Challenging disenchantment The discreet charm of occult TV

Abstract

Occult imagery is widespread in the contemporary global mediaverse, including in TV programs such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed, Sightings, and The X-Files. This article considers the popular cultural presence of the otherworldly and the magical in relation to the strand of theorizing, beginning with Max Weber and taking a postmodern turn in Jean Baudrillard, that treats the cultures of Western modernity as disenchanted ones. In particular, it turns to Baudrillard's concept of seduction, which, while generating controversy in cultural theory circles, has had only a limited impact in media studies. The article argues that 'tele-visions of the otherworldly' constitute an enchanting challenge to modernist dis-illusionment, serve as a counterpoint to Baudrillard's 'obscene' media hyperrealism, and promote forms of imagination that, like magic realist literary fiction, undermine certain drives toward mastery associated with the dominant knowledge formations of Western modernity. TV's occult imagery can thus serve as the site of an unsettled and unsettling critical imagination, a skeptical popular subjunctivity.     

Charles Sheeler's imprecise precisionism

Abstract

In this article I address the significance of a series of images of New York skyscrapers fundamental to the work of American modernist painter and photographer Charles Sheeler (1883–1965). The article examines three works – a photograph, a drawing and a painting – produced between 1919–23 of the same scene: the rear of the Park Row Building, Manhattan. I argue that these images introduce imprecisions that disrupt the notion of Sheeler as the pre-eminent Precisionist artist. Following aspects of Theodor Adorno's aesthetic theory, I suggest that Sheeler's works adopt the language of rationalization whilst remaining critical of it. As such, the more positive conceptions of Sheeler's skyscraper works are juxtaposed against the actuality of the imprecision in the works, a dialectical move that unveils a negative critique of the rationalized culture of American modernity.     

Negotiating cultural boundaries: Confucianism and trans/national identity in Korea 1

Abstract

This essay looks to the complex intercultural relations of China and Korea to highlight two important issues in political theory and international relations: the transnational nature of world politics and the limits of analytical binaries such as East‐West and tradition‐modernity. Discussions of international politics in East Asia characteristically address issues of security and development studies. More recently, Confucianism has been mobilized as part of the clash of civilizations of Asia with the West. This essay will consider how cultural boundaries are negotiated within the region via an analysis of the workings of the transnational discourse of Confucianism in the construction of Korean identity. While many make truth claims about what ‘Confucianism’ means in Korea, this essay examines the discursive economies of ‘Confucian events’ in three overlapping social spaces: official, mass media, and academic. This essay will show the diversity of Confucianism within East Asia, and underline how rather than being a simple orthodoxy, the shape of Confucianism is an active political issue. While many try to define a core ‘Korean Confucianism’, I argue that we should use Confucianism as an analytical tool to understand something else, citing how some scholars are using Confucianism for the specific project of building democracy in Korea.     

The Mobilization Against the 2005 Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe: A French Mobilization for Another Europe

ABSTRACT

Offering a contribution to cultural approaches to studying social movements, this paper explores how people incorporate social change efforts into broader self-projects. I use the contemporary abstinence pledge movement as an archetypal example of a lifestyle movement, a movement that advocates for lifestyle change as its primary challenge to perceived cultural problems. To capture the public face crafted by this movement, I coded complete website content for ten pledge organizations, as well as their print and social media presence. The data demonstrate: how pledge organizations explicitly target culture, rather than pressuring the state to enact policy change; how participants employ individualized tactics while still believing in their collective power to engender change; and that pledgers craft a moral self, engaging in ‘personal’ identity work. Expanding the lifestyle movement literature to think about outcomes and influence, I then show how pledgers contest perceptions of movement success, redefining effectiveness towards abstract, long-term, and subjective measures. I conclude by locating lifestyle movements in the context of late modernity and suggesting how theorists might use and further develop the concept in the future.     

