Volume 2, Issue 1

The oversaturation of information that characterizes the “digital age” is not only a question of large numbers of competing discourses blurring meaning itself out, but also of a fundamental disassociation between words and their use, between the constative and the performative dimensions of language. Baudrillard has analysed how the mutability of signs in our society has rendered meaning meaningless, through an infinite game of simulacra and simulation that forecloses our understanding of reality rather than making it legible. Meanwhile, Sloterdijk and Žižek have approached the same problematic from a different angle, analysing how actions perform an ideological foreclosure that cannot be observed when analysing signs alone. What discourses say and what they actually do today is often contradictory and this contradiction fulfills an ideological function. This is especially troubling when discourses declare themselves to be counter-hegemonic yet actively participate in the reproduction of the status quo. In this context, it is pertinent to return to the work of Marx to reflect on and engage with his coherent articulation of words and their use, of words and actions, and of the intellectual and the political. The coherence of his discourse and praxis offers tools to think through, if not seek to transform, the alienated semiotic landscape of our times.

Ever since the expansion of video-politics, television canalises citizens' criticism and demands regarding political authorities, conceiving of citizens as spectators. Social networks magnify this type of involvement, promising horizontality and social cohesion. Political parties have become reduced to elites that distribute power and benefits among themselves, disengaging from voters, except during electoral periods. Our opinions and behaviours are captured by algorithms and subject to globalised forces. The public space where citizenship should be exercised is becoming opaque and distant. Citizenship is radically diminishing while some social movements are reinventing themselves and winning sectorial battles: for human rights, for gender equality, against authoritarianism. Yet the neoliberal approach to technology maintains and deepens greater inequalities. What are the alternatives to this dispossession? Hackers and dissenters? What is the role of the vote in a State-society relationship reprogrammed by technologies and the market?

In this article, I deal with some new aspects of the late-modern constitution of subjectivity, related to the use of new communication technologies. By developing some intuitions associated with an interpretation of contemporary social life based mostly on Marx’s conception of fetishism, I hope to offer a provisional account of a few consequences of such developments for the conception of the self. I differentiate among several dimensions of a process through which the self-objectification enhanced by those developments leads to self-fetishisation and self-commodification, as well as capitalisation, and indicate its possible contradictions. I argue that while self-objectification is in itself not a problem, reflecting only a shift towards a conception of authenticity which is no longer related to something like an inner true core, self-fetishisation and its consequences contradicts this process’ own promises.

This article focuses on the interplay between correlated textual subject positions, insofar as they are differently legitimated across the New International Division of Labour (NIDL). In examining the academic system of referencing or invocation, I will pay particular attention to how it functions as a circuit of value production in the cultural domain. Marx’s theory of value production will be used as an exegetic tool to locate the workings of economic power in the referential apparatus of the contemporary academy, showing how Third-World symbolic production is undervalued despite its existence, since economic conditions retroactively foreclose the validation of Third-World intellectual and artistic production as cultural capital. As a case study, I will analyse some of the citation strategies of postcolonial theorist Anthony Appiah in In My Father’s House, which operates within the presupposition that textual subject positions (the place of enunciation in particular) are made available only to privileged subjects in the extra-textual world. Appiah’s methodology opens up what I call a circumscribed redistribution of cultural capital across the NIDL. Hence, I take In My Father’s House not only as an object of analysis but also as a critical source to understand how value production mediates academic writing, allowing Appiah’s conceptualization of the relationship between textual and social subjects to inform my own.

How is it possible to understand a specific cultural determination of human praxis, especially the productive and consumptive one, without falling into ethnologising human subjects in their everyday forms of reproduction, or construct biological fixations? The former senior faculty of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) Bolívar Echeverría (Riobamba, Ecuador 1941-Mexico City 2010), who does not limit human culture to its “elevated” forms and bases his analysis in the precise manner of material reproduction, finds an adequate image of this relationship between freedom and tradition, between individuality and a historically- and geographically-determined collectivity. This image lies in human languages, their innumerable speech acts and in a science that studies the relation of interdependence among them: semiotics. Starting from that concrete philosophical problem, retaking Saussure’s conceptual proposals and confronting them philosophically with Marx’s and Echeverría’s theories, we try to construct a basis for a critical epistemological contribution from the Global South, overcoming in that way one of the most powerful and destructive rests of the old colonial processes: “intellectual” Eurocentrism

This essay proposes a reading of Marx’s Capital that considers the correlation between life and labour, between material existence and productive activity, as essential to the book’s critical project. It argues that there is a critical and paradoxical moment in the plexus of this relationship that academic discourse should consider: if Capital argues that capitalism constitutes a system of organization of life, inscribing human labour as labour power, that is, as commodity or market goods, then how can we extract critical labour itself from this totalizing structure? In other words, what kind of labour is critical labour and what function should it represent in a world in which all labour would already be inscribed within the logic of capital? Drawing on biographical, anecdotic and circumstantial considerations about Marx’s labour while writing Capital, this essay traces the conditions of existence of the author and creates a reading position that explores the relationship between life and work, between Marx and Capital, and thus questions critical labour itself as a productive activity and the material life it contains.

The aim of this essay is to reconnect Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism and the use that he makes of this anthropological category with a general critique of global capitalist relationships. Based on Marx's anthropological insights into the concept of fetishism, it explores the political relationship between labour, subjectivity and commodities in supply chains capitalism. For this purpose, it empirically examines the materials of ethnographic research on the production of Italian companies that produce in an Eastern European country (Romania) and then sell mainly to countries in Western Europe. In this way, the spatial separation between the places where the investments are made (production) and those where profits are generated (market) becomes very clearcut, just like the alienating division between people and the products of their work. In the light of the Marxian analysis of the commodity form, this detachment will be analysed in a fragment of the productive, organisational and social mosaic of contemporary capitalism.

Neoliberal capitalism intensified the social fragmentation, which resulted in the upswing of heterogeneous communities without a unifying meta-language that was liberal universalism of citizenship. Our society shows “paralogical” traits and paralogy reverberates in the new populist policy I call metapopulism (Trump, Putin, etc.)-witness their inconsistencies. Metapopulism establishes unifying principles as a substitute of liberal universalism. These are allegory and the Real. An allegorical signifier (“patriotism” etc.), which is separated from the signified (the meaning), is a common representation of heterogeneous communities and simultaneously maintains their paralogy. The Real appears as the signifier that is excluded from “correct” liberal discourse and promises to enhance the experience of a system’s failures by attributing a social meaning to it (sublimation). These principles work on the condition that their promises are permanently thwarted and deferred, which is their spectrality. However, another type of unification may be feasible. It is a unifying discourse and practise that is grounded in a specific position of the “precariat” as the hegemonical class as formed by neoliberal capitalism (the Lukacsian concept). Here, a unification is borne by the praxis of sublimation.

This paper brings core concepts coined by Karl Marx in conversation with Jacques Lacan to analyse some of the mechanisms that have mystified subjects’ consciousness, and contributed to a scenario where the (white) working-classes in the United States and elsewhere turned to the far right that further undermines their existence, instead of uniting with the raced and gendered working class to overthrow capitalism. It explains that the money fetish, which we find at the centre of the American Dream of wholeness (on earth), serves as the unconscious fantasy object petit a to deal with the desires and fears subjects fundamental non-wholeness creates, which have been heightened by the insecurities of neoliberal capitalism and exploited by the far right. It also shows how religion offers the illusion of wholeness in the sky, which produces subjects who endure rather than rebel against their suffering. Finally, it explains how the far-right brands the sexed and raced working-classes as inferior to uphold the illusion of the white working-class subjects as whole, which further undermines the creation of a revolutionary proletariat.

