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The first book of its kind in English, Beyond No Future: Cultures of German Punk explores the texts and contexts of German punk cultures. Notwithstanding its "no future" sloganeering, punk has had a rich and complex life in German art and letters, in German urban landscapes, and in German youth culture. Beyond No Future collects innovative, methodologically diverse scholarly contributions on the life and legacy of these cultures. Focusing on punk politics and aesthetics in order to ask broader questions about German nationhood(s) in a period of rapid transition, this text offers a unique view of the decade bookended by the “German Autumn” and German unification. Consulting sources both published and unpublished, aesthetic and archival, Beyond No Future's contributors examine German punk's representational strategies, anti-historical consciousness, and refusal of programmatic intervention into contemporary political debates. Taken together, these essays demonstrate the importance of punk culture to historical, political, economic, and cultural developments taking place both in Germany and on a broader transnational scale.
We tend to think of rhetoric as a solely human art. After all, only humans can use language artfully to make a point, the very definition of rhetoric. Yet when you look at ancient and early modern treatises on rhetoric, what you find is surprising: they’re crawling with animals. With Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw, Debra Hawhee explores this unexpected aspect of early thinking about rhetoric, going on from there to examine the enduring presence of nonhuman animals in rhetorical theory and education. In doing so, she not only offers a counter-history of rhetoric but also brings rhetorical studies into dialogue with animal studies, one of the most vibrant areas of interest in humanities today. By removing humanity and human reason from the center of our study of argument, Hawhee frees up space to study and emphasize other crucial components of communication, like energy, bodies, and sensation. Drawing on thinkers from Aristotle to Erasmus, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw tells a new story of the discipline’s history and development, one animated by the energy, force, liveliness, and diversity of our relationships with our “partners in feeling,” other animals.
For decades, Germany has been shaped and reshaped by the sounds of popular music—whether viewed as uniquely German or an ideological invader from abroad. This collected volume brings together leading figures in the field of German Studies, popular music studies, and cultural studies at large to survey the sociopolitical impact of music on conceptions of the German state and national identity, gender and sexuality, and transnational cultural production and consumption, expanding on the ways in which sounds, technologies, media practices, and exchanges of popular music provide a unique glimpse into the cultural dynamics of postwar Germany.
Illustrates the ways that the “war on crime” became conjoined—aesthetically, politically, and rhetorically—with the emergence of gangsta rap as a lucrative and deeply controversial subgenre of hip-hop In The Mark of Criminality: Rhetoric, Race, and Gangsta Rap in the War-on-Crime Era, Bryan J. McCann argues that gangsta rap should be viewed as more than a damaging reinforcement of an era’s worst racial stereotypes. Rather, he positions the works of key gangsta rap artists, as well as the controversies their work produced, squarely within the law-and-order politics and popular culture of the 1980s and 1990s to reveal a profoundly complex period in American history when the meanings ...
In The Game Culture Reader, editors Jason C. Thompson and Marc A. Ouellette propose that Game Studies—that peculiar multi-, inter-, and trans-disciplinary field wherein international researchers from such diverse areas as rhetoric, computer science, literary studies, culture studies, psychology, media studies and so on come together to study the production, distribution, and consumption of games—has reached an unproductive stasis. Its scholarship remains either divided (as in the narratologists versus ludologists debate) or indecisive (as in its frequently apolitical stances on play and fandom). Thompson and Ouellette firmly hold that scholarship should be distinguished from the repetiti...
This volume offers innovative ways to think about speculation at a time when anticipation of catastrophe in an apocalyptic mode is the order of the day and shapes public discourse on a global scale. It maps an interdisciplinary field of investigation: the chapters interrogate hegemonic ways of shaping the present through investments in the future, while also looking at speculative practices that reveal transformative potential. The twelve contributions explore concrete instances of envisioning the open unknown and affirmative speculative potentials in history, literature, comics, computer games, mold research, ecosystem science and artistic practice.
'One in four people in Germany today have a so-called migration background, however, the relationship between theatre and migration there has only recently begun to take centre stage. Indeed, fifty years after large-scale Turkish labour migration to the Federal Republic of Germany began, theatre by Turkish-German artists is only now becoming a consistent feature of Germany’s influential state-funded theatrical landscape. Drawing on extensive archival and field work, this book asks where, when, why, and how plays engaging with the new realities of “postmigrant” Germany have been performed over the past 30 years. Focusing on plays by renowned artists Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and Feridun Zai...
Jonathan Sterne shows that understanding the historical meaning of the MP3, the world's most common format for recorded audio, involves rethinking the place of digital technologies in the broader universe of twentieth-century communication history.
Wearable technology, including smartwatches, biometric trackers, and body cameras, are often touted as helpful tools that record, produce, and analyze data about daily life to improve our individual habits and health or to solve serious public issues. In this book, James N. Gilmore argues that these lofty promises mask forms of surveillance and power. Charting the implementation of wearables in areas of accessibility, health, sports, labor, law enforcement, and infrastructure, Gilmore demonstrates how these devices have been positioned as authoritative means for producing knowledge about human activity. Drawing on news reporting, advertising, film and television, company reports, and legal policies, he shows how this knowledge production reproduces three distinct modes of power: normalcy, surveillance, and solutionism. Bringers of Order empowers readers to examine the complicated ways our devices reshape how we think about our lives and our ethics and why we should resist companies analyzing our personal data.
An analysis of contemporary authoritarianism and the medium in which it flourishes, the internet, as well as what lies at the complex intersection of authority and technology. In recent decades, a new style of authoritarian politics has taken hold throughout the liberal-democratic world. The new authority figures are characterized by obscene, transgressive behavior, reminiscent of the “crowd” leader as theorized by Freud, only far less transient. In The Emperor's New Nudity, Yuval Kremnitzer considers the fraught intersection of authority and technology—the internet being the medium that has allowed contemporary authoritarianism to thrive—asking foundational questions such as: How ca...