Mother Died Today or Maybe Yesterday: Reflections of L'etranger on Team‐Based Forms of Work Organization

One of the most enduring images of late twentieth‐century popular culture was the individualist and iconoclastic portrayal of the ‘grumpy old man’ Victor Meldrew in the BBC television series One Foot in the Grave. Richard Wilson's portrayal of the recently retired security worker is the antithesis of everything that contemporary organizations require from the idealized vision of employee as ‘team‐player’. As one who revels in the way that the epitaph ‘Victor’ is thrown at me at regular intervals both by my partner and children, at times when I think I am behaving normally, I thought it would be interesting for me to reflect, in public, on my relationship to contemporary workplace relations. It is my contention that Meldrew's characterization is not wholly based around the age dimension but is equally based upon his portrayal as an individual ill at ease with the mores of gregariousness. The essay therefore is a self‐reflective piece in which the author places himself in a particular milieu—that of L'etranger and uses this ‘placing’ in order to discuss the relationship between what he defines as ‘the outsider’ and the issue of age discrimination in contemporary blue‐collar environments. It is suggested that whilst the outsider or L'etranger is accepted under certain conditions within the managerial labour process this same level of organizational tolerance is not afforded to older workers within blue‐collar areas. It moves from a reflective, even autodidactic exploration of the relationship between the author and cultural articulations of L'etranger and uses this to inform an analysis of the acceptance of L'etranger within some aspects of the managerial labour within team based manufacturing units. In exploring these issues the essay then attempts to develop a third narrative in terms of now L'etranger, approaching the age of retirement fits in to the new academic labour process.     

'War Is Not a Map': Irish America,Transnationalism, and Joseph O'Connor's Redemption Falls

Abstract

This essay argues for a transnational reading of Irish novelist Joseph O'Connor's Redemption Falls (2007). It contends that O'Connor's revisiting of the period of the American Civil War and its aftermath begs all sorts of questions regarding Ireland and Irish America's historical and contemporary transnational intercessions and responsibilities. As Ireland underwent a period of unparalleled economic prosperity beginning in the mid-1990s, which most commentators attribute to successive Irish governments' commitment to globalization, it began to face new and pressing challenges in relation to its involvement with the rest of the world, particularly with regard to its stance on neutrality and recent immigrants to Ireland. I conclude that Redemption Falls reveals the complexity of Irish and Irish Americans' relationship to notions of whiteness and (racial) innocence and challenges readers to consider how Ireland will conduct its future relations with the global community both within and beyond its borders.     

De-publicized secularization and contemporary Chinese mass culture

This article attempts to distinguish two kinds of secularization and mass culture in contemporary China by creatively deploying Hannah Arendt, Jurgen Habermas and other western thinkers’ theories of secularization and modernity. It argues that, in the 1980s, China underwent a first process of secularization: that was characterized by liberating a secular society from the quasi-religious totalitarianism of the Cultural Revolution through the re-establishment of a civic society, which integrated individualism and publicness, with awareness of individual rights and rights for participation. The participation of new and self-disciplined rational individuals, who were concerned with pubic interests and issues. This essay takes Teresea Teng's popular songs as an important example of this first kind of secularization, as an attempt to demonstrate how the mass culture of the 1980s actively contributed to the construction of this new publicness. Since the 1990s, however, another kind of secularization emerged, one that did not care about the public world and others, but instead about material enjoyment and intimate private matters. Different from the religious path, this represents a way of abandoning the public world: it takes the form of a retreat into bodily/physiological happiness and one's secluded private world, leading to the development of a morbid narcissistic personality. This essay argues that these two kinds of secularization are the foundation and the starting point for us to understand the political effects of two kinds of mass culture.     

'America' in transit The heresies of American studies abroad

Abstract

In arguing for the need to move beyond the export model and the global/local dialectic to internationalize American studies, this article explores the resiliency of the nation and nationalism to shape the transcontinental dynamics of the production, circulation, and consumption of 'America' as a commodity in a global market. In discussing the institutionalization of American studies in India, I argue that outside the boundaries of US American studies, we need to engage with the heretical practices of the globalization of American studies, which embody the translational yet conflictual itineraries of diverse interpretive communities across the world. Theorizing the relations among modernity, colonialism, and 'America', and re-imagining the emergence and significance of the many meanings and traditions of 'America' and American studies in transit along a global circuit are the central concerns of this article.     

The Ecologies of Protest in the Theatre of Aztlán

Abstract

This essay looks at the work of the contemporary Mexican-American woman playwright, Cherríe Moraga. It focuses on two of her plays which were produced during the mid-1990s entitled Heroes and Saints and Watsonville: Some Place Not Here, although other plays from this period, such as Circle in the Dirt: El Pueblo de East Palo Alto, also appear in the study. The plays are based on Moraga’s responses to certain environmental and historical events which took place in California during this period. I explore how each work stages environmental protest in ways that reinscribe gender, myth, and indigeneity. In particular, I explore how Moraga recreates on stage utopian and dytopian and past and present landscapes, and how she stages feminist protest in response to both the levels of pesticides used in large-scale agricultural farming and the exploitation of the workers.     

