Literary clinical practice: desire,depression and toxic masculinity in Hamlet

ABSTRACT

This essay introduces the notion of a literary clinical practice for which it remains essential to continue to consider those texts that open up a place for a readership, or audience, or even a civilization to consider the endlessly generative failure of its literature to write mental health. Concerned with mental illness that is an effect of language on the subject, the body, and of the enigma of the truth as cause, psychoanalysis is the crucial interlocutor for any literary clinical concern with the maladies of literature and society. In order to re-assess the utility of Shakespeare’s Hamlet to contemporary problems such as depression – perhaps the dominant symptom of our time – this essay attempts a reconsideration of Jacques Lacan’s famous seminar on Hamlet from the perspective of the contemporary clinic of the Lacanian orientation in psychoanalysis led by Jacques-Alain Miller.     

Contemporary South African Jazz and the Politics of Place

Abstract

Drawing on popular music scholarship on music and place, as well as interviews with jazz musicians, scholars, and journalists active on the jazz scenes in Durban and Johannesburg, this article considers how locales are perceived to uniquely influence music-making. Extending Bakhtin's notion of “utterance” to music, it argues that the musical character of recent South African jazz subtly registers demographic, political, economic, and environmental specificities peculiar to contemporary Durban and Johannesburg. It is argued that contemporary South African jazz, as it is experienced by its performers and listeners, may be profitably conceptualised as speaker and addressee of locale.     

Visual methodologies for research with refugee youth

Abstract

In the current moment of social, political, economic and environmental disquiet, unprecedented numbers of children have been forced to leave their homes and settle in new communities. As schools worldwide receive increasing numbers of refugee youth, there is a pressing need for thoughtful educational research that inquires into the unique individual needs and experiences of displaced learners. Given that students’ journeys are shaped by movements across physical, cultural and linguistic spaces, we suggest that related scholarship might benefit from Third Space theory. Within this theoretical framework, neither language nor culture is static. Rather, both are continuously shaped through interactions – including those that are non-verbal. For students who may be learning in an unfamiliar language, visual methodologies offer a means and venue for communication. To explore how refugee youth might benefit from Third Space theory and visual methodologies, we first review scholarship that examines how children and schools negotiate educational space. We then describe a series of methodologies that scholars might consider when conducting research with refugee youth, including photovoice, fotonovela, digital storytelling and quilting. Significantly, pairing a Third Space theoretical framework with visual and participatory methodologies may address issues of language, power, vulnerability and ethics.     

Minor Shakespeares

ABSTRACT

This introduction to the journal special edition Minor Shakespeares contextualises the articles which follow by exploring Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘minor literature’ as it helps to read and reconceptualise Shakespearean drama and poetics, as well as the range of global Shakespeares. It is illustrated how recent paths taken by Deleuzian scholarship in the fields of literary and film criticism, ontology, vitalism, sexuality studies, ecocriticism and postcolonialism open potentially new lines of enquiry into Shakespeare, and how a Deleuzian/Deleuzoguattarian approach can combine openness to Shakespearean concerns with the bringing of Shakespeare into dialogue with pressing contemporary political questions.     

Aesthetics of disaster as decolonial aesthetics: making sense of the effects of Hurricane María through Puerto Rican contemporary art

ABSTRACT

On 20 September 2017, Hurricane María made landfall on Puerto Rico causing unprecedented disaster. From that day onwards, the Puerto Rican multi-layered colonial, social and political context was further complicated by the traumatic acceleration of a human disaster via this natural disaster. This crystalized the urgency of using art as vehicle for (social) catharsis, a practice that continues to be used by individual artists, collectives, community organizations, art projects, and other art institutions on the island and abroad, through mural art, community paintings, art exhibitions, literature, music, and many other aesthetic expressions. This article examines, from a decolonial and critical cultural studies perspective, post-Hurricane María artistic expressions in contemporary art as decolonial aesthetics through the cathartic use of the frame of an aesthetics of disaster. It is argued that, an aesthetics of disaster aims to re-assert an artistic form that is able to accelerate the discursive nullification of a deeply rooted colonial, social and cultural problem by way of art as catharsis inspired by the way that Hurricane María unveiled these problems. The piece briefly contextualizes Puerto Rico, and it examines the idea of Puerto Rican contemporary art as catharsis. Then, it describes how Puerto Rican contemporary art exhibitions and associated aesthetic production are processing urgent post-hurricane issues through three illustrative pieces in exhibitions in PR and abroad in the United States (US). Lastly, decolonial aesthetics is reexamined and re-understood, informed by Édouard Glissant's view expressed in Poetics of Relation which aids to the conclusion that Puerto Rican contemporary art using the frame of an aesthetics of disaster functions as a powerful form of decolonial aesthetics.     