Marxist Internet scholars have recently shed light on the commodification and exploitation of social media users. While some of these studies have also acknowledged the ideological nature of how online sociality is understood and discussed, they have not yet addressed in great detail the ways in which ideology figures in the process of commodification of social media users. We address this question by combining Marxist ideology theory with insights from cognitive pragmatics. Focusing on the idea of illusion, we draw on Relevance Theory and employ the notions of “relevance” and “cognitive illusion” to discuss the ideological process we call context manipulation, a concept that helps bring to focus the discursive obscuring of the capitalist operational logic of social media corporations. We illustrate our cognitivepragmatic model of ideology with examples of Facebook’s discursive practices. The paper contributes to the discussion on ideology in cultural studies and the discussion on commodification of online sociality in critical Internet and media studies by offering a revised interpretation of Marx’s ideology theory that highlights the discursive and cognitive nature of ideological processes, and by elaborating on the workings of ideology in the specific context of corporate social media.

Inspired by Marx’ view of “untimely temporalities,” I connect my own conception of the need for anachronism in art history with some contemporary artworks focusing on the political importance of art in the present. The analyses of work by three contemporary artists who each bring their own aesthetic of slowness, interruption, and activism to their art leads to a conception of political art as activating rather than directly activist. In addition to Marx, especially his view of temporality, and to Henri Bergson as a major philosopher of time, the article also establishes connections with the ideas of contemporary cultural analyst Kaja Silverman. These three thinkers, each in their own way, undermine the binary oppositions on which so much of thought is based.

As the momentum of space exploration unfolds, our planetary exterior is increasingly transformed into a site of capitalist production and destruction. Grounded within infrastructures, processes and practices of mediation, our technological acquisition of space is also entwined back into the ambits of global media cultures down on Earth. The currents of this enculturation are indexed by the upsurge and emerging variety of “space apps” which use techno-scientific data and creative visualisation to offer assorted digital experiences of outer space-from maps and tours of planets, stars and galaxies, to real-time observation of celestial events and phenomena. To provide some measure of this inclination, we consider the ways in which these apps sculpt our collective techno-aesthetic relations with extraplanetary space. Framing their digital renderings as the sensational interface of capitalism, we suggest that they offer a glimpse into the ongoing manipulations of economies of attention and the appropriations of affect that undergird its high-tech progress in the space age.

This article analyses the idiom of “placemaking” in contemporary development, specifically considering the Battersea Power Station development in south London. It argues that the recourse to a highly aestheticised concept of place allows development to mediate the structural transformations they are enacting and create a narrative and discourse about development that deflects and dissipates political critique. In order for public-private “regeneration” to proceed as the default mode of urbanisation for contemporary London, developers need to not only create sound investments but also produce a hegemonic cultural narrative that articulates the stakes of their interventions in ways that make them not just compelling but inarguable and inevitable. Three modes of conceptualising the redeveloped city are considered: the concept of place, the aesthetic of the garden and rhetoric of sustainability, and the ethos of creativity. Together, these constitute a vision for the future technological city that seeks to render political disagreement marginal if not unthinkable.

Among the many genres of visual art to emerge in the wake of computerisation, the subset of generative or algorithmic art known as complexism seems uniquely keyed to the social and technological mainsprings of everyday life in the twenty-first century. Complexism typically deploys computer algorithms to demonstrate how complex phenomena can emerge through the reiterative enactment of simple rulesets. The light and sound installations and the videos that complexist artists produce, alongside the discourses surrounding the works, stand out as singularly contemporary, not necessarily for their exploitation of now-ubiquitous telematic tools and techniques, but for their deep commitment to the trailblazing problems, methods, and hypotheses set out by the new science of complexity. Practitioners of and commentators on complexism (the work and writings of Philip Galanter feature most prominently here) persistently invoke this booming interdisciplinary field of complexity research. Against this trend, I argue that for all the leverage the tools and terms of complexity science supply to complexist art, the concept of complexity itself remains surprisingly vague and shorn of any historical sensibility. One preliminary aim of this essay is to bring more theoretical rigour to the artists’ use of this concept by beginning to fill in the missing backstory. From there, I move to complicate this genealogy by introducing a somewhat controversial figure-the social theorist, political economist, and legal philosopher Friedrich Hayek, who had posited similar problems concerning the emergence and maintenance of complex, self-organized systems as early as the 1930s, and whose theoretical solutions to these problems were instrumental to what historians and sociologists have subsequently described as capitalism’s late “neoliberal turn.”

In an era of “frictionless” digital environments, this article proposes a queer analysis of the “lossy” materialities of mediated encounters. Building on recent scholarship on media failure and media infrastructures, it will argue that moments of disruption and deterioration commonly experienced by users reveal the failure of overlapping social and technical infrastructures to ensure lossless transmission of normative fantasies of subjectivity and mediated relationality. Highlighting the queer instability of material assemblages, it will pay close attention to how the articulation of bodies, objects, and spaces in particular scenes of lossy encounter generates unplanned affective intensities which may disorient and undo the consuming subject. Borrowing the concept of lossy file compression and adapting it for this purpose, the article’s broad aim is to offer a queer critical framework for inhabiting the contingent, emergent, and dissipating energies of media encounters beyond the capital-driven instrumentalisation of agency and the neoliberal imperatives of update culture.

Taking the widely viewed media work of French filmmaker and environmentalist Yann Arthus- Bertrand’s as its subject, this essay posits that despite the filmmaker’s stated ecological and humanist position, the formalist strategies he employs-particularly the fly-over and the database-bring with them a set of historical conventions that paradoxically import capitalist and imperialist ideologies and phenomenologies. In particular, the article considers the films Home (2009) and Human (2015) and the database project 7 Billion Others (2003-ongoing) as documentaries that deploy techniques of technologically-virtuosic seeing that end up obscuring the very possibility of cognitive mapping that would allow viewers to situate their contents in legible political economic frameworks. Closely related to the concept of the Anthropocene, which holds all people equally accountable for the current environmental crisis, Arthus- Bertrand’s work tends to obscure the causes and therefore meaningful solutions for the current situation. The article concludes by postulating that the model of cognitive mapping itself requires more attention to the ways in which particular aesthetic forms mobilize affective dimensions of viewer experience.

Along with the increasing commodification of all aspects of culture and the persistent aestheticisation of everyday life under late capitalism, there is an equally increasing longing for objectivity, immediacy, and trust. As the mediation of our everyday experiences augments, a generalised feeling of mistrust in institutions reigns; the sense of a need to bypass them increases, and the call for more “transparency” intensifies. As transparency manages to bypass critical examination, the term becomes a source of tacit social consensus. This paper argues that the proliferation of contemporary discourses favouring transparency has become one of the fundamental vehicles for the legitimation of neoliberal hegemony, due to transparency's own conceptual structure-a formula with a particularly sharp capacity for translating structures of power into structures of feeling. While the ideology of transparency promises a movement towards the abolition of unequal flows of information at the basis of relations of power and exploitation, it simultaneously sustains a regime of hyper-visibility based on asymmetrical mechanisms of accountability for the sake of profit. The solution is not “more” transparency or “better” information, but to critically examine the emancipatory potential of transparency at the conceptual level, inspecting the architecture that supports its parasitic logic.

In February 2014, Getty Images, the largest international stock photography agency, and LeanIn. org, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s women’s empowerment foundation, announced a new partnership that aimed to change the way women are portrayed in stock photography. The “Lean In Collection” with Getty seeks to challenge visual gendered stereotypes ascribed to both sexes in the daily life of work, home, and family life in advertising imagery. While the overarching ambition of gender empowerment implicit in the mission of Lean In is a worthwhile goal, I look to the problematic relationship rooted in the partnership between Lean In’s gender empowerment initiative and the role of Getty Images in trafficking aesthetic stereotypes for profit. Using methods of visual analysis and feminist critique, I argue that the photographs idealise a concept of female empowerment that is steeped in the rationale of neoliberal economics, which narrowly circumscribes gender citizenship according to the mandates of market logic. The Lean In Collection describes gender equality not as a right of citizenship procured by the state, but as a depoliticised and individualised negotiation.

