Cultural Moment Research Articles

Allan's A‐list: The Subscription List to Allan Ramsay's Poems of 1721

AbstractThe new and first complete edition of the works of Allan Ramsay (1684–1758) in six volumes is beginning to draw renewed attention towards this important poet. This essay examines one of the key unexamined puzzles of his career: how an Edinburgh wigmaker apparently without any advantage of birth and connexions succeeded in gathering an enormously distinguished subscription list — including nearly sixty peers and eight dukes — for his first key collection of poems. The answer lies both in the powerful and interlocking networks which Ramsay had inherited, cultivated, or adopted and in the particular culture and political moment in post‐Union Edinburgh in which he came to maturity. Ramsay's key network groups are discussed under four headings: Jacobites, Friends and Clubs, local dignitaries, family links, professionals, and merchants; patronage; and wider artistic networks.

Mediating otherness: The Afrofuturist planetary posthuman in Black Panther

Literature and film, as forms of cultural production, have consistently participated in public discourses by raising valuable questions pertinent to contemporary historical and cultural moments. Science fiction film and literature, particularly in the 2010s, have tackled cultural discourse on the human condition by thematically addressing human relationships with technology and articulating complex theoretical discussions in a way that translates into popular culture. This article brings the theoretical concepts of planetarity and the posthuman together in dialogue to conceptualize a planetary posthuman subject who positions their self not in opposition to the other, but in relation to the other, contextualized within the understanding of the planet as an interconnected whole, and embodied in the figure of the cyborg. It focuses on Afrofuturist science fiction and how it intervenes in discourses on race and otherness using this model of a planetary posthuman subject through the analysis of a popular example of mainstream Afrofuturist work. This article explores how the film Black Panther (2018), directed by Ryan Coogler – a commercially successful and groundbreaking work of Afrofuturist Hollywood science fiction film – addresses cultural discourses on race and otherness while reflecting on the (post)human condition by presenting Afrofuturist planetary posthuman subjects. Finally, it explores how the film, using the theoretical model of the planetary posthuman, intervenes in public discourses on the human condition by mediating in current conceptualizations of race, otherness and technology, challenging neo-liberal global capitalism and its polarizing tendencies.

"I owe some people some apologies"

Videogames are a large and growing cultural-economic medium, a fact alone that makes them worthy of critical attention. Focalising one text, Kentucky Route Zero (CARDBOARD COMPUTER 2013-2020, hereafter referred to as KRZ) this essay argues that videogame media functions as a unique and powerful tool for navigating the phenomenological experiences of neoliberal capitalism and its principal mode of expression -- debt. We argue that KRZ functions as an exemplar of the ways in which games respond to and mediate social and economic structures in terms of content, design, narrative and production. We delve into the game in full, parsing through it, its approaches of economic insecurity, hauntology, debt and how a single text can portray and be part of a wide cultural and economic moment.

Delving the gastronomic identities and food memories among Indo-Fijians in diasporic conditions

ABSTRACT Food and foodways engage the social and cultural moments connoting the memory with the gustatory world, which illuminates the social structure, domesticity, identity, resilience, transnational histories of empire, and many more. This study focuses on food being an intangible cultural heritage, gastronomic identity, and culture, (dis)similarities in the preparation and consumption among Indo-Fijians and transmigrants. The exploratory qualitative method where open-ended questions and in-depth interviews were conducted to explore identity related to food with thirteen Indo-Fijian families and a reflexive narrative report using a narrative coding lens is prepared. Their personal reflective accounts were recorded. Food being a part of culture and identity, is found to be continuing the interaction between migrants and hosts, and makes an ambivalent relationship. Food and foodways are in flux and pass through a state of in-betweenness. The transmigrants show a sense of belonging to their ancestral home, (re)rootedness, acculturation, and hybridisation by (re)constructing the food identities.

Genocide, surveillance, and babies: “embodied propaganda” and the anti-abortion to conspiracy pipeline

ABSTRACT The judicial decision to overturn the federal right to abortion in the United States has profoundly influenced women across the country. Relying on 2,230 individual stories and over 500 posts on Instagram by anti-abortion activists, we investigate their discourse around abortion produced in a specific cultural moment—that of post-Roe America and a post-truth online society in which disinformation and conspiracy spread rampantly. This combined moment is particularly relevant given that people who can get pregnant are being marginalized and criminalized in American society at the same time that trust in experts and institutions is declining, thus troubling both institutional and feminist knowledge-production. Conceptually we draw on existing studies on embodied, feminist knowledge, intersectionality, populist expertise and conspiracy-believing, as well as gendered disinformation and conspiracy to show how (a) anti-abortion rhetoric devolves not only into disinformation but also conspiracy theories that are common among the alt-right and conservative online networks; (b) that the feedback loop among these communities is strong, and (c) that the anti-abortion movement on Instagram is experimenting with Gen Z rhetoric. We introduce and demonstrate the concept of embodied propaganda to capture the phenomenon of co-opting the experiences of marginalized groups in society to manipulate public opinion.

