways of Reading Charles Bernstein: Improvisations on Aphoristic Cores boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Yunte Huang
Abstract Composed as a series of improvisations, this is a modular essay that examines, ponders, and responds to the radical poetics of Charles Bernstein's work from multiple perspectives, including dysraphism, aphorism, wit, and echopoetics. It also situates Bernstein in the long tradition of innovative American poetics extending from Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein to Charles Olson and Susan Howe.
-
Charles Bernstein: Avant-Garde Is a Constant Renewal boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Ian Probstein
Abstract The essay explores the work of Charles Bernstein in light of constant renewal. John Ashbery, as one of the brightest representatives of the New York School, and Charles Bernstein, as a representative of the language (L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E), have similar attitudes toward language. They have much in common in terms of poetics: in the rejection of loud phrases, prophetic statements, emotions
-
Your Brain on Poetry: The Making of the Poetics Program boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Charles Bernstein
Abstract The prehistory of Bernstein's cofounding the Poetics Program at SUNY–Buffalo, his first permanent academic job, in his late thirties. Discusses his initial teaching jobs, at the University of California at San Diego and Princeton, and first course offerings at UCSD, Princeton, and Buffalo.
-
Remarks at the Retirement Celebration for Charles Bernstein boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Susan Howe
Abstract Remarks made at Charles Bernstein's retirement celebration at the Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania, April 4, 2019.
-
-
Pataquericalism: Quantum Coherence between the East and West boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Runa Bandyopadhyay
Abstract Charles Bernstein's pataquericalism is not just a poetics but a philosophy of life, a leftist way to wrench freedom from authority to recognize the actual face of reality that toggles us with hope and despair, to explore hitherto undreamed regions of the mind in order to acquire a new point of view—to inquire into language, into poetics, into life, into reality. This poetics indeed resonates
-
A Source Which Is Also a Translation: Toward an Expanded- Yiddish Poetics, with Special Reference to Charles Bernstein boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Ariel Resnikoff
Abstract The present essay contextualizes the poet, scholar, editor, and translator Charles Bernstein (b. 1950), as an artist and practitioner working within a speculative translingual (language-crossing) field and tradition of expanded Yiddish. Reading Bernstein in relation to other expanded-Yiddish figures, such as his elders, Hannah Weiner (1928–77) and Jerome Rothenberg (b. 1931), and ancestor
-
This Working Title Will Be Replaced: Charles Bernstein's Forever Forthcoming boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Brian Kim Stefans
Abstract Focusing on two key themes, or vectors, of Charles Bernstein's latest book of poetry, Topsy-Turvy, that of brokenness and the various references to “God” or religious belief, this review argues that there is a new metaphysical dimension in Bernstein's recent poetry that moves beyond his poetry's earlier emphases on the purely interpersonal and material nature of language and its uses. Through
-
Afterword to Pied bot boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Jean-Marie Gleize
Abstract This essay was the afterword to Charles Bernstein's Pied bot, trans. Martin Richet, Collection Américaine (Nantes, France: Editions Joca Seria, 2012).
-
The Well-Hung & Well-Stretched Language-Tongues of New York boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Pierre Joris
Abstract This text was written in French as a preface to Charles Bernstein's Pour ainsi dire (So to Speak), a selection of his work translated by Habib Tengour (Algiers, Algeria: Apic Éditions, 2019). Translating it (back?) into English is problematic, as the author does as he claims the addressee does: he puns & plays with words—which is a well-known no-no when it comes to translating. This translation
-
Charles Bernstein: Against the Idea of Poetry boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Leevi Lehto
Abstract This text is Leevi Lehto's introduction to his Finnish translation of Charles Bernstein's work, both poetry and poetics. Lehto argues that Bernstein's poems are interventions into various constellations, or power relations, in the field of poetry, always reacting to something, always against a particular idealization—among them the idea of interventionism as such.