Taking as its provocation the recent observation by Larry Grossberg that “knowledge is relatively powerless to affect the conditions and directions of social change” (Tilting at Windmills 149-150) this paper will suggest that it is with the explication of comfort that a valuable response to the challenge of the current conjuncture can be found. Following a brief survey of the nature and purpose of Cultural Studies scholarship in this present moment, attention will turn to how comfort comes to be encoded into everyday practices and routines of lifestyle. Accordingly, this paper will assert that Cultural Studies, with its concern for “the quotidian experiences of lives lived” (Martin and Hickey 149), is well-placed to launch inquiry into the “conditions” of comfort-conditions that mark the dimensions of late capitalist social formation. A call for a research agenda within Cultural Studies that positions comfort as a prompt for scholarly attention will be outlined as an “activated” form of cultural inquiry focused on the clarification of the “everyday” dimensions of living now.

The ideas and ideals of authorship and the discourse on property rights that emerged in parallel since the 18 th century have come to form the bedrock of copyright law. Critical copyright scholars argue that this construction of authorship and ownership contributes to individualisation and privatisation of artistic works that disregards the collective aspects of creativity. It also embodies a certain kind of authorial character-or “author function” as Michel Foucault puts it-imbued with racial and gendered powers and privileges. While the gendered and racialised biases of intellectual property rights are well documented within copyright research, the commodification of ideas and cultural expressions relies on individualisation of creativity that is significant not only to the cultural economy but also to the 20 th -century notion of the entrepreneur as the protagonist of capitalism. This article relates the idea of the entrepreneur to the deconstruction of authorship that was initiated by Foucault and Roland Barthes in the late 1960s, and the critique of an author-centred IPR regime developed by law scholars in the 1990s. It asks if and how the deconstruction of the author as a cultural and ideological persona that underpins the privatisation of immaterial resources can help us understand the construction and function of the entrepreneur in extractive capitalism.

Across her six feature films since 1994, American director Kelly Reichardt has taken time as a mechanism to reveal and question social, political, and economic structures. This article looks closely at how her films display a range of temporal interventions and resistances to features of capitalist temporalities. While film theorists and critics often locate Reichardt’s films within “slow cinema,” this article expands the range of temporal concepts applied to her films to explore the sociopolitical critique at work through this auteur’s aesthetics. The analysis focuses on time in three of Reichardt’s feature films, starting with commodified and metaphysical time in Old Joy (2006), then addressing impatience, entropy, and environmentalism’s temporalities in Night Moves (2013), and ending with an exploration of disconnection-and denial of coevalness-in Certain Women (2016). This article applies close scene analysis-along with a range of philosophical, political, and sociological concepts of time-to demonstrate how Reichardt elucidates and resists the temporal tensions underpinning social relations within capitalist culture.

Among business leaders, government officials and academics there is a general consensus that new technological developments such as artificial intelligence, robotics and the internet of things have the potential to “take our jobs.” Rather than resisting and bemoaning this radical shift, theorists such as Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams have argued that full automation, universal basic income, and future thinking, should be demanded in order to challenge neo-liberal hegemony. Helen Hester has gone on to consider the limits and potentials of this manifesto in regard to the automation of reproductive labour. In this article, I take this work as a starting point and consider the significant burden that is left at the designer’s door in the post-work/post-capitalist imaginary. I explore the changes that would need to be made to design methods: techniques that are themselves part of the history of industrial capitalism. Focusing on the automation of domestic labour and drawing on feminist theory and emergent design practice, I begin to develop a feminist design methodology; without which I argue that an emancipatory post-work politics cannot be realised.

Vaporwave, first emerging in the early 2010s, is a genre of music characterised by extensive sampling of earlier “elevator music,” such as smooth jazz, MoR, easy listening, and muzak. Audio and visual markers of the 1980s and 1990s, white-collar workspaces, media technology, and advertising are prominent features of the aesthetic. The (academic, vernacular, and press) writing about vaporwave commonly positions the genre as an ironic or ambivalent critique of contemporary capitalism, exploring the implications of vaporwave for understandings of temporality, memory and technology. The interpretive and discursive labour of producing, discussing and contesting this positioning, described here as “genre work,” serves to constitute and sediment the intelligibility and coherence of the genre. This paper explores how the narrative of vaporwave as an aesthetic critique of late capitalism has been developed, articulated, and disputed through this genre work. We attend specifically to the limits around how this narrative functions as a pedagogical or sensitising device, instructing readers and listeners in how to understand and discuss musical affect, the nature and function of descriptions of music, and perhaps most importantly, the nature of critique, and of capitalism as something meriting such critique.

As a “born digital” audiovisual music genre and visual aesthetic, vaporwave channels remnants of popular culture, advertising, and consumer technology from the 1980s and early 1990s. retrieving the strange sense of affective potential that still echoes within the outmoded, depleted myths of that era. In doing so, it opens up a unique vantage-point on our present moment, and our contemporary attachments to digital media and a still unrelenting consumer culture. Just as Walter Benjamin believed “revolutionary energies” to resound in the outmoded objects of nineteenth century culture, vaporwave invites us to recognise the affective potentials still incipient in the sounds and images of the recent past and, in doing so, to acknowledge the affective potential available in our own cultural moment.

It is a commonplace that science fiction draws inspiration from science fact. It is a less familiar thought-though still widely acknowledged-that science has sometimes drawn its inspiration from science fiction. (Arthur C. Clarke’s idea of geostationary communications satellites is a well-known example.) However, the debt of science to science fiction extends beyond such specific examples of scientific and technological innovations. This essay explores the paradoxical-sounding thesis that science itself, as we now know it, was originally the product of a science fiction vision. At a time when the collective endeavours of early modern researchers amounted to something less than science, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627) helped show what wonders might be achieved by organised and methodical state-sponsored scientific research. Bacon’s vision was highly prescient: many of the scientific possibilities he sketched have since become realities. It was also highly influential: early modern science bears the characteristic stamp of Bacon’s vision, and that same influence is discernible right down to the present day.

The article examines The Man Who Fell to Earth by Nicholas Roeg and Under the Skin by Jonathan Glazer, comparing them with each other and their respective literary originals (hypotexts), in order to establish how aliens and humans are represented in these films and how these representations reflect their respective ideologies. The authors argue that while Roeg’s film, in common with its original, uses the story of Newton to criticise corporate capitalism, Glazer’s film plays down the political aspect of the film, concerning industrial farming and exploitation of the underclass by the political elites, pertaining to neoliberalism, to focus on the problems of identity.

China has long been present in Western science fiction, but largely through notions of Orientalism and depictions as the 'Yellow Peril'. However, with China's new ascendancy and modernization over the last 15 years, along with its investment and collaboration with Hollywood in particular, contemporary film in general, and contemporary science fiction in particular, has embraced this new China in ways hitherto unseen before. This essay examines three contemporary western/American science fiction films which each represent and construct China in slightly different ways, and in ways which reveal the West, and Hollywood's reappraisal of the relationship with China and its emerging 'Soft Power.'.

The article examines Andrzej Wajda’s Roly Poly (Przekładaniec, 1968), a 35-minute film made for Polish public television, that is an expanded version of Stanisław Lem’s short grotesque play Do You Exist Mister Johns? (Czy Pan istnieje Panie Johns?) published in 1955. Roly Poly tells a story of a car race driver, Ryszard Fox. A victim of several car crashes, he gets so many transplants from other victims of these collisions, with his brother being a first donor, that eventually he becomes a mix of different organisms, including female and animal parts. Wajda presents the whole story in brief scenes and episodes using an aesthetic mix of black humor, grotesque, absurdism, surrealism, and pop art imagery. The author argues that with its narrative focus on transplant experiments and aesthetic concoction of different styles, Roly Poly becomes a cinematic variant of the surrealist parlor-game of exquisite cadaver, where an often accidental collection of words or images is assembled into a new entity. Furthermore, the article claims that the film presents a dystopian variant of Bakhtinian grotesque body and as such it opposes the concept of ideal, uniform, and homogenized communist/national body. Eventually, the body of transplants displays a transgressive potential of trespassing different divisions and hierarchies and as such it indirectly subverts the main premises of nationalistic politics led by Polish communist party in the late 1960s.

