Cultural Criticism Research Articles

Biosemiotics for postdigital living: the implications of the implications

AbstractThe postdigital condition is discussed from the perspective of Paul Cobley’s biosemiotic approach to culture. While semiotics is often concerned with cultural criticism, there has been no explicit biosemiotic approach to culture, until only recently with Cobley unfurling such a research program. The key to this is the biosemiotic notion ofmodeling, which accounts for co-evolutionary processes encompassing biology and culture. This approach responds to recent calls in the humanities and social sciences to understand culture as constituted through technology, but also as something not strictly human (more-than-human). By undermining both vitalism and reductionism, biosemiotics avoids biologism and culturalism, which is of much importance for theorizing culture and learning in light of evolution. This has consequences for construing cultural pluralism. Mainstream notions of multiculturalism rely on cultural holism and, hence, advocate the separation of communities and languages for the pretense of maintaining diversity. Cobley’s theory avoids this pitfall, offering a view of cultures as intrinsically heterogeneous and open systems. This suggests further implications for how we understand the aims of literacy and state-run education. We present an account of biocultural learning that accommodates contemporary posthumanist and postdigital orientations. Construing learning as ecologically contextual is necessary for addressing ongoing technological transformations.

Reading Thoreau in the 21st Century

This essay offers a critical re-assessment of Henry David Thoreau’s life and legacy in the context of contemporary critiques of the mainstream environmental tradition. It takes seriously concerns raised about Thoreau’s status as a privileged white male, but calls for more nuance. In particular, the essay challenges those portraits of Thoreau that emphasize Thoreau’s status as a devotee of American nature religion to the exclusion of Thoreau’s significant contributions as an abolitionist and as a prescient critic of an emergent culture of consumption that relied on slavery for its success. The essay assesses the ambivalent legacies that Thoreau left in his wake, demonstrating those moments when Thoreau’s public life as a social critic chafed against his most deeply held spiritual orientations and practices. This essay also argues for the necessity of reading and teaching Thoreau side-by-side with the work of Black writers whose renderings of human-nature relationships both resonate with and depart from Thoreau’s Transcendentalist vision.

Sex, race, and femininity: young Chinese females’ responses to lingerie advertising

This study examines the effects of a lingerie model’s femininity (submissive vs. assertive), race (East Asian vs. Caucasian), and presence/absence (model-presence vs. product-only) on young Chinese female consumers’ advertising evaluation, body image, and gender role attitudes. Results from an experiment show that ads with lingerie models presenting assertive femininity (sexual subjects) receive more positive advertising evaluation but result in more traditional gender role attitudes than ads with those presenting submissive femininity (sexual objects). Caucasian lingerie models receive more positive advertising evaluation than East Asian lingerie models. Product-only lingerie advertisements are more positively evaluated and predict a more positive body image than lingerie advertisements with models. The findings of this study provide empirical support for feminist scholars’ critique of the postfeminist media culture and advertising use of sexual empowerment discourse, which paradoxically disempowers women.

A conversation with Timothy Brennan

ABSTRACT This interview was conducted in 2022 as part of a series of wide-ranging conversations via email with the prominent American public intellectual and activist Timothy Brennan, whose literary and cultural criticism, secular humanism, and critique of cosmopolitanism have from the late 1980s onwards influenced perceptions of postcolonial studies and “World Literature”. Preoccupied with the intellectual and philosophical praxis, dynamics, malignity, and drawbacks of metropolitan cosmopolitanism, “World Literature”, and world system, Brennan here grapples robustly and critically with the literary and intellectual history of Marxism, Hegel, modernity, and ecocriticism. He also explores digital literature; Ibn Khaldun’s secular affiliations; Edward Said’s places of mind; modernity; and world system in the US empire, the UK, India, Asia, and elsewhere. He maps out an original and thought-provoking analysis of antinomian and anti-colonial genealogy of cultural studies, modernity, pedagogy, secular humanism, and the role of the intellectual in academia and beyond.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Jürgen Habermas and the Public Intellectual in Modern Democratic Life

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Jürgen Habermas and the Public Intellectual in Modern Democratic Life

“LOOK WITH THINE EARS”: THE DEPRECATION OF OCULARCENTRIC CULTURE IN WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S KING LEAR