-
Gertrude and Ludwig's Italian Adventure boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Luigi Ballerini
Abstract A survey of the ingredients and paratextual elements that converged in Charles Bernstein's “Gertrude and Ludwig's Bogus Adventure,” occasioned by the translation of the poem into Italian. Historical hints and literary echoes are shown to be not merely juxtaposed but intertwined with trivia drawn from B Hollywood movies and accounting for the title itself of the poem. As the making of meaning
-
“Nothing tires a vision more than sundry attacks / in the manner of enclosure”: An Afterword to Angriff der Schwierigen Gedichte boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2021-11-01 Dennis Büscher-Ulbrich
Abstract The following text was published in German as an afterword to the bilingual poetry collection Charles Bernstein: Angriff der Schwierigen Gedichte (München: luxbooks, 2014). Originally intended as a critical survey and introduction for German-language readers, it traces Bernstein's work as a radical modernist poet, distinguished scholar, and critical theorist in his own right from the late
-
Primed for Suffering: Gender, Subjectivity, and Spectatorship in Spanish Crisis Cinema boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2021-08-01 Sarah Thomas
Examining three fiction films (Techo y comida, Ayer no termina nunca, and Magical Girl), this essay illuminates the traces of the economic crisis in recent Spanish cinema, focusing on how it is inscribed on female-gendered bodies and subjectivities. In exploring how female pain accumulates across the boundaries of genre in these disparate films, it asks what kind of gendered subjects these films construct
-
The Generative Politics of Presentism in Post-15M Spain boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2021-08-01 Katryn Evinson
This essay revises post-15M movement political party landscape, emphasizing the intentional yet unusual use of the present within the New Left's organizing grammar. Against sectors of the traditional Left, who see presentism as a product of neoliberalism, I claim that in the post-15M conjuncture, the present constituted a battleground in the struggle for a dignified life. First, I focus on the Catalan
-
“They Don't Represent Us!”: From the Crisis of the Organic Intellectuals of 1978 to the Exhumation of Buried Imaginaries boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2021-08-01 David Becerra Mayor,Lauren Mushro
Based on the notion of événement (event), elaborated by the French philosopher Alain Badiou, this essay aims to offer a definition of the 15M movement as an event. According to Badiou, the event has the capacity to perforate established knowledge and to transform the codes of communication. The event destabilizes the regime of truth to the extent that what was assumed to be obvious now appears as unstable
-
De-fencing: Notes on the Cultural Ecosystem of the Commons in the Post-15M Spanish State boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2021-08-01 Palmar Álvarez-Blanco
What do we learn when we study the historical connections between the political sphere—events that make headlines—and the politics of daily life? What role have self-managed communities of practice and their networks played in the socioeconomic, political, and cultural transformations in post-15M Spain? Have they exhausted their potential, or have they just scratched the surface of their capabilities
-
Accounting for Democracy: Excessive Subjects in a State of Consensus boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2021-08-01 L. Elena Delgado
In the face of the public debates and protests fueled by Spain's persistent economic, social, and institutional crisis (2008–present), the country's politicians and media have consistently identified these debates and protests—in a word, social unrest—with three phenomena: nationalism, populism, and feminism. In my essay, I begin by showing how Spanish public discourse tends to situate all three on
-
Processes of Destitution in Spain: Unavowable Communities between the Regime of ’78 and the Total State boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2021-08-01 Ignasi Gozalo-Salellas