Intercultural language educators for an intercultural world: action upon reflection

Abstract

Bearing in mind that learning a new language is much more than acquiring a new code, but a new way of being in the world, the aim of the article is to briefly raise and discuss relevant issues relating to language teacher education in these contemporary times, especially in the area of English Language Teaching (ELT). Emphasis is placed on the importance of teacher education responding to the new demands of this globalised world, proposing among several aspects, new political and pedagogical postures which are to lead into preparing students to become more critical of their own realities and more sensitive to the intercultural encounters they are supposed to engage with this highly complex and ever increasingly intercultural world.     

Prolepsis: On speed and time's interval

Abstract

Prolepsis is a rhetorical device in which an expected future event is presented as though it was already an accomplished fact. In the speed and instantaneity of current experience, our time is structured like a prolepsis. Through an analysis of the proleptic structure of some contemporary practices, I raise questions concerning the political nature of time's interval. In the proleptic organization of time, the interval between present and future is devalued as an obstacle to an anticipated event. However, with the help of Kant and Heidegger, I argue that time's interval consists of an act of temporalization which at once dissolves what has already presented itself and generates an absolutely new and singular event of time and being. The interval is an event in the process of being accomplished, and it is this properly political dimension of experience that is foreclosed in our contemporary organization of time.     

Some realities of African agriculture: A reply to professor Tomlinson and professor Bisschop

This paper on the use of performances of oral literary genres in South African political organisations such as Inkatha, in Zulu Royal institutions, and in trade union movements (FOSATU, MAWU, SAWU, and others), is concerned with the use of the past in contemporary political activity, and with the question of whether oral literature will survive as a viable genre. The pressure exerted on oral literature by written genres seems to threated their continued existence, yet oral genres continue to have significant power in contemporary culture and politics. Several examples are presented to show the adaptation of the oral izibongo genre, and other forms of orally‐performed poetry, to contemporary contexts.     

‘A more colorful picture of my own vision’: expansive learning in Puerto Rico’s student anti-austerity movement

ABSTRACT

Social movement scholars have long been aware of leadership competition or ‘factionalism’ as one of the mechanisms within the longer process of polarization. As such, competition is often discussed as a harbinger of demobilization, and rarely in the context of movement emergence or growth. In turn, education scholars have examined social movement learning primarily as a cognitive process of identity formation, with rare and oblique references to the literature on movement dynamics. The first phase of the 2010–2011 student strike at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) is a useful counterintuitive case for re-examining these conventional wisdoms, as existing studies and first-hand accounts suggest a pattern of intimate connections between factional competition and movement learning. In this article, I propose Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) as an alternative framework for analyzing that sequence. By recasting competition and other movement dynamics as aspects of the internal contradictions of nested activity systems, themselves crucial to the emergent process of expansive learning, CHAT may help bridge the gap between fields and approaches.     

“I Will Have Lacked”: Rethinking Sexual Difference and Sexed Subjectivity Through Psychoanalytic Temporal Relationality

ABSTRACT

Sexual difference, as understood by contemporary Lacanian scholars, is the Real that marks a constitutive gap or discord beneath the construction of sexual identity, but in what way does the Real relate to the Symbolic in a process of becoming a sexed subject? This article explores the possibility of sexual differentiation through a psychoanalytic conceptualization of temporal organization and rearrangement. Taking the moment of the “primal view” in Freud’s text as its point of departure, this article demonstrates that the origin of sexual difference in psychoanalysis is actually a temporal difference between two processes of becoming, explained by Freud’s Nachträglichkeit and Lacan’s future anterior, respectively. In comparison with women’s time, it is argued that the Lacanian temporal relationality promotes a new epistemology of sexed subjectivity that permits an expanded understanding of the lived experience of being sexed.     

Where Is Gender in Agenda Setting?

