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Disturbed Ecologies
The imaginaries of northern landscape have not remained static in the era of ecological crisis but play a pivotal function within the geopolitics of visual representation. Such imaginaries can sanction those dominant discourses that frame environmental catastrophe as the consequence of undifferentiated human activity, but, it is argued, they also have the capacity to represent a complexity and heterogeneity frequently absent from this broad discursive field. The contributors to this volume engage with the practice, curation and utilization of photography and other lens-based media, to examine the critical role of visual culture in shaping and interrogating conceptions of environmental catastrophe.
Anthroposcreens
Anthroposcreens frames the 'climate unconscious' as a reading strategy for film and television productions during the Anthropocene. Drawing attention to the affects of climate change and the broader environmental damage of the Anthropocene, this study mobilizes its frame in concert with other tools from cultural and film studies—such as debates over Black representation—to provide readings of the underlying environmental themes in Black American and Norwegian screen texts. These bodies of work provide a useful counterpoint to the dominance of white Anglo-American stories in cli-fi while also ranging beyond the boundaries of the cli-fi genre to show how the climate unconscious lens functions in a broader set of texts. Working across film studies, cultural studies, Black studies, and the environmental humanities, Anthroposcreens establishes a cross-disciplinary reading strategy of the 'climate unconscious' for contemporary film and television productions. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Soviet Self-Hatred
Soviet Self-Hatred examines the imaginary Russian identities that emerged following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Eliot Borenstein shows how these identities are best understood as balanced on a simple axis between pride and shame, shifting in response to Russia's standing in the global community, its anxieties about internal dissension and foreign threats, and its stark socioeconomic inequalities. Through close readings of Russian fiction, films, jokes, songs, fan culture, and Internet memes, Borenstein identifies and analyzes four distinct types with which Russians identify or project onto others. They are the sovok (the Soviet yokel); the New Russian (the despised, ridiculous nouveau riche), the vatnik (the belligerent, jingoistic patriot), and the Orc (the ultraviolent savage derived from a deliberate misreading of Tolkien's epic). Through these contested identities, Soviet Self-Hatred shows how stories people tell about themselves can, tragically, become the stories that others are forced to live.
Reflecting on the City Through Literature
This book develops and demonstrates an interdisciplinary method that reads literary works as a way of thinking about the city. Literary works do not only provide reflections of the city – depictions of the city as an aesthetically compelling setting – but the literary reflection of the city also offers a critical reflection on the city. How can spatial difference be conceived in cities that are changing beyond the form of the classical modern metropolis of the early 20th century? How can one think of the relation between individual urban subjects and their urban environment, when neither spaces nor discourses of the city provide them with an answer to the question where they might "belong"? How does the human body interact with its urban surroundings, and how should technological mediations be thought of? This book approaches these questions through analysing literary texts, focusing on concepts like heterotopia, non-place and the posthuman. This book will be of interest to interdisciplinary scholars and students of the city, particularly in the fields of Urban Studies, Literary Studies, Geography, and Architecture.
Popular Tropes of Identity in Contemporary Russian Television and Film
This book is an exploration of the changes in Russian cultural identity in the twenty years after the fall of the Soviet state. Through close readings of a select number of contemporary Russian films and television series, Irina Souch investigates how a variety of popular cultural tropes ranging from the patriarchal family to the country idyll survived the demise of Communism and maintained their power to inform the Russian people's self-image. She shows how these tropes continue to define attitudes towards political authority, economic disparity, ethnic and cultural difference, generational relations and gender. The author also introduces theories of identity developed in Russia at the same time, enabling these works to act as sites of productive dialogue with the more familiar discourses of Western scholarship.
Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s
This book explores some of disco’s other lives which thrived between the 1970s and the 1980s, from oil-boom Nigeria to socialist Czechoslovakia, from post-colonial India to war-torn Lebanon. It charts the translation of disco as a cultural form into musical, geo-political, ideological and sociological landscapes that fall outside of its original conditions of production and reception, capturing the variety of scenes, contexts and reasons for which disco took on diverse dimensions in its global journey. With its deep repercussions in visual culture, gender politics, and successive forms of popular music, art, fashion and style, disco as a musical genre and dance culture is exemplary of how ...
Mapping Beyond Measure
Over the last century a growing number of visual artists have been captivated by the entwinements of beauty and power, truth and artifice, and the fantasy and functionality they perceive in geographical mapmaking. This field of “map art” has moved into increasing prominence in recent years yet critical writing on the topic has been largely confined to general overviews of the field. In Mapping Beyond Measure Simon Ferdinand analyzes diverse map-based works of painting, collage, film, walking performance, and digital drawing made in Britain, Japan, the Netherlands, Ukraine, the United States, and the former Soviet Union, arguing that together they challenge the dominant modern view of the...
Literature and the Senses
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Literature and the Senses critically probes the role of literature in capturing and scrutinizing sensory perception. Organized around the five traditional senses, followed by a section on multisensoriality, the collection facilitates a dialogue between scholars working on literature written from the Middle Ages to the present day. The contributors engage with a variety of theorists from Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Michel Serres to Jean-Luc Nancy to foreground the distinctive means ...
Modern Russian Cinema as a Battleground in Russia's Information War
This book explores how modern Russian cinema is part of the international information war that has unfolded across a variety of battlefields, including social media, online news, and television. It outlines how Russian cinema has been instrumentalized, both by the Kremlin's allies and its detractors, to convey salient political and cultural messages, often in subtle ways, thereby becoming a tool for both critiquing and serving domestic and foreign policy objectives, shaping national identity, and determining cultural memory. It explains how regulations, legislation, and funding mechanisms have rendered contemporary cinema both an essential weapon for the Kremlin and a means for more independent figures to publicly frame official government policy. In addition, the book employs formal cinematic analysis to highlight the dominant themes and narratives in modern Russian films of a variety of genres, situating them in Russia’s broader rhetorical ecosystem and explaining how they serve the objectives of the Kremlin or its opponents.
Religion, Gender and Race in Western European Arts and Culture
This book examines narratives of individual religious transformation in Western European literature and culture. Religious individuals, themes, experiences and communities are widely represented in diverse literature and culture, including literary texts and visual arts and media. Taking the subject of religious transformation as an angle from which to study constructions of religion, gender and race, this book reveals through various case studies what authors, documentary makers, film makers and playwrights consider to be important (possible) shifts between the old and the new, continuities and discontinuities, and the formation of the self. The chapters demonstrate how individual religious transformations are understood to be shaped by various intersections of difference, and point at the need to consider gender as always related to and co-constructing religion and race. This transdisciplinary and intimate study provides a fresh lens through which to examine pressing questions regarding the place and future of religion, gender and race in contemporary Western Europe.