This essay analyzes what I call processes of destitution as a result of the various social movements that took place in Spain throughout the 2010s. I argue that the exhaustion of the Regime of ’78 meant an epistemological turn away from hegemonic concepts such as consensus, truth, and historical agreement toward those central to a new destituent process: dissent, divergence, and plurality, among others
-
A Populist Experiment in Spanish Political Culture? On the Cultural Politics of Podemos boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2021-08-01 Vicente Rubio-Pueyo
The goal of this essay is to explain Podemos's 2014 emergence in Spanish politics in terms of its contributions to a possible long-term shift in Spanish political culture. For doing that, the essay focuses not so much on the party's electoral ups and downs but on a series of main discursive lines and elements of the party's trajectory that help explain its relevance in the context of recent Spanish
-
Introduction: A Decade of Indignation boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2021-08-01 Bécquer Seguín
This introduction briefly provides the context of the Great Recession in Spain, which spurred one of the largest protests movements in the country's history. Known locally as the 15M and internationally as the indignados movement, the occupation of plazas in the spring and summer of 2011 jump-started a broader cultural, intellectual, and political shift in Spain that is only beginning to be appreciated
-
If We Don't Tell It, They Will Tell Us: A Short Story about the Ongoing Crisis in Spain boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2021-08-01 Luis Moreno-Caballud,Ryan Hill
Leftist intellectual Ernesto Freire writes an academic paper on the Spanish “lost generation” of the 2008 crisis. He uses the case of his friend Martín Valera as an example. Freire contends that for Valera, as for most people in Spain, the crisis never ended—instead, its dire consequences were gradually accepted as a “new normal.” Freire also considers the cycle of protests and “assault on institutions”
-
Another Colonial History: How Cosmopolitan Was Cavafy's Contemporary Alexandria? boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2021-05-01 Alexander Kazamias
This essay provides an alternative reading of modern Alexandria's social and cultural history as a basis for a better contextualization of Cavafy's poetry. It revisits the watershed year 1882, which marks the city's destruction after its bombardment by the British fleet, using new evidence from a little-known diary by the nineteen-year-old Cavafy. It then examines the overlooked context of Alexandria's
-
C. P. Cavafy as an Egyptiote boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2021-05-01 Hala Halim
In contradistinction to Anglophone criticism's airbrushing of all things Egyptian/Arab from the iconic image of C. P. Cavafy, this essay dwells on the poet as an Egyptiote. An Egyptiote orientation, it is argued, variously informs given poems and prose texts in his later years. Probing Cavafy's knowledge of Arabic, the essay demonstrates his affinities and solidarities with Egyptians under colonial
-
Preface to a Collective Pedagogical Document boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2021-05-01 Stathis Gourgouris
The preface is a description of the project as a collective pedagogical experience. Cavafy's orientations are reconsidered as responses to the contradictions of colonial life in the Southeastern Mediterranean world and his poetics as a rubric for disrupting interpretive orthodoxies all around.
-
Gaza and the Limits of Metropolitan Solidarity: Affiliation under Duress boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2021-05-01 Karim Mattar
This article explores what Gaza reveals about the extent, depth, and limits of contemporary metropolitan solidarity with Palestine. Focusing on Israel's recent wars on Gaza, I assess how these most explicit and spectacular manifestations of Israel's long-term policies there have been addressed in solidarity discourses and practices. Despite their apparent galvanizing powers, do such discourses and
-
Constantine Cavafy in the Colony: Hellenism at the Margins of Empire boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2021-05-01 Aamir R. Mufti
C. P. Cavafy was a writer of the British Empire whose situation resembles that of other colonial writers and should be examined in that context, as well as in the light of the contradictory logic of Orientalism-Anglicism. In the modern West's interest in the late Hellenistic era, philhellenism and Orientalism become one. Cavafy responds to imperial philhellenism by rejecting its triumphalism and exploring