In the early 1980s, an important facet of hip hop culture developed a style of music known as electro-rap, much of which carries narratives linked to science fiction, fantasy and references to arcade games and comic books. The aim of this article is to build a critical inquiry into the cultural and sociopolitical presence of these ideas as drivers for the productions of electro-rap, and subsequently through artists from Newcleus to Strange U seeks to interrogate the value of science fiction from the 1980s to the 2000s, evaluating the validity of science fiction’s place in the future of hip hop. Theoretically underpinned by the emerging theories associated with Afrofuturism and Paul Virilio’s dromosphere and picnolepsy concepts, the article reconsiders time and spatial context as a palimpsest whereby the saturation of digitalisation becomes both accelerator and obstacle and proposes a thirdspace-dromology. In conclusion, the article repositions contemporary hip hop and unearths the realities of science fiction and closes by offering specific directions for both the future within and the future of hip hop culture and its potential impact on future society

This paper reviews the implications for research in cultural literacy of the current hypothesis that revolutionary advances in communication technology are inseparable from an over-reliance on emotion, both in the representation of global disaster and human suffering and as a means of manipulating public behaviour in the political and commercial spheres. It explores the view that feeling has become a simulacrum or form of “hyperreality” whose “contagion” through targeted exploitation is an obstacle to deeper understanding of social processes. It summarises the challenges which this presents for research into the nature of cultural literacy by critically considering three current paradigms: affect theory, clinical psychology including neuroscience, and memetics with due regard for recent attempts to model social behaviour through computer-based simulation. Its conclusions are that historical comparisons between past and present of the processes whereby cultural artefacts mediate emotion, combined with highly contextualised empirical fieldwork into their contemporary impact, should be key foci of critical research into cultural literacy, using the full range of technological instruments available.

Today, mediascapes (see Appadurai) play a predominant role in the construction of modes of human existence. How do they determine our agency? How do they form screens for our emotions, how do they build non-negligible spaces in which our dramas play out? Do they support us or, on the contrary, do they limit us? I pose these questions in relation to Holy Motors (2012), a film by the French director Leos Carax. His film presents man’s postmodern condition as well as state of the art nowadays. The hero of Holy Motors is the absolute actor, a set of his avatars, the postmodern Proteus doomed to live and experience repeatedly a parody of “all the same.” My thesis is that mediascapes only seem to strengthen our agency. They offer us a plural existence and an easy ability to enlarge the borders between illusion and reality, but in fact, they make us part of a system of the urban “desiring machine,” they make our identities and our bodies into a sort of spectacle directed by external forces.

This article addresses the topic of reading in the course of life. Its point of departure is the oral-history research carried out between 2009 and 2015 among 138 narrators (informants, respondents, interviewees) across the Czech Republic. The author presents its background, parameters as well as one of its general achievements-four moments of initiations on an axis of our reading life. The first of these takes the form of sociability (being accepted); the second-autonomy (mastering the skill); the third- maturity (being independent), the fourth-reflection (mirroring). What follows from this is the finding that reading undergoes continual development, whether a long continuity or a meandering chain of partial discontinuities. Thus, our oral history-based research shows that being open to the lifetime span provides us with a specific sensitivity towards reading, stressing mainly the fact of its being rooted in particular time-conditioned, life-motivated and purposive situations.

The use of search engines such as Google is an activity that produces a transformation of communication practices related to the use of digital devices (especially smartphones) and has a significant impact on Internet users’ linguistic practices. One of these practices is conversation-not Internet chat, but “ordinary” face-to-face dialogue. People often search the web during conversations. This practice transforms a simple conversation into a digitally assisted one. A digitally assisted conversation is a dynamic combination of speaking, typing and reading on the screen. In this paper, I present some consequences of this change, such as the way searching during conversations “forces” interlocutors to take a different look at their statements and why reaching for a smartphone and using a search engine can be perceived, regardless of the results displayed on the screen, as a significant rhetorical gesture of negation (usually considered rude). Proficiency in searching and using a smartphone with broadband Internet is considered socially attractive today, just as erudition and literacy once were. This is currently considered an extension of erudition.

The pilot Survey discussed in this paper was designed to understand to what extent Romanian Diasporic Facebook groups (RDFGs) build up public spheres, i.e. spaces in which people can form public opinions that can shape political subjectivity (Habermas 178) and to understand the impact of the RDFGs administrators as community organisers. The Survey incorporated questions on the administrators’ features, group structures, levels of activism and explicit interest in public affairs expressed within these groups. Invitations to participate in the Survey were issued via Facebook Messenger exclusively to RDFGs administrators. The participants reported that their groups were mainly top-down informal structures. They stressed the apolitical profiles of the groups they administer although some reported that the critique of homeland politicians constituted significant discussion threads and said that members often organise offline events that could be described as political. Some respondents reported instances of “political revolts” within groups, in which the ordinary members (OMs) initiated critical dialogues on the group’s walls which questioned the positions of the admins. Interestingly, an illusory sense of superiority was revealed in the administrators’ responses as compared to their evaluation of the interests of the OMs, as well as a state of ambivalence in relation to the censorship practices and workload linked to their administrative roles.

In 2013 Honorata Martin, a young artist from Gdańsk travelled about six hundred kilometres on foot. No other work than the journey itself was created apart from the scrapbook with her notes and a short video. By putting herself in the precarious position of a nomad/migrant, the artist achieved multiple goals. One of them was to put an end to the alienation of work. The result is a work that is deprived of a “labour force,” and as such, it cannot be exploited. Martin adopted the strategy of a “passive subject” (as opposed to the “active subject” of Lazzarato). She followed the instructions, fitted the image that was being proposed to her by people she encountered, and this was exactly the move that triggered emancipatory power. Her perverse answer to the danger pointed out by Lazzarato was the creation of a subject without a soul who cannot be put to use in the economic structure based on immaterial labour. Her project “Setting off for Poland” contributes to decades-long discussions about the role and function of art institutions.

After the occupation of Crimea and the conflict in Eastern Ukraine, many people were forced to leave their homes and look for a new place to live. The cultural context, memories, narratives, including the scarcely built identity of artificially made sites like those from Donbas (Donetsk and Luhansk regions) and the multicultural identity of Crimea, were all destroyed and left behind. Among the people who left their roots and moved away were many artists, who naturally fell into two groups-the ones who wanted to remember and the ones who wanted to forget. The aim of this paper is to analyse the ways in which the local memory of those lost places is represented in the works of Ukrainian artists from the conflict territories, who were forced to change their dwelling- place. The main idea is to show how losing the memory of places, objects, sounds, etc. affects the continuity of personal history.

This essay traces the presence of mobility metaphors in the sartorial practices of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Britain. While fashion is frequently deemed ephemeral and changeful, it is also often theorised with reference to the concept of mobility, either physical or metaphorical. In fact, it seems that it is in the realm of fashion that the notions of motion, mobility, change and transition all become linked through visual representation. Based on Cognitive Metaphor Theory as well as insightful research on visual metaphors by Charles Forceville, one may argue that the concept of mobility is mapped onto garments and attire, resulting in change of fashions, as it was the case with the twentieth-century development of women’s tennis wear. At the same time, oppositional styles adopted by a subculture such as Teddy Boys are frequently theorised as metaphorically communicating class mobility and hence viewed as expressing a protest against British class structure. A more recent example of a close relationship between mobility, migration and fashion can be found in the British debate over the Muslim veil, in which Muslim women’s choice not to wear a veil becomes a metaphor of their cultural mobility and readiness to embrace the British way of life.

