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Contemporary cultural studies have marginalized "agency," namely the power of people to shape social life. Here, Stephen Tumino offers a new materialist challenge to these tendencies and articulates an internationalist cultural theory that puts global agency in the forefront of cultural analysis.
Contemporary cultural studies have marginalized "agency," namely the power of people to shape social life. Here, Stephen Tumino offers a new materialist challenge to these tendencies and articulates an internationalist cultural theory that puts global agency in the forefront of cultural analysis.
Thinking Blue/Writing Red interrogates contemporary culture across a range of texts, from the pandemic (‘Covid’ and ‘Trump Speak’) to high theory (Melville's narratives) and popular culture (Beyoncé's ‘Formation’ and Super Bowl performance, Twin Peaks , metamodern ‘cli-fi’ films). Inspired by Derrida’s idea of the secret, Tumino examines the significance of social movements (Black Lives Matter, Occupy, alter-globalization) and naïve art (Darger, Ryden) to argue that these texts speak of the secrets that capitalism cannot speak. Contending that the cultural surfaces narrate only the ‘nonsecret,’ that to see the social logic of the culture one must dig into what Bruno Latour questions as the ‘deep dark below,’ Thinking Blue/Writing Red reads these texts to tease out the underlying narratives of the culture of capital. This book will be of interest to students in several disciplines, including philosophy, literary and cultural studies, film studies, women's studies, critical race studies, history, LGBTQ+ studies and environmental studies.
Who gets to say what counts as contemporary art? Artists, critics, curators, gallerists, auctioneers, collectors, or the public? Revealing how all of these groups have shaped today’s multifaceted definition, Terry Smith brilliantly shows that an historical approach offers the best answer to the question: What is Contemporary Art? Smith argues that the most recognizable kind is characterized by a return to mainstream modernism in the work of such artists as Richard Serra and Gerhard Richter, as well as the retro-sensationalism of figures like Damien Hirst and Takashi Murakami. At the same time, Smith reveals, postcolonial artists are engaged in a different kind of practice: one that builds ...
The contemporary has marked itself off from modernity by questioning its humanism that centers the world around the human as the moral subject of free will and self-determination, the bearer of universal essence that is the basis of human rights. Modernism normalizes humanism through language as referential, a set of interrelated signs that correspond to the empirical reality outside it. Humanist modernity, in other words, is seen in the contemporary as a regime that, by separating the human from the non-human and insisting on language as correspondence, not only fails to engage the emerging forms of social relations in which the boundaries of human and machine are fading but is also indiffe...
Ashley Crawford investigates how such figures as Ben Marcus, Matthew Barney, and David Lynch—among other artists, novelists, and film directors—utilize religious themes and images via Christianity, Judaism, and Mormonism to form essentially mutated variations of mainstream belief systems. He seeks to determine what drives contemporary artists to deliver implicitly religious imagery within a ‘secular’ context. Particularly, how religious heritage and language, and the mutations within those, have impacted American culture to partake in an aesthetic of apocalyptism that underwrites it.
Contemporary cultural studies have marginalized "agency," namely the power of people to shape social life. Here, Stephen Tumino offers a new materialist challenge to these tendencies and articulates an internationalist cultural theory that puts global agency in the forefront of cultural analysis.
Discussions about the ‘crisis of representative democracy’ have dominated scholarly and public discourse for some time now. But what does this phrase actually entail, and what is its relevance today? How do citizens themselves experience, feel and respond to this ‘crisis’? Bitter-Sweet Democracy grapples with the complexities of these questions in the context of citizens’ relations to politics in Belgium—a nation that has experienced political instability and protests as well as social mobilization and democratic vitality in recent years. This timely and compelling volume offers new, empirical evidence on the state of trust, democracy and representation in Belgium; it further int...
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory is the most comprehensive available survey of the state of the art t/Theory in the 21st-century. With chapters written by the world's leading scholars in their field, the book explores the latest thinking in traditional schools such as feminist, Marxist, historicist, psychoanalytic and postcolonial criticism and new areas of research in ecocriticism, biopolitics, affect studies, posthumanism, materialism and many other fields. In addition, the book includes a substantial A to Z of key words and important thinkers in contemporary theory, making this an essential resource for scholars of literary and cultural theory at all levels.
Art is produced, circulated, consumed and disseminated within an economic system - it depends on money for its creation, for the livelihood of its makers, and for its distribution. In this sense, art can be understood as an enterprising activity. However, profit-making is rarely the primary goal of artists, and indeed the entanglement of art with enterprise generates significant aesthetic, conceptual, philosophical and ethical challenges for contemporary art practice. Social enterprise has emerged from this complex terrain with the promise of an alternative model of economic organisation in the arts. Grace McQuilten and Anthony White argue that artists can, and have, engaged critically in the commercial market, by way of this model. Art as Enterprise brings a fresh perspective to the debate about the roles of contemporary art in consumer capitalist society.