In his groundbreaking research on the broad phenomenon of Western visual culture in important intellectual eras, Martin Jay touches on the abundance of ocular references in Renaissance literature and cites the example of William Shakespeare whose works are replete with visual metaphors. Notwithstanding extensive research on the role of vision in Shakespeare’s works, it seems that scant attention has been paid to the Bard’s deprecation of ocularcentric culture. Shakespeare was, admittedly, not the first writer who depicted and challenged the biased privileging of sight in Western culture, but the present study focuses on the example of King Lear to show that Shakespearean drama played a significant role in reflecting the dire consequences of ocularcentrism in society. Drawing on first-hand Renaissance accounts of vision, Martin Jay’s exhaustive research into the history of ocularcentrism in the West, and James Shapiro’s historical account of the year Shakespeare’s King Lear was first performed, this study employs a New Historicist methodology to examine how Shakespearean drama marks both a turn away from the traditional hegemony of vision and a turning point in the criticism of modern ocularcentric culture in the West. We conclude that King Lear serves, among other things, to remind us that visual subjugation transcends the boundaries of time and culture and that we could all ourselves be Lears or Gloucesters, deluded by the proverbial concept that “seeing is believing”

한국 문화 교육의 관점에서 바라본 <오징어 게임> 문화 비평의 담론

This article explores the direction of Korean culture education by analyzing overseas critical articles on “Squid Game,” which has recently gained worldwide popularity. To this end, previous studies about Korean culture education and intercultural education were examined, and the framework of analysis was derived as “universality,” “specificity,” and “individuality”. Based on this, cultural factors appearing in 50 English articles on “Squid Game” were analyzed. Then a discourse analysis was conducted by selecting 19 articles corresponding to cultural criticism. As a result, overseas perspectives on “Squid Game” were divided into identity-centered interpretation, difference-centered interpretation, and analogical interpretation. Through the significance and limitations of each interpretation, suggestions for the future direction of Korean cultural education were derived.

Racial Amnesia and Queer Identities in Carlos Fuentes’s “Chac Mool”

Few of Carlos Fuentes’s short stories have achieved greater recognition than “Chac Mool,” which has been anthologized on numerous occasions. Most of the scholarship centers on how the story treats the tensions inherent to the promotion of a modernity-driven, mestizophillic postrevolutionary state and the pre-Columbian cosmologies that continued to exist in the country well into the twentieth century. In this reading, Filiberto’s ultimate death by drowning in Acapulco results from his ignorance about pre-Columbian deities. This article validates previous readings while also suggesting that Fuentes’s story opens possibilities for parallel readings that emphasize different cultural critiques. Alongside the nationalist paradigm, we posit a queer reading of the story. When read through this register, our interpretation of different elements of the story—particularly the narrative surrounding Filiberto’s ultimate death—necessarily shifts. Beyond simply criticizing a nationalist order that reified its Indigenous past while remaining ignorant about pre-Columbian peoples, the story also communicates the author’s uneasiness with the role that gay and LGBTQ+ individuals were playing in national literature.

Historical Real Estate: Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States

Historical Real Estate: Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States

Response: Remaining Committed to Religious and Cultural Criticism

ABSTRACT Framed in the mode of an interview, this essay responds to questions surrounding the publication of Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay in African American Religious and Cultural Criticism (1995) in light of contemporary moves in Black studies, including Black religion and culture studies. The contemporary relevancy of the form of religious and cultural criticism presented in the book is the topic of the dialogue among contributors. My postmodern iconoclastic critique of Black essentialism—cultural, racial, or heroic—in favor of a grotesque aesthetic, which accents the comedic interplay of unresolved ambiguity and a Nietzschean robust pessimism filled with laughter, is rearticulated in light of the 21st century challenges and provocations of the religious situation discussed by the guest co-editors and contributors. Readers will discover a generous generational dialogue that models a commendable Black scholarly aesthetic.