-
The Return of the Barbarians and the Colonial Order of the Archive boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2021-05-01 Yiannis Papatheodorou
Cavafy's barbarians constitute a peculiar metaphor for the (self-)censoring process of revealing and hiding the voices of Others in the colonial order of the archive. The theme recurs in three of his works—an “unwritten” poem, a “hidden” poem, and a poem included in the canon—all of which reflect Cavafy's engagement with British colonialism in Egypt. The novelist and critic Stratis Tsirkas, also a
-
At a Slight Angle to the Empire: Cavafy among the British boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2021-05-01 Takis Kayalis
C. P. Cavafy's position as a British-cultured Greek who lived and wrote in colonial Alexandria has perplexed critics, who often address the poet's commitments either as Anglophile or as anti-imperialist and pro-Arab. Seeking a subtler approach to Cavafy's complex colonial circumstances, this essay looks at the poet as a diaspora Greek who wrote of Eastern Hellenism through concepts, facilities, and
-
Cavafy's Levant: Commerce, Culture, and Mimicry in the Early Life of the Poet boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2021-05-01 Peter Jeffreys
The bombing of Alexandria by the British in 1882 forced C. P. Cavafy and his family into temporary exile. Traumatic for the young poet, this displacement produced a set of epistolary exchanges between friends and family that sheds much light on his Western orientation, connecting him back to the metropolitan cities—London and Liverpool—where he had previously resided. Cavafy remained firmly oriented
-
Philology from the Point of View of Its Victims boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2021-02-01 Marc Nichanian
This essay examines Orientalism within the context of Edward Said’s works and the contemporary critical debates around them. Inspired by Erich Auerbach, Said strove to conceive of humanism as overcoming the European imperialist legacy. Yet not only does Said fail, he also seems to not notice how his version of humanism is appropriated by nationalists around the world. The greatest contradiction lies
-
Between Form and Formalization: Angus Fletcher’s The Topological Imagination boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2021-02-01 Andrew Warren
This is a review essay of Angus Fletcher’s posthumous The Topological Imagination: Spheres, Edges, and Islands (2016). Fletcher’s guiding intuition is that topology—a vast, foundational, formally rigorous pillar of modern mathematics—can offer fresh, useful ways of seeing and thinking about our world. These novel modes of perception and cognition are, Fletcher contends, naturally anticipated by literary
-
To Become What One Is boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2021-02-01 Lindsay Waters
In the twentieth century, criticism flourished in the academy in the English language from the 1930s to the 1960s, but gradually a hyperprofessionalized discourse purporting to be criticism took its place. The problem was exacerbated because people misunderstand literary theory thinking it superior to criticism. Big mistake. Theory proper begins its life as criticism, criticism that has staying power
-
Excerpts from Zamanın Kelimeleri: Yeni Türkiye’nin Siyasî Dili (Words of Our Times: The Political Language of New Turkey) boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2021-02-01 Tanıl Bora
These essays grapple with the widely “expended” words that characterize the era of the nationalist-conservative-populist Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, or AKP) in Turkey, which has been in power since 2002. Some of these words rest on a specified backdrop of nationalist and Islamist jargon. Others are words that have accrued meaning in tandem with the zeitgeist. Still others
-
Ways of Working with Language boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2021-02-01 Jonathan Arac
With reference to the author’s experience with English and other languages, this essay reflects on the problem of American monolingualism and explores modes of learned critical attention to the work language does in society, examining writing by Kenneth Burke, Raymond Williams, Erich Auerbach, and Sheldon Pollock.