Abstract

Why do some issues surge to the forefront of our attention while others languish in obscurity? Feminist scholars have explored the emergence of issues such as rape, battering, no-fault divorce, pay equity, and other women's issues on the public agenda. Despite a burgeoning body of literature on feminist social movements within history, political science, and sociology over the last twenty-five years, scholars of agenda setting, public policy, and American politics more generally have largely ignored this work. Not surprisingly, this research cannot be simply added in to the dominant agenda setting theoretical paradigm; rather, the findings disrupt conventional understandings. This essay critiques two canonical works, Kingdon's Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policies(1995) and Baumgartner and Jones's Agendas and Instability in American Politics(1993), and discusses exemplary feminist research. It argues that if we want to know how norms change we need to broaden our scope beyond political elites and interest groups to include social movements and newly politicized grassroots activists. We must see change as produced by networks of insiders and outsiders rather than exclusively caused by elites in formal positions. Feminist scholarship also takes seriously the discursive and emotional aspects of politics rather than utilizing a narrow pluralist framework. Moreover, it recognizes the important yet neglected role of law as both an arena and a discourse.     

Urban politics and the study of urban poverty: Promising developments and future directions

The study of urban poverty is alive and well in sociology. The study of urban politics, by contrast, has stagnated. Though scholars agree that politics shapes the creation and durability of urban poverty, analytical connections between the two subfields are rarely made explicit. In this article, I make the case for a more integrated body of research. I first illustrate how urban poverty scholars implicitly discuss politics, and conversely, how urban politics scholars implicitly discuss poverty. I then highlight recent developments in the literature and propose two paths forward—by no means the only paths forward, but two ways to jumpstart greater conversation across both subfields. For the urban poverty literature, a focus on organizations can help scholars analyze political dynamics more directly. And for the urban politics literature, an emphasis on political mechanisms rather than overarching perspectives can disrupt the current theoretical malaise. These two moves can advance both literatures while drawing them closer together.     

Body shopping: Maternity and alterity in Mamatoto

ABSTRACT

The products and practices of The Body Shop, both material and rhetorical, can be inserted into a number of competing discourses along the axes of feminist interests in the body and its relation to culture. We focus here on The Body Shop's Mamatoto range as it relates to contemporary Western discursive formations of maternity, alterity, and the vexed constructions of ‘difference’ and ‘globalism’ that emerge from them. Among the meta-products of Mamatoto are discursive formations of the body itself which, while they appear to endorse, even to celebrate, an active engagement with transcultural specificity and difference, actually reinstate the Western, white body of ‘woman’ as the ‘gold standard’ against which the exoticized currency of other women can be classified, appropriated and disowned. Within this framework, maternity itself is deployed by The Body Shop as a richly suggestive trope that serves to represent the problematics of body-as-nature, body-as-culture and body-as-identity that continue to preoccupy feminists across a wide range of political and cultural agendas.     

The person of the category: the pricing of risk and the politics of classification in insurance and credit

In recent years, scholars in the social sciences and humanities have turned their attention to how the rise of digital technologies is reshaping political life in contemporary society. Here, we analyze this issue by distinguishing between two classification technologies typical of pre-digital and digital eras that differently constitute the relationship between individuals and groups. In class-based systems, characteristic of the pre-digital era, one’s status as an individual is gained through membership in a group in which salient social identities are shared in common with other group members. In attribute-based systems, characteristic of the digital era, one’s status as an individual is determined by virtue of possession of a set of attributes that need not be shared with others. We argue that differences between these two types of classification technologies have important implications for how persons attach (or fail to attach) to groups, and therefore what kinds of political mobilization are possible. We illustrate this argument by examining contention over the use of gender as a variable in the pricing of risk in insurance and credit – two markets in which individuals directly encounter class-based and attribute-based systems of classification, respectively.

     

What is platform governance?

ABSTRACT

Following a host of high-profile scandals, the political influence of platform companies (the global corporations that that operate online ‘platforms’ such as Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, and many other online services) is slowly being re-evaluated. Amidst growing calls to regulate these companies and make them more democratically accountable, and a host of policy interventions that are actively being pursued in Europe and beyond, a better understanding of how platform practices, policies, and affordances (in effect, how platforms govern) interact with the external political forces trying to shape those practices and policies is needed. Building on digital media and communication scholarship as well as governance literature from political science and international relations, the aim of this article is to map an interdisciplinary research agenda for platform governance, a concept intended to capture the layers of governance relationships structuring interactions between key parties in today's platform society, including platform companies, users, advertisers, governments, and other political actors.     