The article is an attempt to explain the basic methodological principles behind the project of the online visual platform called Refugee Atlas. The crucial issue discussed here is the relation between the work on the atlas and the legacy of German art historian Aby Warburg’s Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. The author explains how he applied central notions, such as Pathosformeln, Nachleben, the polarity of the symbol, used by Warburg, to work concerning visual representation of the “refugee crisis” and long cultural history of migration. Besides, the text contains numerous remarks about anthropological research recently devoted to the issue of migration and its possible convergence with Warburg’s outstanding explorations in the domain of iconology.

This article explores the idea of a drifting house, a house with no fixed coordinates, a concept that is central to an understanding of immigration. It can also describe what Anaïs Nin referred to as a house of incest, which means that under such a roof, all traditional familial boundaries are mobilised, either being crossed or absent to begin with. This is the situation for Jenny and her father in Krys Lee’s short story, “The Believer,” from her debut book Drifting House (2012). After her mother murders a delivery boy and is incarcerated in a high-security psychiatric facility, Jenny and her father become dislocated from their life as immigrants to the United States. Eventually, daughter and father take a road trip to visit Jenny’s mother and then drive on to Las Vegas, where their life as immigrants began and where they will now cross the ultimate boundary. Very few women writers have addressed the emotive theme of incest from the position of a daughter’s willingness to participate or even initiate the sexual encounter. Krys Lee twins immigration with incest to draw significant parallels between the two situations. In doing so, she demonstrates how the European and Korean past remains relevant to post-national literature.

This article explores the working of the cultural literacy concepts of rhetoricity and textuality in Michel Houellebecq’s third novel Platform through the lens of French philosopher Frederic Lordon’s affect theory, with a view to understanding the way emotions and motion operate jointly through writing in this post-travel literature text dealing with the contemporary travel industry, sex tourism, and emotional alienation. As such, it contributes to the current reassessment of the role played by emotions in human interactions. By exploring the specific layered textuality of Platform, which purposefully recycles a series of discursive cliches and tropes, I show how Houellebecq’s writing style demands to be considered not only for its literary value but also for its potent, and perhaps unexpected, moving effects, or rhetoricity, which invite readers to reconsider their perception of alterity-i.e. the world and the other-but also of the performative power of art and literature. In order to demonstrate this, the article looks first at the failure of travel writing orchestrated in the novel; it then analyses alternative textual modalities of affect mediation trialed in the text; and finally, it considers the strategies used in Platform to “empowerise” signs and, as a result, those who read them.

This paper aims to explore Ian McEwan’s vision of Europe in his 1992 novel Black Dogs. Published some three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Black Dogs plunges its readers into a fictional experience that enhances their sense of an irrational fear and their apprehensions of evil forces haunting Europe’s past and present and bursting out in the shape of a pair of menacing creatures in London, France, Poland and Germany. Taking the reader back and forth in time and space in a narrative of mobility, McEwan projects a complex vision of Europe, where memory plays tricks and sheds light upon an essential, albeit inscrutable truth at the same time. Feeling that he belongs nowhere, in particular, Jeremy, the narrator-protagonist, probes into the past to find the key to the present, which overarches the future of the continent. In order to do so, his mind sweeps over moments and places, projecting pieces of a jigsaw puzzle which only the reading process can fit together. Looking into McEwan’s memory-oriented narrative strategies, the paper will focus on the emblematic role of the reader in a novel which is a parable of cultural, epistemological and literary reading.

This essay investigates the theme of emotionlessness in Salman Rushdie’s novel Shame; the research is carried out within the theoretical framework of postmodernism. In the novel, otherwise filled with strong emotions such as love, hate and shame, one character, Farah Zoroaster, can be singled out as a person characterised by a lack of emotion. The question raised in this research is about the place of emotionlessness in the narrative of the novel and the functions it performs. It is discovered that although Farah has a unique position in the novel, her story is intertwined with those of other migrant/ peripheral characters such as Bilquis Hyder, Eduardo Rodrigues and Omar Khayyam Shakil as opposed to the protagonists of the novel Iskander Harappa and Raza Hyder, who are local/central characters of the novel. However, alongside the narrative lines of her father and Eduardo Rodrigues, Farah Zoroaster’s story explores the topic of migration from a perspective of personal freedom and spirituality, which is different from other migrant narratives in the novel. The postmodern nature of the narrative plays with the reader by offering contrasting connotations of the freedom and spirituality attributed to the emotionlessness of Farah, such as narcissism and the absence of personal qualities.

Literary historiography is not indifferent to phenomena that are of key importance to contemporary culture and the humanities, including tourism and travel writing/travel studies. By trying to incorporate the ways a contemporary person experiences the world, literary history uses narrative strategies that are typical of current travel discourse-e. g. of a tourist guide. A tourist guide is an applied genre and also a cultural representation of the literary past of a city or region. The central category for literary tourist guides is space and mobility (rather than timelines and other figures important in a grand literary history). Space functions here as the subject of narration and as the basic principle that orders the material. In that context, the form of a tourist guide is a way of presenting the literary past, remembering the history of the city and its literary works, the lives of writers. Adapting a tourist guidebook for the needs of literary history results from the fact that everyday practices, such as travel and walking, influence professional forms of knowledge. This article shows how academic knowledge (here: literary history) can be learned and popularised by means of a non-academic genre (here: literary tourist guides).

The main objective of this essay is to consider Polish perception of the 21st-century European movement of migration and analyse the literary and artistic representations of this experience through the examples of Jarosław Mikołajewski’s A Great Surge, Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Guests, Anna Konik’s In the Same City, Under the Same Sky and Margot Sputo’s Who Where?. I relate these works to the latest international art, including projects by Ai Weiwei, E. B. Itso, Giacomo Sferlazzo, and look for common denominators. I claim that the common feature of many artistic projects is the creation of a substitute for contact between the viewer and refugees, appealing to other senses than sight, especially to the sense of touch. These works do not attempt to represent the experience of migrants as individuals, but point to the experience of migration in its elemental aspect-matter and physical contact, exposure to destruction, dependence, intimacy, confrontation with others. What’s more, art based on migrant movement-referring to the imagined experience of direct contact with migrants or their belongings-bypasses the process of identification and empathy. Instead, it relies on affective transmission. I propose a category of affective diffusion as a process that can occur not only between sentient individuals but also as a result of the material aspect of art and the contact with the viewer. The inspiration to create the concept of affective diffusion is the relationship between migrants and inhabitants described by Jarosław Mikołajewski in his essay Wielki Przypływ [A Great Surge] which shows aspects of migration through Lampedusa Island. Many inhabitants who are asked about migrants show intensive emotions like anger, fear and xenophobia. But the testimonies of people who see the living and the dead day after day suggest that these emotions get weaker under the influence of physical contact. It seems that the moment of two bodies getting in touch undermines the frozen system of ideas and emotions, stimulates feelings, opens up a new, ambiguous potential for understanding. This is because expressive emotions lose their importance with the activation of affective transmission. This physical contact gives rise to changes in the economy of feeling, thinking and judging.

There is a growing body of work on the theory of cultural literacy, but little has been written on how to teach cultural literacy in higher education contexts. This article discusses the use of Open-space Learning (OSL) techniques as valuable tools for teaching cultural literacy. Cultural literacy and OSL are two different areas of study, but there is common ground between them, and cultural literacy can draw great benefit from the cross-pollination of ideas with OSL. The paper focuses on practice-based models used in OSL that have been adapted to teach cultural literacy. The aim of these practice-based models is to create an environment that teaches students how to transfer the analytical and critical skills that they learn as part of a literary and cultural studies (LCS) course to real-life scenarios. We argue that an important part of this learning environment is what we refer to as cognitive “destabilisation,” and discuss why OSL techniques are ideally suited to fostering such destabilisation in students.