A Black Feminist Study of Religion: Inheriting Victor Anderson’s Black Religious and Cultural Criticism

ABSTRACT In this article, I outline what Kristie Dotson refers to as an “inheritance map” for the epistemological insights and critical moves in Victor Anderson’s Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism (1995). I establish that Beyond Ontological Blackness represents what Stuart Hall calls a significant break – “where old lines of thought are disrupted, older constellations displaced, and elements, old and new, are regrouped around a different set of premises and themes” 1 1 Hall, “Cultural Studies." – and thusly, a new direction in the study of black 2 2 In my current writing projects (post 2019) I use Black (rather than black) and white for political reasons. Full stop. I deploy a “b” when engaging oppression, however. Still, making distinctions in this essay between what should have a “B” (for example, Black women, church, students, presence, subject, religion, experience, etc.) and what should have a “b” (for example, antiblack, ontological blackness, symbolic blackness, black heroic cultural genius, black crisis, etc.) proved extremely difficult. Most challenging was turning my powerful “B” into a “b” throughout for clarity and consistency. religion and theology 3 3 This is not slippage. I distinguish between black theology and the study of black religion at length in Jezebel Unhinged: Loosing the Black Female Body in Religion and Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018). : black religion and culture studies. The latter of which makes room for a black feminist study of religion.

Grey or Nothing: Blackness and the Perils of Ontology Without Ethics

ABSTRACT This article examines the enduring relevance of Victor Anderson’s Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay in Religious and Cultural Criticism. Anderson rightly senses a close connection between the practice of African American cultural criticism and the ethical sensitivity required to do it well. He also recognizes the historical limits of ontological inquiry. I argue that these metaphilosophical assumptions afford more generative encounters with Black political and cultural life, especially its discursive ambiguities and practical incongruities. By engaging the writings of two contemporary critics, Tamura Lomax and Calvin Warren, I show the benefits of thinking alongside Anderson’s important text and the dangers of not doing so. Scholars of religion, African American studies, and cultural studies ignore Anderson’s work and the discourses it enjoins at their own peril.

BOB’s Blues: A Reflection on the Legacy of Victor Anderson’s Beyond Ontological Blackness

ABSTRACT This essay celebrates Victor Anderson’s Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism (BOB) by considering how it reads blackness as an open possibility for human flourishing. Through critical engagement with Anderson’s notion of the “grotesquery of blackness,” it reads blues as a site for considering the implications of Anderson’s contention that black theology must move beyond essentialist constructions of blackness. The reflection also highlights how Anderson’s work anticipates contemporary critiques of modernity within decolonial studies, especially in the work of Sylvia Wynter. Finally, this essay uses the insights of BOB to assess the grotesque genius of the blues by offering a brief analysis of blues singer Muddy Waters’s performance of “Hoochie Coochie Man.”

Side by Side: US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of American Youth Literature Culture by Marilisa Jim�nez Garc�a (review)

Reviewed by: Side by Side: US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of American Youth Literature Culture by Marilisa Jiménez García Hilary Brewster (bio) Side by Side: US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of American Youth Literature Culture, by Marilisa Jiménez García. UP of Mississippi, 2021. Side by Side: US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of American Youth Literature Culture by Marilisa Jiménez García is a complex analysis of the historical, cultural, and artistic relationship between Puerto Rico and its mainland colonizer, the US. Her nuanced study examines authors, actors, playwrights, and librarians and the textual productions of these iconic Puerto Ricans—or Nuyoricans—in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and how each plays a role at the intersection of Puerto Rican and American youth cultures. Jiménez García expertly weaves history, politics, textual and media analysis, cultural critique, and scholarship to demonstrate their connectedness and transnational impact on one another. Although this connectedness is a result of complicated, often fraught and detrimental policies enacted by the United States lauding its colonial power over the people of the (now) territory of Puerto Rico, Jiménez García ultimately urges readers to celebrate the people whose stories are not only art and means of cultural expression but acts of resistance. In the introduction, Jiménez García lays out myriad frameworks as a precursor to the subsequent five chapters. In this rather dense beginning, she details how texts for youth and literacy programs for youth in Puerto Rico have a longstanding history with political protests on the archipelago (4), as well as how "literature for children" and other culture aimed at youth continues to have a seemingly negative standing in the academy, within pop culture, Latinx and Ethnic studies, and literature studies. Furthermore, she outlines the ways in which children's and youth literature is frequently coded as Anglo-British, white, and white [End Page 220] American in academic discourses (7); how picture books in particular play a role in replicating and upholding a racist, colonial hegemony; and also how children's literature has fallen out of the larger realm of Latin literary studies (12). Although Jiménez García notes that the relatively recent public attention to the need for "diverse" literature in the children's publishing world is ultimately positive, she also makes clear that this diversity generally overlooks authors, characters, and settings from Latin America and the Caribbean (16). Perhaps the most important point made in the introduction that becomes a recurring thread—even more than the others, given the nature of the cultural texts examined in the chapters—is that there has been a hesitancy to view the US as an empire, preferring an immigrant paradigm in locating difference rather than a settler colonial model regarding past and present land acquisition, occupation, removal, and continuous displacement of Indigenous populations. Particularly in the case of Latinxs, the dominant discourse lingers on issues of immigration and the border [rather than the US as an empire]. (14) This depiction of the US as "benevolent conqueror" has been a longstanding tradition in US K-12 classrooms (19). Jiménez García's critique of the US K-12 and higher education systems in upholding much of the aforementioned hegemony is perhaps the strongest section of the introduction, although also the thread that disappears most quickly in the other chapters. The first chapter centers two questions: what representations of Puerto Ricans occupied the bookshelves in the New York City public library from the late 1800s through 1960 (after the US invasion of Puerto Rico in 1898 through Operation Bootstrap and the beginning of the establishment of the commonwealth in the 1950s), and how did the general US public learn about Puerto Rico and its people in children's texts? (30). Divided into two sections, this chapter is focused first on early primers and illustrated texts by white US writers, then shifts to discuss Puerto Rican writers responding to US imperialism (31). Drawing on scholars such as Nathalie op de Beeck and Lara Saguisag, Jiménez García argues that the "faux history books [primers especially] contain aspects one has come to expect...