Enjoy Poverty: humanitarianism and the testimonial function of images

The overlap between production of humanitarian images and interventions in contexts of natural and man-made catastrophes is growing on a global scale. An increasingly close relationship exists between image production, news production and humanitarian industry. In this article, we argue that this process is transforming the meaning of the social, political and ethical act of bearing witness. We analyse the epistemic and political implications of visual humanitarian testimony through the documentary film Enjoy Poverty (2008), shot in Congo by the Dutch artist Renzo Martens. Examining some of the key scenes of the film, we undertake an analysis of the visual culture of humanitarianism within which the contemporary production of sensational images of strong emotional impact is inscribed and justified. We maintain that rethinking testimonial debt in light of contemporary visual humanitarianism fundamentally means to acknowledge and explore the hierarchical relationship that visual humanitarianism creates between the witnesses, the victims and the spectators. We conclude by arguing that Enjoy Poverty constitutes an attempt to generate a new visual, discursive and political horizon within which one can prevent the transformation of the testimonial relationship into a relationship of power.     

Who Controls Whom? History and Educational Technologies

Abstract

Considering the lack of research on the historisation of educational technologies, the current study attempts to fill this void. To do so, the following research question is posed: To what extent have educational technologies and local histories controlled one another? Data for this question came from a naturalistic enquiry into a university in the Saudi Arabian public sector. Having analysed documents, interviews, and observations by means of the grounded theory technique, two key themes emerged: local histories controlling educational technologies and educational technologies controlling local histories. The consideration of both themes brought forth a theoretical proposition — that there are political dynamics between educational technologies and micro histories, with one continuously directing and driving the other. The recommendation is therefore that policymakers, scholars, and commentators should be more cognisant of the political tensions between local histories and educational technologies.     

Georges Bataille's base materialism

Abstract

The French intellectual Georges Bataille (1897–1962) developed base materialism in his work during the late 1920s and early 1930s as an attempt to break with all existing materialism. This essay is an explication of base materialism and its radical implications for contemporary theory. Bataille argues for the concept of an active base matter that disrupts the opposition of high and low and destabilises all foundations. Then he attempts to use this to develop a radical libertarian Marxism, opposed to both Stalinism and fascism. Although it provided a critique of the emphasis in Marxism on production, the active flux of base matter could not be contained in a political discourse. This means that Bataille's thought has an impact beyond the political and into the wider domain of theory. One example of this is the influence of base materialism on Derrida's deconstruction, and both share the attempt to destabilise philosophical oppositions by means of an unstable ‘third term’. This explains why Bataille's materialism does not appear as conventionally materialist, and why it has had little impact within contemporary materialism. Despite attempts to force base materialism into the mold of a new form of materialism it disrupts conventional materialism and the ‘radical’ politics that often goes with it. Bataille destroys the promise of liberated spaces and offers a more radical and disorienting freedom which inscribes instability into all discourses. It is this that defines the importance and necessity of Bataille's base materialism today.     

Creative cultural production and ethnocultural revitalization among minority groups in Russia

ABSTRACT

In this article, I discuss how globally circulated forms of creative cultural production and digital technologies are appropriated by minority ethnocultural activists in Russia, and how these processes result in new forms of expression of ethnic culture and reinterpretation of minority cultural heritage. I focus on creative cultural and digital initiatives that have emerged within the last 5–7 years in an autonomous region of the Russian Federation: the Republic of Tatarstan. These initiatives were launched by young grass-roots activists and entrepreneurs who are Tatars – an ethnic group that predominantly resides in the Republic of Tatarstan. As a republic with a certain degree of autonomy under the Russian federal legislation, Tatarstan has been the centre of the Tatar classic cultural production (theatre, music, arts, and literature), as well as of the Tatar language education. Under the policies of centralization and cultural unification Russia has pursued under the presidency of Vladimir Putin (2000 onwards), most of the political autonomy arrangements that Tatarstan achieved in the 1990s have been dismantled. The new restrictive ideological climate in Russia has repercussions for activism around ethnocultural questions, such as preservation of minority language and identity. At the same time, dissemination of transnational forms of cultural production and the advancement of digital technologies in Russia contribute to innovative cultural developments in the regions. Adapting these global formats and genres to the local cultural activities, the young members of the Tatar community develop new forms of ethnocultural activism. They produce alternative ways of representing and articulating ethnic identity, which depart sharply from the Soviet-born templates of representing ethnic culture. The urban activities these groups pursue allow for the de-politicization of ethnocultural activism in the conditions of an increasingly restrictive ideological and political climate in which minority activism is often equated with separatism.