“Wozu Image?” is a two-hour workshop held as part of “(e)motion,” the second Cultural Literacy in Europe (CLE) Biennial Conference which took place in Warsaw on May 10-12, 2017. In our session, we expanded the themes of the “Wozu Poesie?” exhibition, first held in Berlin in 2013, which, with thanks to Haus für Poesie (formerly Literatur Werkstatt Berlin), was shown as part of the conference. The workshop explored, through intersemiotic translation and its embodied experience, the relation between image and text, and what it means to put oneself in the picture. In this paper, we contextualise this artivism, or metaphorical “act of war,” in relation to photography. Artivism is a composite word that denotes “an activist action directed to creating change through the medium and resources of art” (Poposki 718). We report and record the processes and outcomes of the workshop with the aim of opening up intersemiotic translation (translation as encounter and experience across different media) to explorations beyond words and across disciplines. Specifically, we explore the production of text in relation to images as a way of thinking through a problem and answering questions, and the composition of an image as a way to embody thoughts on cultural literacy.

Notions of “home” in Europe are becoming more fluid, being challenged and reshaped by unprecedented migration. This chapter discusses the impact of migration on these notions by drawing on research produced during our collaborative project Talking Transformations. In Talking Transformations, poetry about aspects of “home” was sent into a linguistic and artistic “migration,” which involved translation into different languages and into film art. Translated poetry and artworks, as well as vocal recordings of the poems, travelled to and from the EU countries that feature most in migration into and out of the UK-for migration to the UK, Romania and Poland; for migration from the UK, France and Spain. The works were exhibited in festivals and other public events in the UK in summer 2018. The use of “translation” as the underpinning framework for our project stems from its critical relevance to “motion”: as practice, translation signifies the process whereby texts move across borders between cultural, geographical and temporal spaces. In this chapter, we discuss the changing notions of home within the framework of the project and present how the discursive and public-facing nature of Talking Transformations can contribute to a more positive and inclusive debate of migration and its impact on identity and culture.

This essay outlines the potential of artistic research for engaging audiences in cultural literacy and linguistic hospitality, which according to Paul Ricoeur occurs “where the pleasure of dwelling in the other’s language is balanced by the pleasure of receiving the foreign word at home” (10). It builds upon Emile Benveniste’s (1969) and Jacques Derrida’s (1997, 2000) transcultural etymological investigation of hospitality which is central to Alison Phipps’ ethical, socially oriented ethnographic praxis. Focusing on the use of a sensory and reflexive methodology in Translation Zone(s): A Stuttering, a participatory arts research project-developed during an Arts and Humanities Research Council Cultural Engagement Fellowship-this essay aims to extol the value of adopting an experimental approach to language, to embrace “not knowing” as a constructive methodological strategy and to extend the scope of research within this area to encompass other epistemological fields. The project is recontexualised in the aftermath of the United Kingdom’s EU referendum (2016) and looks towards the possibilities that the affective nature of art affords, considering how it could be used to encourage a critical debate about language and counteract the increasingly nationalist rhetoric and identity politics associated with being a native English speaker.

The controversy surrounding the announcement by the US Treasury, in April 2016, that the portraits of Harriet Tubman and Andrew Jackson will “share” the twenty-dollar bill-which the latter has embodied for almost a century-highlights a glaring incongruity: A formerly enslaved black woman and abolitionist leader is being placed in iconic proximity with an exemplary historical representative of the United States as a national experiment built on whiteness, slavery, and genocide. Our essay revolves around three basic questions: Why Tubman? Why Jackson? Why Now? The Treasury’s decision and its subsequent vicissitudes allow insights into the blurring of Barack Obama’s avowed “post-racialism,” which presided over the idea to redesign the currency, into the overt white supremacy and anti-black violence at the onset of the Trump regime, which has de facto frozen the implementation of the new bill. The story serves, namely, as a commentary on paradigmatic antiblackness as a force that, being constitutive of American civil society, has been fortified by the “post-racial” pretences of the Obama era. With reference to Christina Sharpe’s notion of “monstrous intimacy” and Saidiya Hartman’s theorization of “fungibility,” we argue that the twenty-dollar bill affair reflects the ways in which the interlocutory life of civil society is fortified by the continuous positioning, in popular imagination and discourse, of the black female body as inert matter in modes of appropriation, violence, and representation that sustain America’s political and libidinal economy.

This article considers artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s use of photographic transfers and popular culture in her 2016 painting “Portals” to craft an artwork specific to her experience across multiple points of social identification in the United States and Nigeria. Through close reading and the study of Crosby’s formal and conceptual strategies, Zelt investigates how varying degrees of recognition work through photographic references. “Portals” contests assimilationist definitions of American identity in favor of a representation which is multiplicitous, operating across geographies. By juxtaposing images from different times, in different directions, Crosby constructs “contact zones” and provokes a mode of looking that reflects a feeling dislocation from the country in which she stands, the United States, and the country with which she also identifies, Nigeria. After a brief introduction to the artist and her relationship to Nigerian national politics, the article explores how distance and recognition work through image references to express a particular form of transnational identity, followed by an examination of uses of popular culture references to engage with blackness and an interdependent “Nigerian-ness” and “American-ness.” It concludes by contextualizing the painting’s display amid waves of amplified nativist purity in the US.

The story of Black women in British mainstream cinema is certainly one of invisibility and misrepresentations, and Black women filmmakers have historically been placed at the margins of British film history. Up until the mid-1980s, there were no Black female directors in Britain. Pioneers like Maureen Blackwood, Martina Attille and Ngozi Onwurah have actively challenged stereotypical representations of Black womanhood, whilst asserting their presence in Black British cinema, often viewed as a male territory. In the 2010s, it seems that the British film industry remains mostly white and masculine. But the new millennium has brought a digital revolution that has enabled a new generation of Black women filmmakers to work within alternative circuits of production and distribution. New strategies of production have emerged through the use of online crowdfunding, social media and video-sharing websites. These shifts have opened new opportunities for Black women filmmakers who were until then often excluded from traditional means of exhibition and distribution. I will examine these strategies through the work of Moyin Saka, Jaha Browne and Cecile Emeke, whose films have primarily contributed to the re-presentation of Black womanhood in popular culture.

My paper addresses the intersections of the American popular music star system, Black female Gospel singers, Gospel Music, and the exilic consciousness of the Sanctified Church with special attention to life and music of Gospelwoman Priscilla Marie “CeCe” Winans Love. I argue that CeCe Winans and the marketing campaign for Winans’ album Let Them Fall in Love, is indicative of the encroachment of American popular music’s star system into self-elected “exiled” Gospel Music and into the lives of “exiled” Gospelwomen. Gospelwomen are 20th and 21st century urban African American Protestant Christian women who are paid for singing Gospel Music and who have recorded at least one Gospel album for national distribution. The self-elected exile of Gospelwomen refers to their decision to live a life based on the values of the Kingdom of God while encountering and negotiating opposing values in American popular culture. Gospelwomen and Gospel Music are impacted by the demands of stardom in America’s celebrity culture which includes achieved success and branding. Gospelwomen negotiate these components of stardom molding them into mechanisms that conform to their beliefs and needs.

My article underscores the intermediate existence of black American women between race and gender by stressing the role white patriarchy and black hypermasculinity play in the marginalisation of black female voices and the prioritisation of white women’s interests within and beyond mainstream feminist spaces. In order to legitimise this intermediate existence of black women, my article develops the triple consciousness theory (TCT). Inspired by W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness, TCT argues that black women view themselves through three lenses and not two: America, blackness and womanhood. Black feminists, TCT affirms, are able to reimagine misguided narratives of black womanhood in contemporary American culture by unpacking the complexity of this threefold consciousness. In Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay strives for the inclusion of pluralist voices in the mainstream feminist movement and in Lemonade, Beyonce uses Afrofuturist tropes, reappropriation and gothic imagery to exorcise the generational pain of betrayal by black men and white women. With Insecure, Issa Rae radicalises feminist theory by critiquing archetypes attached to black womanhood and in Marvel’s Black Panther, not only do black women possess the unprecedented agency to shape their own identities on their own terms, there is also an existential reconnection with their past.

