Monthly Archives: September 2013

Phillip Novak (bio)Le Moyne CollegeNovakPP@lemoyne.edu Jennifer Fay, Theaters of Occupation: Hollywood and the Reeducation of Postwar Germany. UP of Minnesota, 2008.  The usual approach to writing about film culture in postwar Germany is to restrict the discussion to films made by Germans, in order, as Jennifer Fay puts it in the introduction to Theaters of […]

Neil Larsen (bio)University of California at Davisnalarsen@ucdavis.edu  Basing itself largely on an emergent body of ethnography concerning the contemporary traffic in human organs, and especially on the buying and selling of human kidneys in South Asia, Kalindi Vora’s “Others’ Organs: South Asian Domestic Labor and the Kidney Trade” can certainly lay claim to a considerable […]

Brian Lennon (bio)Pennsylvania State Universityblennon@psu.edu Abstract New media studies, we might say, has discovered temporality. After fifteen years in which its cultural dominant was presentist prognostication, even a kind of bullying, the field has folded on itself with such new guiding concepts as the “residuality,” the “deep time” or “prehistory,” and the “forensic imagination” of a […]

Ulrik Ekman (bio)University of Copenhagenekman@hum.ku.dk Abstract This article argues that Blur Building, Diller & Scofidio’s architectural project for the Swiss Expo 2002, demonstrated performatively and interactively how contemporary worldmaking involves cultural and technological invention and construction both, implying our cultural co-evolution with ubiquitous computing and media such that “worlding” must today be approached and approximated as […]

Louis Kaplan (bio)University of Torontolouis.kaplan@utoronto.ca Abstract This essay reviews and challenges Susan Sontag’s use and abuse of Georges Bataille in her last book, Regarding the Pain of Others. Sontag takes up Bataille’s understanding of and fascination with a group of Chinese torture (or lingchi) photographs from the beginning of the twentieth century. Her somber reading glosses […]

John Culbert (bio)University of California at Irvinejohnculbert@lycos.com Abstract “The Well and the Web” examines a number of media watershed events in which the sense of community in crisis, threatened by new technologies of communication, is expressed in sensationalistic dramas of young lives in mortal danger. From the advent of live TV news to the rise of […]

Stephanie Boluk is a Ph.D. student in English Literature at the University of Florida. She is currently writing her dissertation on seriality while working as an editor for the open access journal Imagetext. She has written essays and reviews for The Journal of Visual Culture, New Media and Society, and the proceedings of the 2009 […]

David Banash is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University, where he teaches courses in contemporary literature, film, and popular culture. His essays and reviews have appeared in Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life, Iowa Review, Paradoxa, Postmodern Culture, Reconstruction, Science Fiction Studies, and Utopian Studies. He is currently at work on […]

Brian Wall (bio)Binghamton Universitybwall@binghamton.edu Edward P. Comentale and Aaron Jaffe, eds. The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009. Print.  The terms in which the reception of The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies played out in the comments to Dave Itzkoff’s New York Times review in December of 2010 rehearsed a number of […]

Lissa Skitolsky (bio)Susquehanna Universityskitolsky@susqu.edu Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009.     In defending uniqueness, I am not simultaneously endorsing the injudicious claim that the Holocaust is more evil than alternative occurrences of extensive and systematic persecution, organized violence, and mass death. The character of […]

Diane Enns (bio)McMaster Universityennsd@mcmaster.ca Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? New York: Verso, 2009.  I began reading Judith Butler’s Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? in a café in Sarajevo—rather appropriate, so I thought, given that a mere fifteen years ago this city was under siege, the scars and grief quite […]

David Banash (bio)Western Illinois Universityd-banash@wiu.edu Marcus Boon, In Praise of Copying. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010.  Marcus Boon’s In Praise of Copying is a radical attempt to overturn the conceptual and practical privileges accorded to those copies we call “originals,” and in the process to reconceptualize all creative activity in terms of imitation, repetition, or more […]

Brandon Brown (bio)vigilo@hotmail.com   1   Every book has a beginning, and this is this book’s beginning. It starts with a question and then it answers the question. The question is to whom should I dedicate my new little fun book nugget? That’s kind of a disclaimer, saying that the book is lepidum, or “fun.” […]

Judith Goldman (bio)University of Chicagojgoldman1@uchicago.edu     Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,rumoresque senum severiorumomnes unius aestimemus assis!soles occidere et redire possunt;nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,nox est perpetua una dormienda.da mi basia mille, deinde centum;dein mille altera, dein secunda centum;deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum.dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,aut ne quis malus […]

David Ensminger (bio)Lee Collegedavidae43@hotmail.com Abstract For three decades, African Americans have often been depicted in the popular press and in independent media as embodying the legacy of a hip hop nation, which the media would signify as an urban, misogynist, and materialistic musical genre and lifestyle. Such representation diminishes or negates, through absence or scant coverage, […]

Patricia MacCormack (bio)Anglia Ruskin UniversityPatricia.Maccormack@anglia.ac.uk Abstract This essay picks up on Deleuze and Guattari’s brief invocation of the work of H.P. Lovecraft. Deleuze and Guattari’s project to develop a philosophy of sorcery as a mode of thought that gestures toward becoming-imperceptible is considered by reading examples in Lovecraft’s “cosmic horror” of the terrors and revolutions available […]

Judith Roof (bio)Rice Universityroof@rice.edu  In his timely critique of revisionist kinship studies, Petar Ramadanovic identifies “taboo” as the sticking point where the potentially liberatory value of such discourses disappears. Ramadanovic sets out to rethink taboo, hypothesizing that the “function of the taboo” is to operate as “a fundamental rule that makes sexuality” and “can, of […]

Petar Ramadanovic (bio)University of New Hampshirepetarr@unh.edu Abstract Using the theory of kinship as an example, this essay argues that the dominant understanding of cultural construction is inadequate. The author argues that recent cultural theory lacks an account of the unconscious, that recent psychoanalytic thought lacks a theory of kinship, and that both are in fact necessary […]

Jian Chen (bio)New York UniversityJian.Chen@nyu.edu  Abstract Sex Without Friction focuses on Cheang Shu Lea’s science fiction porno I.K.U. (2000) as provocation to think through the limitations of social and cultural criticism that is premised on mediation. Directed by Taiwan-born digital nomad Cheang, multimedia film I.K.U. features a gender-morphing human clone, programmed to collect sexual experiences for […]