-
The English Department as Imperial Commonwealth, or The Global Past and Global Future of English Studies boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2021-02-01 Joe Cleary
Though canons and faculty have greatly diversified in recent decades, English departments around the world fundamentally prioritize English and American literatures. To this extent, they resemble the Anglo-American imperial commonwealths that some toward the end of the nineteenth century advocated for in order to stave off the decline of the British Empire and to shore up a permanent Anglo-American
-
The Cause of the Refugee boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2020-11-01 Chloe Howe Haralambous
This essay asks what current scholarly and political treatments of the refugee illuminate about our political moment. Taking as its starting point Ilana Feldman’s historical ethnography of Palestinian refugee camps and the possibilities for political action afforded by purportedly a-or anti-political institutions such as the humanitarian apparatus, the essay mobilizes her conclusions to consider the
-
How to Read the New Histories of Empire boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2020-11-01 Christian Thorne
Through a detailed consideration of Richard White’s Middle Ground, the essay identifies a few important features of imperial history writing over the last thirty years: academic apologies for empire have become commonplace. A conspicuously large number of them are left-liberal in orientation, housed in fields with strong anti-imperialist credentials. They are nominally pro-indigenous, Americanizing
-
Witnessing the Past in the Work of W. G. Sebald boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2020-08-01 Maria Malikova
This essay reads “As Day and Night,” an essay W. G. Sebald wrote about artist and friend Jan Peter Tripp, as a complex and multilayered commentary on the role of both written and visual texts in the author’s oeuvre. It draws on Sebald’s Austerlitz as well as the work of French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty to argue for the centrality of the human gaze in Sebald’s imagination. The human gaze
-
The Bricolage of Words and Images boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2020-08-01 He Ning
This essay discusses the role of photographs in Sebald’s Austerlitz. The author argues that photographs constitute a crucial paratext to the entire narrative, making possible the representation of traumatic memories through “the bricolage of words and images.” Engaging with Freudian psychoanalysis and Roland Barthes’s theory on photography, the author demonstrates how the process of retrieving memories
-
The Roar of the Minotaur boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2020-08-01 Stuart Burrows
This essay proposes that W. G. Sebald’s distinctive contribution to the global novel is his reordering of the space of representation. This reordering is both literal and metaphorical. It is literal, in the sense that Sebald sets his work within actual spaces: the pages upon which his novels are written as much as the landscape being traversed by his narrator. It is metaphorical, in the sense that
-
Restless Flying, A Black Study of Revolutionary Humanism boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2020-05-01 R.A. Judy
This is an expository essay of “restless flying,” the terms of which are gleaned from engagement with two poetic lines. One is from Aimé Césaire’s 1956 poem, “Le verbe marronner.” The other is from the tenth-century Abbasid poet al-Mutanabbī’s qaṣīda, لااحترا مه سيل ءاش يئاقب (“Baqā’ī šā’ laisa hum irtiḥālan,” “My Constant Wish Is They Not Be Departing”), apropos the literary and political work of
-
Notes toward a History of Tragedy and the “Tragic” boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2020-05-01 Michael Hays
This essay addresses the rather complex questions of the history and function of the word tragedy: Is there a historically and logically consistent use of the word that can serve as a constant in discussions of both drama and dramatic theory? I will try to address some of the reasons why questioning the historical uses and transformations of the word tragedy and the notion of the “tragic” may be important
-
The Uncanny Return of Settler-Colonial Capitalism in Toni Morrison’s Home boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2020-05-01 Donald E. Pease
Toni Morrison’s 2012 novel Home is concerned primarily with the efforts undertaken by its protagonist, the black Korean War veteran Frank Money, to accommodate himself to civilian life. However, Home differs from other Korean War novels in that after Frank returns to the United States, he neither aligns his wartime experiences with the superpower rivalry nor conducts a critical meta-engagement with
-
A Little Muzhik, Muttering to Himself boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2020-05-01 Bruce Robbins
The night before her suicide, Anna Karenina has a strange nightmare about a muzhik, or former serf, who speaks French and is doing something with a piece of iron. Given the place of class in the novel, if mainly on the Levin side rather than the Anna side, critics of Tolstoy have said less than might have been expected about the simple fact that this is a wealthy woman dreaming uneasily about a poor
-
More on the Missing Half Second boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2020-02-01 Jap-Nanak Makkar