Evil and Complicated Queers through History

Evil and Complicated Queers through History

Improvisation and Social Aesthetics

Improvisation and Social Aesthetics

Welcome to America 2.0”: Reading Waste in Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story

This article proposes a reading of Gary Shteyngart’s celebrated novel Super Sad True Love Story (2010), a text that straddles the dystopian and the satiric in its depiction of a quasicontemporary America, from the perspective of Waste Studies. Through the problematic relationship between its two main characters, Shteyngart’s novel articulates the wide-ranging effects of globalization on a generationally-ruptured American society, that in many ways stands also for the First World at large. Drawing from sociologists, cultural critics, and philosophers like Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck, Byung-Chul Han, John Scanlan and Susan Sontag, who have theorized how individuals today are molded, challenged and threatened by powerful extrinsic forces in the era of globalization, this article aims to explore how Super Sad True Love Story showcases a range of mutually interrelated “modes of waste,” resulting from the writer’s pushing to a satiric/dystopic extreme contemporary American practices in politics and finance, citizenship and social ethics, culture and language, and even biological research.

Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture by Edward Tyerman

Reviewed by: Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture by Edward Tyerman Emily Wilcox Edward Tyerman, Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. 353 pp. Hardcover ($140.00), softcover ($35.00), or e-book. In Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture, Edward Tyerman examines works of Soviet literature, performing arts, and film that, in his words, "mediated" China to Soviet audiences during the 1920s. He focuses on the period between 1924 and 1927, a high point of Comintern engagement in Chinese domestic politics before Chiang Kai-shek's anti-Communist purge in April 1927. Through this material, Tyerman successfully explores larger questions about the history of socialist internationalism and how cross-cultural solidarity is pursued through aesthetic choices in artistic production. The central figure in Tyerman's narrative is Sergei Tretyakov, once a Futurist and a founding member of Left Front of Arts, who "from 1923…emerged as a central figure in the left avant-garde in Moscow" (22) and became one of the leading voices on China in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Tretyakov first visited China in 1920 while fleeing the Japanese occupation of Vladivostok on his way to Siberia. From early 1924, Tretyakov spent 18 months teaching Russian at Peking University, during which time he began writing extensively on China for Soviet readers, publishing more than 130 articles on China over the next four years. After returning to Moscow in 1925, Tretyakov also engaged in creative projects in a variety of other media that sought to bring "new knowledge of China" (23) to the Soviet masses. Works by Tretyakov form the core of Tyerman's analysis, placed in conversation with closely related projects that either present contrasting approaches or contextualize Tretyakov's work within larger discourses. Part of what makes Tretyakov interesting as a central figure in this study is that his work complicates understandings of Soviet representations of China in the 1920s as Orientalist. Discussing two essays by Tretyakov—"Whence and Whither" (1923) and "Loving China" (1925)—in the introduction, Tyerman explains that Tretyakov's self-stated aim was to promote "a new sense of the world" through "the overcoming of exoticism" in representations of China (23–24). Tretyakov openly critiqued stereotyped and fantastical views of China, which he analyzed as a form of commodity fetishism and reification. Tyerman shows how Tretyakov's work employed avant-garde aesthetics to develop an alternative to Orientalist perception: what Tyerman calls an "internationalist aesthetics" of solidarity, equality, and commensurability. According to Tyerman, this internationalist aesthetics also had "a specific political function: connecting Soviet and Chinese subjects within a single revolutionary present" (21; emphasis original). This new approach to China, Tyerman shows, was part of a larger critique of cultural Eurocentrism, which some Soviet writers described as a barrier to the globalization of revolution. It was also, Tyerman demonstrates, part of a new prioritization of the senses and direct bodily experience among the Soviet avant-garde. Building on Jacques Rancière's concept of the "distribution of the sensible" (20), Tyerman argues that Tretyakov used an avant-garde emphasis on bodily knowing and the senses—particularly sight and sound—to portray China as a dynamic, contemporary society. Internationalist Aesthetics thus contributes to recent conversations about the senses in literary and cultural studies. [End Page E-9] Internationalist Aesthetics is primarily a work of literary and cultural criticism, and it will appeal most to readers interested in early Soviet literature, performance, and film studies, as well as those interested in China's international representations, Sino-Soviet relations, the global avant-garde, and the politics and aesthetics of socialist internationalism. What I found most stimulating was Tyerman's readings of diverse approaches to internationalist aesthetics. In chapter 1, Tyerman contrasts firsthand accounts of China by two traveling Soviet writers, Tretyakov and Boris Pilnyak, who both espoused internationalism and used "experiments with observation, aural experience, and translation as methods for producing knowledge about China" (71), but with differing results. In Tretyakov's poem "Roar China" (1924), whose vivid blend of "factographic" writing and affective sonic imagery forms a high point of the chapter, we find a rousing acoustic portrayal of China on the...