Partial publicity and gendered remembering: figuring women in culture and performance

This essay brings representational issues of female publicity into recent discussions about space, community and memory. Cultural analysts in a variety of fields have used these concepts to foreground the radically contextual and socially embedded nature of artistic production as well as to incorporate psychic and material notions of representation into the analysis of the political. I argue that such conceptual work is implicitly gendered, something made clearer by asking feminist questions about the function of memorial space in imagining publicity. To focus an interrogation, I investigate one disciplinary strain within cultural studies: theatre and performance studies. Throughout, I position performance – both theatrical and social – as an exemplary site with which to investigate the linguistic, spatial, and embodied practices of culture. Such forms expose the gendered operations of language, space and gesture as well. Furthermore, the field of performance studies has produced theoretical paradigms that derive from larger theories of memory and space. By thus positioning it as both a site of culture and a site of cultural theory, I argue that performance can illuminate the tacit gendering of culture more generally. My investigation of publicity and civic memorial will build upon three relatively recent examples of civic performance in Chicago: the performance of First Lady at the 1996 Democratic convention, the 1996 inauguration of the Jane Addams Memorial Park in Chicago, and the premiere of Chicago-born playwright David Mamet’s The Old Neighborhood in 1997. I frame both Chicago theatre and other kinds of Chicago performances as different types of civic memorial in order to speculate on relationships amongst different types of genres. More importantly, I illustrate the different ways that women function allegorically and indirectly as vehicles for imagining publicity and for lamenting its failures. My examples suggest how women – living and/or memorialized, ethnically marked and unmarked – can figure paradoxically as the object blamed for the loss of extended affiliation even as (conversely) they are also blamed for its ‘unnatural’ public promotion.     

Now and again: Eventful experience as a resource in senior activism

ABSTRACT

Shared memories shape relations among social movement participants and their organizations. However, scholars often ignore how experience operates as a means of solidifying attachment in group contexts. In contrast, I argue that activism depends on how participants publicly recall events. In this, I integrate a social memory perspective with the examination of activist movements. Through narrative, participants build engagement by presenting the self-in-history as a model for collective action. I refer to this as eventful experience, utilizing memorable moments as a resource for generating commitment. Movements depend upon members communicating the critical moments of their lives, embedding personal timelines in group culture. The linkage of personal experience and public events is a strategy by which individuals motivate collective action. Drawing on a thirty-month ethnography of a progressive senior citizen activist group in Chicago, I examine how members use an awareness of temporality to build a culture of action. Each movement group uses the past experiences of participants to build their culture – what Jasper refers to as taste in tactics, incorporating past successes, present plans, and imagined futures into a call for direct action.     

Writing ‘Conflict’: Whispers as a ‘Restorative’ Narrative

Abstract

This paper examines contemporary Kenyan popular fiction as a site of cultural production, where the contradictions of African modernity are played out. The paper focuses on one of Kenya's oldest popular fiction columns, Whispers, published in local newspapers since 1983. Constructed around a Kenyan family, which is deployed as an allegorical trope to read modern Kenya, the paper explores how the column introduces us to the anxieties that define life in contemporary Kenya. Although the narrative comprises many thematic concerns, reference is particularly made to the restive masculinity threatened by social change. The paper also provides a discussion of the constant ‘backward glance’, an attempt to look for stability in the past, part of the society's relentless search for models that could help Kenyans make sense of an uncertain present, and an even more doubtful future. The paper also engages with the narrative mode of this fiction, examining how humour, satire and parody deceptively make light of what are important issues affecting society.     

Under the Kitchen Surface: Domestic Products and Conflicting Constructions of Home

This paper examines how the product world around domestic cleanliness plays with the dual construction of the home as safe and dangerous. By participating in this construction, cleaning products engage with a salient concern in domestic life—how to achieve and maintain a safe domestic environment. We have investigated the discursive commentary on domestic cleanliness and safety in one domestic advice manual: Good Housekeeping magazine, over the period 1951–2001. This investigation has also provided insights into the discursive character of cleaning products. We have been interested in how product discourse moves the home discursively from exhibiting dangerous tendencies towards the attainment of safety through the utilization of products. However, reading product narratives over the late modern period makes it apparent that competition and the need for product innovation in an otherwise difficult market has created complexities that confront the domestic sphere with more dangers. We draw out the consequences of our findings and reflect on how this informs the assertion made by Ger and Yenicioglu (2004) about the connections between contemporary consumer culture, cleanliness and the domestic safe haven.     