This article discusses the visual, textual, and musical aesthetics of selected concept albums (Vinyl/CD) by Afrofuturist musicians Erykah Badu and Janelle Monae. It explores how the artists design alternate projections of world/subject relations through the development of artistic personas with speculative background narratives and the fictional emplacement of their music within alternate cultural imaginaries. It seeks to establish that both Erykah Badu and Janelle Monae use the concept album as a platform to constitute their Afrofuturist artistic personas as fluid black female agents who are continuously in the process of becoming, evolving, and changing. They reinscribe instances of othering and exclusion by associating these with science fiction tropes of extraterrestrial, alien lives to express topical sociocultural criticism and promote social change in the context of contemporary U.S. American politics and black diasporic experience.

This article considers the freedom for the musician that exists within different kinds of music improvisation. It examines the constraints, conventions and parameters within which music improvisations are created and identifies three broad strands of improvisatory practice, that have developed in response to the development of recording technology. It argues that non-hierarchical, pan-ideomatic and structurally indeterminate forms of music improvisation that began to emerge in the late 20th century represent a form of music that models and expresses the felt freedom of the improvising musician.

This paper addresses one aspect of my Practice as Research project exploring composing for large groups of improvising musicians. It looks at how my practice evolved as a result of contemplating the nature of solo improvisation, together with Garry L. Hagberg’s writings around “Collective Intention.” I discuss a new work for octet that started with small-group improvisations, initially totally freely and then later using thematic material inspired and informed by the initial sessions. By basing the finished compositions on improvisations this way, I aim to bring the creative voice of the individuals into final performance. Not just by employing the compositional techniques of the likes of Graham Collier, John Zorn, Anthony Braxton and many others who allow room for realtime improvised contributions in performance, but by weaving the unique voices of the musicians into the written material as well. In this way, I am challenging the stereotype of a lone composer working away from the ensemble, which the contemporary big band composer often fits.

The purpose of this article is to establish what improvisation means and how it is used by electronic musicians operating in Vienna from the late 1980s till the present day: Peter Rehberg, Peter Kruder, Rupert Huber, Patrick Pulsinger, and the members of the band Sofa Surfers. It attempts to find out whether they believe that their choice of electronic instruments enhanced or impeded their ability to improvise and their sense of artistic agency; what type of improvisation they favour and what are their views on the changing role of improvisation in producing electronic music. It also examines the difference between old and new style electronic instruments in improvisation and music production at large. Finally, it asks a question whether the musicians had any views about the link (or the lack thereof) between the cultural milieu in which they operate and their willingness and ability to improvise.

The 2017 set by the electroacoustic duo Third City comprised five pieces, each defined by an audio path linking different acoustic musical instruments to digital musical instruments to enable live sampling. Performances were then improvised within structures developed in rehearsal. The authors here ask how the different instruments and audio paths influenced the improvisational roles taken by the performers. Previously established differences between acoustic musical instruments and digital musical instruments are highlighted, and questions regarding their use within improvisation are articulated. A taxonomy of improvisational roles is then selected and applied to the pieces. In identifying correlations between the instruments and audio paths of the five pieces and the improvisational roles used by the performers, conclusions are reached to serve as guidance in the setting up of audio paths for other electroacoustic improvisation pieces using live sampling. This article is the result of research into practice, an asynchronous post hoc consideration (Onsman and Burke 210) of the 2017 Third City set carried out by the duo having repositioned themselves relative to their music-making selves as researchers referring to both the experience of performers and the projected experience of the audience as inferred from archive footage.

The aim of this paper is to examine the use of graphic notation in relation to improvisation and indeterminacy in practice. The paper opens with a background context around terms and ideas about improvisation and indeterminate music pioneered by composers in the 20th century. The techniques the author used in the pieces Fluttering (Brondum 2015) and Serpentine Line (Brondum 2010) are examined and discussed in informal interviews with four musicians. The paper closes with a discussion and conclusions gained from the interviews and from working with musicians in the context of using graphic notation as a bridge between improvisation and notated music. Documentation of the author’s practice and research of these methodological and aesthetical issues may be of interest to composers and musicians that work with similar techniques. It may also add to theory by developing the understanding of a composer’s own approach, and in extension, to ask questions on how to develop these theories further.

Abstract: In this article, I explore the problem of identity at the national and European levels historically and sociologically, exposing the liberal thread that runs through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Looking to key historical and artistic figures, I argue for the continuity between early nationalist and European integrationist impulses, maintaining that-despite their seemingly contradictory essence-the two are bound together by a liberalism (viz. the pursuit of the natural rights of man) they hold in common. I contend that this connection illustrates that the initial efforts to construct the nation in the early nineteenth century and a supranational Europe more than a century later can be understood asidealistic liberal projects that have failed due to the populist turn upon which their success depends, leaving the cultural elites behind both projects in a shared loneliness.

Nowadays, more and more writers cannot be classified according to one single nation. Whereas in Imagined Communities Anderson describes the development of nations and national belongings, in Third Culture Kid (TCK) discourse a central theme is the concept of not belonging to one specific nation or culture (“NatioNILism”). TCKs are individuals who were raised moving from one country to the next due to their parents’ career choices. Not having had a fixed home while growing up, rather than accepting classifications according to nations and cultures, many TCKs prefer to embrace diversity. Antje Rauwerda argues that the fiction of adult TCKs comprises typical features that reflect the consequences of a displaced international childhood and accordingly coins the new literary classification Third Culture Literature. Whereas Rauwerda exclusively analyses novels written by TCKs, this article examines whether the effects of hypermobile international childhoods can be detected in the works of TCK songwriters. By analysing not only the song lyrics of contemporary musicians such as Haikaa, Sinkane and Tanita Tikaram but also the artists’ views regarding issues such as belonging, identity and transience, it will be shown that in the scholarly realm the TCK lens can be expanded to song texts too.

This article considers how Ishiguro’s 2015 novel about mass forgetting in post-Arthurian Britain adds to debates about what it means to be a human living within a society. There are four areas of enquiry linked by their emphasis on the interdependence of remembering and forgetting: ideas of memory in nationhood; the depiction of the British landscape; the cognitive process of recognition; and the emotional aspects of remembering. Interdisciplinary in scope, this article uses evidence from psychological studies of memory alongside detailed close readings of the text, allowing a more precise analysis of the role of the narrator and the effect of Ishiguro’s text on the reader. By keeping his previous corpus in view throughout, it evaluates Ishiguro’s continued use of memory and nationality as themes, while demonstrating the new departures offered by the conjunction of an ancient setting and a contemporary reading audience. One of the first sustained critical efforts on The Buried Giant, this article puts the novel firmly on the agenda of literary, cultural and memory studies respectively.

In The Road from Damascus (2008), Syrian-British writer Robin Yassin-Kassab’s debut novel, the protagonist describes “the opposing camps of [his] childhood,” as narratives of “Qabbani versus Qur’an” (56). While Sami’s father idolises the pan-Arabist poet Nizar Qabbani and supports the Syrian regime despite its repressive policies, Sami’s mother, disillusioned with nationalist ideology, turns instead to faith, offering her son a “different mythology” based on “the adventures of God’s messengers” (53). Tracing Sami’s negotiations of these seemingly opposed inherited narratives, Yassin-Kassab’s novel examines the lingering impact of pan-Arabism and the alternatives offered by Islamic frameworks. While critics have previously approached this novel as part of a growing corpus of British Muslim fiction, in this essay, I focus more closely on the novel’s interrogation of Arab nationalism. As I will show, Yassin-Kassab’s novel unfolds as a series of ideological disillusionments that chart the protagonist’s confrontation with the failure of nationalist politics. Inviting the reader to follow the protagonist’s successive conversions and de-conversion from various forms of nationalism, Yassin-Kassab’s representation of the polarisation between “Qabbani versus Qur’an” poses the question of how one might find alternatives beyond such restrictive dichotomies, dramatizing the inadequacies of political vision in the Arab world today.