A Semiotic Analysis of Symbolism and Persuasion as Communication Strategies on Some Educational Billboards in Buea-Cameroon

For many semioticians and cultural critics, it is always difficult to decode the meanings of billboard texts and symbols due to cultural differences. This paper investigates the texts, symbols and persuasive elements on some educational billboards in Buea-Cameroon, with a view to determining the meanings they communicate. The paper employs the semiotic theory of De Saussure and Barthes’ theory of myth to highlight the meaning which educational billboards communicate through persuasion and symbolism to lure potential clients to patronize the schools. From a cultural perspective, critics would question the aesthetic aspects of the symbols and texts based on their values. However, semiotics enquires into the way meaning is created by texts and symbols and not simply investigating what the meaning is. In terms of method, fifteen (15) educational billboards were subjected to qualitative analysis using the descriptive method. The findings revealed four semiotic elements viz: textual, plastic arts, iconic, linguistic and contextual. On the textual elements, we discovered that font size, font type and colour are given prominence. Plastic arts consist of construction through shapes, spatial composition, and texture. Iconic elements were revealed by pictures of kids and students on billboards. Linguistic features recognized metaphors and alliteration that couched the meaning of the words graphically inscribed on billboards. Contextual features were represented through symbolic messages silently being passed across based on the contemporary needs of the public. Though persuasive language and connotative symbols are deployed on billboards to project the school’s reputation, one still requires basic knowledge of culturally oriented symbols to navigate through any sociolinguistic landscape.

Beyond Fortress Conservation: Postcards of Biodiversity and Justice

Since the late nineteenth century, visual culture has played an active role in naturalizing fortress conservation—a colonial model that began with the founding of Yellowstone National Park in 1872 and still shapes biodiversity and land policies around the world. Just as fortress conservation created a sharp divide between wilderness and human society, visual images—historically and today—traffic in tropes of untouched land to disavow Indigenous presence and to marginalize other ways of protecting nature. For the 2022 Venice Biennale, we worked together to create an exhibit of twenty-two postcards reflecting on the global legacies of fortress conservation. Even though our project is grounded in a critique of visual culture, we also believe that critique is not enough. The postcards document actual practices on the ground to show surprising, everyday examples of contemporary conservation. Challenging conventional myths, the photographs and accompanying texts layer history and critique with stories of sustenance and survival. For this essay, we share some examples from the show and also extend our analysis to connect the postcards to broader narratives of environmental history and visual culture. Ranging from the American West to the transnational Arctic and India, we trace connections across vast distances and explain how grassroots visual culture offers vistas beyond fortress conservation.