Fundamental references from the Western culture

This article presents theoretical elements concerning the ‘nature versus culture’ confrontation as a particular aspect of the worldwide expansion of Western civilization. Several speculations are made concerning the philosophical foundations which have provided the base for the current political and economic mega-scenarios in the contemporary world. We turn our attention to the articulations of the concept of nature with the processes of mondialization of Western culture and with the history of universal culture. Finally, several considerations are made on the dynamics of economic processes on a world scale and projections on the impact of science and technology in the social and political frames that are taking place in the contemporary world.     

Gender,race and global modernity: A perspective from Thailand

Abstract

This paper draws from cultural studies, postcolonial studies and political economy to track the trafficking in racism and sexism in the cultural economy of contemporary globalization. It approaches this by looking at how global modernity is enacted by Thais and Westerners in Thailand. The author argues that the pursuit of global modernity in Thailand leads Thais to invite and embrace global modernity's racist and sexist core, thereby constituting their self-orientalization. Globalization's racist and sexist economy of desire is shown to be manufactured and retailed by both global and local corporations and to operate in international education, public health, the mass media and public culture. The paper is based on a decade of participant observation and field research.     

Living in a “Half-Baked Pageant”

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the ways in which new suburban identities were forged through the architecture, design, and decoration of the modest mock-Tudor semi-detached house in the interwar years in England. It focuses particularly on the tensions between the longings for the past and aspirations for the future displayed in the architecture and interiors of “Tudorbethan” houses. It argues that such houses embodied a specifically suburban modernity, which looked backwards to the past whilst looking forward to the future. Although contemporary critics dismissed it as ersatz and backward-looking, the Tudorbethan semi signified a coming together of nostalgia and a particularly suburban form of modernity. Speculative builders created Tudorbethan houses with modern methods of construction that combined half-oak timbering with concrete. Furthermore, whilst some of the furniture that filled the Tudorbethan semi may have been nostalgically Jacobethan in its styling, it was modern in its purpose, with metamorphic designs that made the most of small spaces. This article challenges the dominance of Modernist aesthetics and values on writing on design, architecture, and consumption by exploring popular conceptions of the “modern” that accommodated past and present, nostalgia and modernity.     

On Samir Amin’s call for a Fifth International

ABSTRACT

In his prodigious output, from works on capitalist development to analyses of Islamist movements to involvement in the World Social Forum, Samir Amin’s was a consistent voice for struggle against capitalism’s domination of the world and its peoples. In this brief essay I address his call for a shift from movement to organization, indeed, toward a kind of Fifth International and explain why I endorse it.     

Mentoring,Sexual Harassment,and Black Women Academics

ABSTRACT

The #MeToo Movement both within academia and popular culture has largely been seen as an issue for white women (and men). While the phrase Me Too was originally coined by Tarana Burke in 2006 to raise public awareness of sexual harassment, violence and assault experienced by women of color, the Movement has largely been whitewashed by primarily depicting victims and survivors as white women. Black women academics, like myself, also experience sexual harassment. By highlighting the ways that race-based sexual harassment further marginalizes already underrepresented groups in political science, I use my personal story to elucidate how a gender-only lens misses the complexities of Black women’s experiences with power inequities in academia. Throughout this narrative I underscore the importance of mentorship, professional networks, and the ability to harness scholarship as a vehicle to combat the pervasiveness of sexual harassment, violence, and assault for Black women in political science.     

Fantasias of terrorism

An introduction to this special issue of the Journal for Cultural Research, this essay explains how terrorism may be said to equate to a “fantasia”, and how this fantasia has operated in different times and places. It also takes a close look at the popular fantasia promoted by the entertainment industry today, beginning with representations of the enemies of James Bond. In popular culture, terrorism is a spectre (along the lines of Ian Fleming’s SPECTRE) bent on the destruction of society, and yet it is also a sign of disorder at the heart of the very society which it attacks. Jacques Derrida’s comments on 9/11, using the metaphor of an auto-immune disorder, are pertinent. Film and television fantasias of terrorism offer critiques of the modern world order, but they offer the wrong critique.