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Culture and conflict inevitably go hand in hand. The very idea of culture is marked by the notion of difference and by the creative, fraught interaction between conflicting concepts and values. The same can be said of all key ideas in the study of culture, such as identity and diversity, memory and trauma, the translation of cultures and globalization, dislocation and emplacement, mediation and exclusion. This series publishes theoretically informed original scholarship from the fields of literary and cultural studies as well as media, visual, and film studies. It fosters an interdisciplinary dialogue on the multiple ways in which conflict supports and constrains the production of meaning, o...
Few phenomena are as formative of our experience of the visual world as displays of suffering. But what does it mean to have an ethical experience of disturbing or traumatizing images? This collection of essays offers a reappraisal of the increasingly complex relationship between images of pain and the ethics of viewing.
The Covid-19 pandemic reinforced the perception that capitalism is in crisis, that the future is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, and that, increasingly, our thinking about it and ability to manage and organize ourselves within it, are challenges we are ill-equipped for. Despite the efforts of many writers, and a surfeit of manuscripts concerning the need to rethink capitalism, questions concerning the struggle for social and economic justice remain unanswered. While some suggest that with corrective action, businesses can save the world, there is an acceptance that they cannot do so alone. However, while governments might strengthen their institutions, enacting more effective pol...
A novel interpretation of the history and theory of technology from the perspective of toys, play, and play objects. Toy Theory addresses the relationships between toys and technology in two distinct but overlapping ways: first, as underexamined cultural artifacts and behaviors with significant technical attributes and, second, as playful and toylike dimensions of technology at large. Seth Giddings sets out a “toy theory” of technology that emphasizes the speculative, experimental, and noninstrumental in technological paradigms and argues that children’s playthings, rather than being the most ephemeral and inconsequential of technical devices, instead offer analytical and anthropologic...
From the battles over Jerusalem to the emergence of the “Holy Land,” from legally mandated ghettos to the Edict of Expulsion, geography has long been a component of Christian-Jewish relations. Attending to world maps drawn by medieval Christian mapmakers, Cartographies of Exclusion brings us to the literal drawing board of “Christendom” and shows the creation, in real time, of a mythic state intended to dehumanize the non-Christian people it ultimately sought to displace. In his close analyses of English maps from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Asa Mittman makes a valuable contribution to conversations about medieval Christian perceptions of Jews and Judaism. Grounding his arg...
This book critically challenges the usual territorial understanding of borders by examining the often messy internal, transborder, ambiguous, and in-between spaces that co-exist with traditional borders. By considering those less visible aspects of borders, the book develops an inclusive understanding of how contemporary borders are structured and how they influence human identity, mobility, and belonging. The introduction and conclusion provide theoretical and contextual framing, while chapters explore topics of global labor and refugees, unrecognized states, ethnic networks, cyberspace, transboundary resource conflicts, and indigenous and religious spaces that rarely register on conventional maps or commonplace understandings of territory. In the end, the volume demonstrates that, despite being "invisible" on most maps, these borders have a very real, material, and tangible presence and consequences for those people who live within, alongside, and across them.
This edited collection examines the effects that macrosystems have on the figuration of our everyday—of microdystopias—and argues that microdystopic narratives are part of a genre that has emerged in contrast to classic dystopic manifestations of world-shattering events. From different methodological and theoretical positions in fieldworks ranging from literary works and young adult series to concrete places and games, the contributors in Microdystopias: Aesthetics and Ideologies in a Broken Moment sound the depths of an existential sense of shrinking horizons – spatially, temporally, emotionally, and politically. The everyday encroachment on our sense of spatial orientation that gradu...
Wars have played a momentous role in shaping the course of human history. The ever-present specter of conflict has made it an enduring topic of interest in popular culture, and many movies, from Hollywood blockbusters to independent films, have sought to show the complexities and horrors of war on-screen. In The Philosophy of War Films, David LaRocca compiles a series of essays by prominent scholars that examine the impact of representing war in film and the influence that cinematic images of battle have on human consciousness, belief, and action. The contributors explore a variety of topics, including the aesthetics of war as portrayed on-screen, the effect war has on personal identity, and...
We are now confronted with a new type of uncanny experience, an uncanny evoked by parallel processing, aggregate data, and cloud-computing. The digital uncanny does not erase the uncanny feeling we experience as d j vu or when confronted with robots that are too lifelike. Today's uncanny refers to how non-human devices (surveillance technologies, algorithms, feedback, and data flows) anticipate human gestures, emotions, actions, and interactions, thus intimating that we are but machines and that our behavior is predicable precisely because we are machinic. It adds another dimension to those feelings in which we question whether our responses are subjective or automated - automated as in redu...
This book gives readers a fresh take on Depression-era poetry in relation to the idea of modernity experienced as crisis.