The Paradox of Play: A Conversation with Ken Corbett and Maggie Nelson

ABSTRACT In this conversation, Ken Corbett and Maggie Nelson address motherhood, the question of the family and the precarity of the present. Drawing from lived experience, clinical work, and writing endeavors, they engage with our cultural moment through a discussion of precocity and precarity, parenting discourses and impossible safety, psychoanalysis, queer families and queer children, and the looming presence of overwhelming societal challenges. By playing with the paradox around questions of impossibility, they each, in their own way, speak to what is possible.

Preface. Multisensuality in Historical and Cultural Contexts

This section contains four original articles addressing the matters of interaction, coexistence and representation of the human senses in various historical and cultural contexts. The multisensory experience of the world in relations to the past, the present and the future constitutes the main theme of the selected articles. The authors analyze how, in various cultural texts and historical moments, human experience was depicted through the prism of sensory perception, sometimes combined with sensory memory and the powerfulness/powerlessness of the (non)human corporeality. The authors analyze a variety of historical and cultural sources to answer the question of the impact of multisensory experience on our view of the world: in the past, the present and the future. Nina C. Rastinger in her article “Capturing Extraordinary Multisensory Experiences in Writing: Reports on Natural Disasters in an 18th Century Newspaper Corpus” deals with written representations of natural disasters, which constitute extraordinary multisensory experiences, in historical newspaper texts. Natalia Giza in her study “Multisensuality in the Satirical Prints of the Georgian Era in England” shows how sensory perception enhanced visual humor in the satirical prints of Georgian England, examining how English caricaturists used various sensory elements such as sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. Jules Sebastian Skutta in his paper “Tactile Vision and Othering: Ethnographic Engagements and Racial Differentiations in 19th Century Travelogues” demonstrates on the basis of ethnographic travelogues from German East Africa and from the time of German colonial rule that the transmission, emergence, and dissemination of features of racial differentiation are based on the interplay of different sensory perceptions. Finally, Bartosz Mroczkowski, in the article entitled “Designing the Future Through Touch” focuses on the sense of touch in the process of designing the future. The aforementioned articles illustrate that multisensuality is a multidimensional concept that requires a thorough analysis from different academic perspectives and with the use of various methodological approaches.

Telling the warrior woman’s story: gender identity as a mode of storytelling in HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011-2019)

ABSTRACT Joseph Campbell’s (1949) hero’s journey has historically been heavily criticised for its misogyny and rejection of female-centred heroic narratives, creating an exclusionary universalism that narrows the scope of what constitutes heroic in stories and narratives told in various mediums. However, that exclusionary universalism, while an important element of Campbell’s own mode of storytelling, reflects on the temporal gulf between the era in which it was written and the contemporary cultural moment. The current cultural moment embraces the possibility that the hero can be non-normative, thus emphasising the need to challenge the relevance of Campbell’s monomyth. In this article, I make the case for a more inclusive approach to the hero’s journey through the lens of gender identity as a mode of storytelling. I expand the conceptual framework of the warrior woman archetype to argue that gender is a constitutive consideration of heroic narratives and apply the theory in practice to the medium of television through the example of Game of Thrones’s (2011-2019) Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie). This case study illustrates how gender identity provides a toolbox for storytellers to expand the possibilities for non-normative heroic figures and facilitate an understanding of heroic narratives through alternative perspectives.

Toponymy and its aspects in naming villages as tourism destinations in Madura: An ethnolinguistics perspective

This study is intended to analyze the category of toponyms of tourism destinations in Bangkalan, Madura in particular the four villages where the tourism destinations exist based on the aspect of the naming system. Then, it identifies the relation between the toponym with the cultural values of the names of those tourism destinations. This study used a descriptive qualitative method. The data are names of the villages in Kamal, Socah, and Bangkalan districts in which there are four tourism villages. The data collection was carried out by observing, interviewing the head of the villages, and reviewing the document of villages for tourism destinations. Results of the study show that there are three aspects of toponymy in the four tourism villages. They are toponymy of vegetation, history, and embodiment. There is no regional toponymy. From the aspect of naming the villages, it can provide important cultural and historical moments representing the people's lives, religious, and linguistic creativity. The place name is not merely arbitrary but depends on various factors or aspects and provides linguistic and cultural information toward the name of the four tourism villages in this study.

‘All brilliant gloss’: the liminal visual in Softley’s The Wings of the Dove

Abstract This article examines Ian Softley’s 1997 adaptation of Henry James’s 1902 novel The Wings of the Dove as a study in the representation of liminal sociocultural moments, specifically through its infusive representation of the character of Aunt Maud, played in the film by Charlotte Rampling. James’s Maud is the financial centre of the narrative, a complex and contradictory weaponization of philistine convention and vulgar immorality, a collage of surfaces repeatedly described as gloss on a double-sided coin. James felt that the diffusiveness of Maud’s power was the novel’s structural problem, because it inhabited a liminal space where the desires of the individual coextend with the desires of the market, and thereby dislocated the centre of critique and control in the text, moving the reader further and further away from the commercial trappings of their cultural moment. The filmmakers claimed that eliminating Maud allowed them to update the novel’s language, costumes, etiquette, and environment for a younger audience, but the film was dismissed as a pandering cash grab, an attempt to make Henry James a brand. In this way, the film diminishes Maud’s presence but empowers her narrative agency; resituating James’s brand of displacement, alienation, and loss into a liminal environment makes Maud’s commercial influence so inescapable and self-reflexive that it makes the film look like one of her many enterprises.

