Monthly Archives: May 2013

Daniel Worden (bio) University of New Mexicodworden@unm.edu  A review of Robert Meister, After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights. New York: Columbia UP, 2011.  In After Evil, Robert Meister provocatively documents the emergence of, the ethics of, and the regrettable lack of political change demanded by our contemporary understanding of human rights. This ambitious and […]

Lisa Brawley (bio) Vassar Collegelbrawley@vassar.edu Review of Karen Tongson, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries. New York: NYU Press, 2011.     Contained in these boxes, little and large, are the unacknowledged urgencies, desires, and encounters meant to be kept out of these meticulously planned geographies: queers, immigrants, ‘gangstas,’ minimum-wagers, Others who find the notion of a […]

Tyler Bradway (bio)Rutgers Universitytyler.bradway@gmail.com  A review of Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham: Duke UP, 2010.  In the final paragraphs of The History of Sexuality Vol.1, Michel Foucault imagines a future society looking back on ours with bewilderment. This society, organized by a “different economy of bodies and pleasures,” will be perplexed […]

David A. Ensminger (bio)Lee Collegedavidae43@hotmail.com  I tend to imagine store window displays as late-capitalism voyeur tableaux, microcosms, and dioramas, more than mere passer-by enticement. They become a pitch and pronouncement, a Weltanschauung, a way of making meaning, a fetish-world, and an inner-view. They feel layered and riddled with an unconscious and conscious psychogeography, a keyhole […]

Harryette Mullenand Arlene R. Keizer (bio)ConversationUniversity of California, Irvineakeizer@uci.edu  In the introduction to Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism,Madhu Dubey writes, “Although we would expect African-American literatureto form a vital resource for debates about postmodernism, it isconspicuously missing, even when these debates are launched in the name ofracial difference” (2). The avant-garde writer Harryette Mullen’s […]

Judith Goldman (bio)University of California, Berkeleyjudithgo@buffalo.edu Abstract This article discusses the self-characterizations of the contemporary North American school of Conceptual writing, arguing that certain exponents of Conceptualism disavow a relation to Language writing, claiming an alternate predecessor in Conceptual art. The article in turn posits that the appropriative technique of “reframing” used by Conceptualists has been […]

Dwayne Dixon (bio) Duke Universitydedixon@duke.edu Abstract Using Jean Rouch’s concept of the ciné-transe, this essay argues that the camera transforms the relations between the anthropologist and the field site through movement and the filmic encounter. Critical focus on the camera/body assemblage shifts attention from the fetish of the recorded image and onto the subject and […]

Anne-Lise François (bio) University of California, Berkeleyafrancoi@berkeley.edu Abstract   This essay asks about the fate of flowers in an age of colony collapse disorder and market-driven industrial agriculture. From human hand-pollination to the genetic selection of self-pollinating crops, contemporary responses to CCD bring to ironic conclusion certain tropes of flowers as figures of deceit, mortality, […]