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A comprehensive study of the pervasive role of immersion and immersive media in postmodern culture, from a humanities and social sciences perspective. Virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, and other modes of digitally induced immersion herald a major cultural and economic shift in society. Most academic discussions of immersion and immersive media have focused on the technological aspects. In The 360° Gaze, Christian Stiegler takes a humanities and social science approach, emphasizing the human implications of immersive media in postmodern culture. Examining characteristics common to all immersive experiences, he uncovers dominant metaphors, such as the rabbit hole, and prevailing ideologies. He raises fundamental questions about opportunities and risks associated with immersion, as well as the potential effects on individuals, communities, and societies.
Investigating the genesis of the prosecuted "crimes" and implied sins of the female performing group Pussy Riot, the most famous Russian feminist collective to date, the essays in Transgressive Women in Modern Russian and East European Cultures: From the Bad to Blasphemous examine what constitutes bad social and political behavior for women in Russia, Poland, and the Balkans, and how and to what effect female performers, activists, and fictional characters have indulged in such behavior. The chapters in this edited collection argue against the popular perceptions of Slavic cultures as overwhelmingly patriarchal and Slavic women as complicit in their own repression, contextualizing proto-femi...
A Critical Companion to Julie Taymor is the most updated and holistic volume on the director currently published. Situating Taymor’s work within the intersections of story and spectacle, contributors to this collection examine issues of creativity, gender, sexuality, and adaptation by focusing on themes from Taymor’s oeuvre including martyrdom, musicality, fidelity, postmodern representations, feminism and queerness, identity, desire, trauma, revenge, hybridity, and obscenity. The result reveals Julie Taymor to be a globally-influenced American director who exhibits and exemplifies the authentic artistry of ingenious storytelling and deserves scholarly attention. This work will be of particular interest to scholars of film, philosophy, popular culture, gender, feminisms, and queer identities.
This collection of essays foregrounds the work of filmmakers in theorizing and comparing postcolonial conditions, recasting debates in both cinema and postcolonial studies. Postcolonial cinema is presented, not as a rigid category, but as an optic through which to address questions of postcolonial historiography, geography, subjectivity, and epistemology. Current circumstances of migration and immigration, militarization, economic exploitation, racial and religious conflict, enactments of citizenship, and cultural self-representation have deep roots in colonial/postcolonial/neocolonial histories. Contributors deeply engage the tense asymmetries bequeathed to the contemporary world by the mul...
This book tackles the intersections of postcolonial and postsocialist imaginaries and sensibilities focusing on the ways they are reflected in contemporary art, fiction, theater and cinema. After the defeat of the Socialist modernity the postsocialist space and its people have found themselves in the void. Many elements of the former Second world experience, echo the postcolonial situations, including subalternization, epistemic racism, mimicry, unhomedness and transit, the revival of ethnic nationalisms and neo-imperial narratives, neo-Orientalist and mutant Eurocentric tendencies, indirect forms of resistance and life-asserting modes of re-existence. Yet there are also untranslatable differences between the postcolonial and the postsocialist human conditions. The monograph focuses on the aesthetic principles and mechanisms of sublime, the postsocialist/postcolonial decolonization of museums, the perception and representation of space and time through the tempolocalities of post-dependence, the anatomy of characters-tricksters with shifting multiple identities, the memory politics of the post-traumatic conditions and ways of their overcoming.
This collection of essays focuses on current theories of sensation and synaesthesia in films and audiovisual works from a variety of methodological perspectives. It offers an insightful exploration of recent film theories about the cinematic experience. Film spectatorship and its extension in new media as a similar form of audience enjoyment stimulates both our senses and mind by creating immersive environments that involve different levels of emotion and consciousness. The collection addresses these topics through its five sections. The first, “Perception,” focuses on the synaesthetic mechanism underpinning film perception and its connection with affect, cognition, and emotions. The sec...
Everyday Feminist Research Praxis: Doing Gender in The Netherlands offers a selection of previously unpublished work presented during the 2011, 2012 and 2013 Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies (NOG) conferences. Reflecting the wide spectrum of interdisciplinary gender studies, this volume is organised into four sections along four conceptual knots. These thematic entry-points are space/time, affectivity, public/private, and technological mediation. The central emphasis of this volume is twofold: first, the everyday is approached as a concretely grounded site of micro-political power struggles. Second, the contributors make explicit connections between theory and their everyday fem...
This innovative study shows how the imaginary constructions of self and Other are shaping identification with Jewishness in the twenty-first century. The texts and artworks discussed in this book test a diverse range of ways of identifying as Jews and with the Jewish people, while engaging with postmodern and postcolonial discourses of hybridity and multiculturalism. This book selects six key areas in which the boundaries of Jewish identities have been interrogated and renegotiated: nation, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, and the Holocaust. In each of these areas Sicher explores how major and emerging contemporary writers and artists re-envision the meaning of their identities. Such re-envisioning may be literally visual or metaphorical in the search for expression of artistic self between the conventional paradigms of the past and new ways of thinking.
Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this volume brings together contributions by distinguished experts from different disciplinary fields for a multidimensional view on immersion in the visual arts and media. In the current media debate, immersion has frequently been linked to the advent of digital technology and its capacity to provide vivid sensations of being placed in or surrounded by an artificial space. The idea of ‘liquidity’ contained in this promise to plunge into another world informs wide areas of contemporary cultural imagination, referring to a myriad of phenomena that relate to experiences of uncertainty and instability, of complexity and change. Considering the fact, how...
This book challenges law’s reliance on neurology’s brain-sex binary. The brain has become the latest candidate in a historical search for a reliable and fixed biological marker of ‘true sex’ that has permeated every aspect of Western culture, including law. As definitions of the sexed and gendered body have become ever more contentious, the development and dissemination of brain-sex theories have come to dominate popular understanding of LGBTI+ identities. But, this book argues, the brain is no more helpful than earlier biological measures in ensuring just outcomes. Examining how law determines and differentiates ‘male’ and ‘female’ in two contested areas of sexed identity ...