A speech given by the skinhead Combo in the film This is England (2006) provides the ground for an analysis of far-right nationalism. This article uses Critical Discourse Analysis and the idea of the nation as a discursive construct to explain Combo’s strategies to gain dominance over his gang by means of rhetoric, body language, building up an ethos based on Christian and epic mythologies with ethnic connotations, drawing boundaries, and discrediting and excluding his opponents. These strategies are then compared to those of the UKIP leader Nigel Farage in his “Brexit victory” speech delivered in June 2016, which was based on a mystification of territorial boundaries, symbolic allusions to a defensive war, and a verbal construction of an ideally independent nation and a promising future. Thus, the article argues that analysis of a scene from the film set in the Thatcherite Britain of 1983 can still illuminate the articulation of later nationalist discourses.

Ironically, feudal relations and embedded caste based gender exploitation remained intact in a free and democratic India in the post-1947 period. I argue that subaltern is not a static category in India. This article takes up three different kinds of genre/representations of “low” caste women in Indian cinema to underline the significance of evolving new methodologies to understand Black (“low” caste) feminism in India. In terms of national significance, Acchyut Kanya represents the ambitious liberal reformist State that saw its culmination in the constitution of India where inclusion and equality were promised to all. The movie Ankur represents the failure of the state to live up to the postcolonial promise of equality and development for all. The third movie, Bandit Queen represents feminine anger of the violated body of a “low” caste woman in rural India. From a dacoit, Phoolan transforms into a constitutionalist to speak about social justice. This indicates faith in Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s India and in the struggle for legal rights rather than armed insurrection. The main challenge of writing “low” caste women’s histories is that in the Indian feminist circles, the discourse slides into salvaging the pain rather than exploring and studying anger.

This article comparatively examines the first four novels of Fawziyya Shuwaysh al-Sālim (b. 1949): al-Shams madhbūḥa wa-l-layl maḥbūs (1997), al-Nuwākhidha (1998), Muzūn (2000), Ḥajar ʿalā ḥajar (2003). I argue that these novels reflect not only the stages of the author’s career as a novelist but also of the transition of Kuwaiti women’s fiction from the conventional to the postmodern narrative technique and discourse. Al-Sālim’s first and second novels typically reproduce-albeit subversively-the dominant literary discourse and employ conventional narrative techniques. On the other hand, her millennial-third and fourth-novels signal the inception of the feminist-postmodernist novel in Kuwait; in varying degrees, both texts utilise present-day, globalised linguistic vulgarism and fragmented narrative techniques to explore feminist discourses bordering on female transcendence and self-determination.

This article studies the anti-racist writings by contemporary scholars Cornel West, Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., George Yancy, and Claudia Rankine. It uncovers how they include personal narratives in their works in order to theorise the workings of white hegemony in the twenty-first century. In doing so, I argue, they productively blur the lines between the personal and the theoretical as well as between the past and the present. Consequently, they problematise the notion of abstract theorising, the myth of continuous racial progress as well as conceptions of postracialism.

August Wilson's Century Cycle is as much a theatrical experiment of black cultural history and sociology as it is one of storytelling. Though often considered a realist playwright, Wilson walks beyond the realist landscape into speculative and imagined ones in Gem of the Ocean. His investment in cultural critique and history enhances the possibility of an enriching analysis of his work as speculative fiction. This research project locates the ties between Wilson’s affinity with history and the creation of a dystopian Pittsburgh in the play. In Wilson’s work, set in 1904, the antebellum past is so close to the post-Emancipation present, temporally and socio-politically, that there is almost no difference at all. The flattening of time Wilson insinuates through the milieu, a capitalist-police state, is articulated through characters’ relationship with it. Wilson is welcomed in conclusion into black speculative traditions of re-imagining time and using cultural histories to critique cultural realities.

Discourses of Islamist terrorism deployed as part of the War on Terror have fed into a host of conspiracy theories imagining Islam as a system of total government. But even before 9/11, mainstream political discourses reflected similar suspicions. Beginning in the 1980s, concerns about the political establishment were expressed from within government itself in the idea of a government that governs “too much.” In this article, I suggest that the proliferation of Islamist conspiracies after 9/11 reflects this mode of government. To develop this argument, I begin by linking discourses about terrorism produced as part of the War on Terror to conspiracy theories linking terror and Islam to notions of total power in the state. I then suggest that Islamist conspiracies draw on the epistemologies of uncertainty produced by the state in order to transform what is unknown or “risky” into un/certain objects of knowledge and truth. This transformation takes place through their location in the space of the sacred-in the soul of Islam. I illustrate these parallels through a comparative analysis of official policies and discourses of terrorism and conspiracy culture, with a focus on the Center for Security Policy website and Glenn Beck’s It Is About Islam: Exposing the Truth About ISIS, Al Qaeda, Iran and the Caliphate, where discourse about terror is used to signify the (hidden) truth of Islam.

Douglas Coupland’s site-specific installation Canada House, temporarily erected in 2004 in a house deemed by locals to be a “tear down” in a Vancouver suburb, unwittingly captured the zeitgeist of the era eco-critics and theorists have named the Anthropocene, the age where the future of the climate and the environment are most influenced by human activity. In my article, I examine Coupland’s work from the perspective of new materialist philosophy, with particular attention to what Timothy Morton calls the “hyperobject.” In so doing, I attend to the specific dynamics of the installation as a phenomenon in real time and space, as well as its enduring reality as an artifact that translates specific dynamics of interconnectivity between aesthetic, linguistic, and ecocritical discourse as they relate to space and human/nonhuman relationships.

The Safavid dynasty ruled Persia between sixteenth and eighteenth centuries and is known as a turning period in the political, social and religious trajectories of Persian history. The ethnographic literature about the Safavid Persian culture written by Western travelers is an indication of the forming relations between the West and the Orient. The travelogues indicate that Safavid discourses of sexuality were different from their counterparts in the West. These non-binary discourses were not based only on gender and sexual orientation, but also on social factors such as age, class and status. Relations of these factors to different forms of “masculinities/femininities” were focal for gendered and sexual categorization. Nonbinary sexual/gendered identities and expressions were explicit, and a sexual continuum was prevalent. The fundamental differentiation of masculinity and femininity were not valid, and sexual relationships were not confined to heterosexuality. This study uses historical sources to explore the discourses of gender and sexuality during the Safavid era. Drawing on criticisms of Orientalism, implications of Western narratives on our understandings of sexuality and gender in the Safavid era are discussed.

Following the 2014 Umbrella Movement, Hong Kong society has witnessed a series of fights between social (youth) activists and its Special Administrative Government (SAR). What was at stake really boils down to the issue of Hong Kong’s self-positioning vis-a-vis the rising economic and political strength of Mainland China. This issue is certainly nothing new, given that most cultural discourses in the 1990s, both within and outside Hong Kong, have focused on the city’s postcolonial status after the handover. This article therefore proposes to approach such an issue from the perspective of the Sinophone to bring to light how cultural production in Hong Kong can generate alternative thinking. It considers specifically a literary work by a native Hong Kong writer, namely, Dung Kai-cheung’s Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City (Atlas), through the lens of translation. By analysing how Dung Kai-cheung engages in three levels of translation to paint a kaleidoscopic image of Hong Kong, this article shows how the concept of Sinophone can inspire, enlighten and even question existing knowledge about Hong Kong’s history and culture. Eventually, Atlas, shown as deprived of a nativist or nationalistic discourse, creates new epistemic possibilities for understanding Hong Kong. As part of the ongoing global Sinophone cultures, Atlas also exemplifies how Hong Kong can be imagined to hold an equally important position vis-a-vis Mainland China.