This review essay compares two early and two recent texts by N. Katherine Hayles and Mark B. N. Hansen. Considering their recent work in the context of Ruth Leys’s critique of the turn to affect, I argue that Hayles and Hansen use neuroscientific conclusions on a “missing half second” to propose theories of technology’s impact. These critics neglect to provide explanations of a social or political
-
A Specter Is Haunting Poland boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2020-02-01 Shir Alon
This essay assesses a series of art projects, festivals, and institutional spaces acknowledging Poland’s Jewish past that appeared in Poland during its first decade of EU membership. Identifying a recurring practice of making absence present and tangible, or more broadly a concern with Jewish ghosts, the essay examines how contemporary art practices peddle in nostalgia for a Jewish past as a mode of
-
Two Voices of the Spanish Crisis boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2020-02-01 Bécquer Seguín
This essay examines intellectual authority and popular dissent in Spain following the Great Recession. It advances two contrasting theoretical accounts of the voice—the “acousmatic” and “constituent” voice—as ways for understanding how intellectuals have eluded responsibility for their role in Spain’s economic crisis and why collective attempts at holding them accountable have been limited. Through
-
Literature as Thought and Thought as Literature boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2020-02-01 Oliver Simons
Paul North’s The Yield: Kafka’s Atheological Reformation is one of the few books to have analyzed Kafka’s so-called Zürau Aphorisms, a collection of short texts from 1917–1918. North reads these notations as “reflections” in the tradition of ontological philosophy, “thoughts” in the style of Blaise Pascal’s Pensées, or a theoretical treatise. By referring to Kafka’s notations as “thoughts before” they
-
Postrevolutionary Affect and the Consolidation of Zionism: The Case of Mercedes Sosa boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2019-11-01 Tamara Lea Spira
This essay traces the Zionist conversion of iconic revolutionary folk singer Mercedes Sosa to theorize the shifting forms of racial empire in the movement from the Dirty War to the War on Terror. I read Sosa’s story as emblematic of the thwarted revolutionary dreams of the late twentieth century and the subsequent forms of recolonization—and in this case Zionism as settler colonialism—that came to
-
“Number, form, proportion, situation”: The Measure of Racial Comparison in Myung Mi Kim’s Dura boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2019-11-01 Christopher Chen
This essay offers a reading of what could be called a metrological imaginary at work in the writing of Korean American experimental poet Myung Mi Kim and in particular in Kim’s third book, Dura. In Dura, Kim traces a jagged itinerary through the archives of the Atlantic slave trade, imperial networks of exchange, and the settler colonial seizure and parcelization of indigenous lands in order to form
-
Modernist Apparitions, or When a Situation Presents Itself boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2019-11-01 Petre Petrov
Modernism has been customarily identified with the reign of purified artistic form. Yet we know that it is equally often the (staged) irruption of potent subterranean contents, such as nature, myth, the irrational or the unconscious, the primitive, race, sexuality. It is the moment of rampant subjectivity, exercising total domination over materials, but equally of rampant essences that mold or mock
-
The New Negro and the National-Popular: Randolph Bourne and Alain Locke boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2019-11-01 Jay Garcia
This essay argues that “New Negro” and “Young American” writings from the early twentieth century reward rereading in concert with Antonio Gramsci’s concept of a “national-popular” and as instances of theoretical production in themselves. Focusing on the work of Randolph Bourne (1886–1918) and Alain Locke (1889–1954), the essay returns to “New Negro” and “Young American” writings not only to identify
-
Living at This Hour: Jonathan Swift, Edward Said, and the Profession of Literature boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2019-11-01 Helen Deutsch
This essay examines the living affinity between two complex and charismatic writers, Jonathan Swift and Edward Said, in order to revitalize our understandings of both. Said’s career-long engagement with Swift took the form of a passionate amateurism that has a claim upon us at a moment when the humanities are being asked to justify themselves to opponents within and beyond the university. Reading Said’s
-
But Then, What Is Culture? boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2019-08-01 George Solt
Reading Trespasses reminds us of Masao Miyoshi’s talent for asking deceptively simple questions and leading us down a path that leaves us with a deeper sense of crisis but also with new possibilities for imagining how to reconnect the dots.
-
Looking Back at the Phenomenocene boundary 2 (IF 0.4) Pub Date : 2019-08-01 Keijiro Suga
This essay is conceived as a supplement to Masao Miyoshi’s only book of photography. Miyoshi was an avid traveler and photographer all his life. He called his practice “anti-photography” and left a book titled This Is Not Here (2009). His photographic images are interesting in many ways, surprisingly fresh and often beyond words. But what is essential about photography is the fact that photography