“I Could Almost Wish for the Madman’s Happiness”: Escape, Escapism, and Madness in Wollstonecraft’s Novels

ABSTRACT In Mary Wollstonecraft’s two novels, Mary, A Fiction (1788) and The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (1798), women are continually on the run, moving from one form of imprisonment to another whether it be physical, mental, or symbolic. In this article, I examine this perpetual motion in both novels, focusing on the futility, cyclicity, and social implications of the characters’ movements. In Mary and Maria, Wollstonecraft presents only two options for women in contemporary society—subjugation or perpetual attempts at escape—neither of which grant them freedom or true mobility. During instances of Mary’s and Maria’s greatest distress, both characters express a longing for one provocative form of release: madness. Wollstonecraft shows how a movement away from reason is the only option for total mental liberation afforded to the heroines in the cultural moment in which she is writing. Ultimately, I propose a feminist perspective on women’s insanity as a form of escape and a reading of this madness as an assertion of agency.

Self-knowledge, self-regulation and ambivalence: the production of female desire in the US-UK popular cultural imaginary

ABSTRACT This article examines how media texts are curbing and conditioning female desire in the contemporary US-UK cultural moment. It analyses eight popular cultural texts: fictional TV shows Sex/Life (2021-), Wanderlust (2018), Gypsy (2017), film Hello, My Name is Doris (2015); factual TV shows Sex, Love & Goop (2021) and The Principles of Pleasure (2022); short story Cat Person (2017); and non-fiction book Three Women (2019). These media call on women to identify and regulate their desires in ways that sustain patriarchal ideals of femininity. Celebrations of female sexuality as a vehicle for self-knowledge are tied up in psychological, physiological and medicalised discourses which pathologise female desire in a binary of low/excessive, or confused and complex. Such discourses mask sexual trauma and present female sexual liberation as a reparative solution to violence. However, transformative understandings of desire as unknowable, contextual and culturally conditioned, which allow for a reworking of gendered relations, also emerge. Bringing together philosophical, psychological and popular debates on female desire with cultural representation, the article concludes that representations largely ignore the relationality of desire as always located within the violence of gender, race and class power structures.

The Many Genealogies of Feminist Activism

The stakes of feminist activism, and the fault lines within feminism, have a newfound significance in this cultural moment. In response to the fall of Roe, the ascendancy of incendiary far-right politics, and the mainstreaming of white-supremacist ideologies, grassroots feminist activism and its impacts have never mattered more. When reading Rachel Seidman's Speaking of Feminism and Arielle Rotramel's Pushing Back, both books that feature interviews and ethnographic work on feminists and feminist groups prior to the 2016 election (Seidman interviewed participants from 2014 to 2016, and Rotramel worked on this material primarily from 2007 to 2011), the gap between the pre- and post-2016 realities seems ever more stark. These books highlight feminisms just prior to the series of aggressive assaults that feminism (and all forms of social justice) would face following the 2016 US presidential election. Both serve as a kind of warning—feminists of all ages understood the hazards of fusing misogyny and white supremacy—and as capturing the histories of feminist activism before the cascade of traumas that would ensue from 2016 to the present day. In this way, feminist ethnographic work and interviews with activists operate as time capsules with unique relevance to the genealogical structure of feminist history and activism. By foregrounding women-of-color-led activisms in particular, historians can trace in this period the movement from theorizing about intersectionality to enacting feminist activisms that draw from experiences of marginalization. The significance of feminist work that built on, and contributed to, theorizing about intersecting identities and interlocking oppressions is brought boldly to life in these two texts.

“Let’s Make the Womb Safe Again”: Ethnographic Explorations of White Evangelical Women’s Language of Reproductive Injustice

Like broader conservative movements, the pro-life movement in the United States has a fraught history regarding its alignment with White supremacy. Yet, the whiteness of the pro-life movement is often hidden behind the discourses of colorblind racism through the U.S. cultural moment. To uncover and deconstruct this supposed “anti-racist” discourse, I study Evangelical women and their roles in the pro-life/anti-choice movement to explore their consequences on the narratives of abortion and reproductive health care from the 1970s to present. I conduct interviews and participant observation with self-described Evangelical pro-life women through ethnographic opportunities and events. In this study, I explore the intersectional issues of reproductive injustices through fieldwork and interviews with anti-choice women. These interviews and ethnographic data focus on a particular group of anti-choice organizers who prepare and oversee the logistics of this movement: pro-life women. How does it come to be that conservative women control the narratives of reproductive health care? How can ethnographic methods be utilized to unveil new information and knowledge surrounding the barriers to reproductive health care by the pro-life movement? I analyze this qualitative data to understand how the rhetoric of the pro-life/anti-choice movement invades the language of reproductive health in the United States and how a reproductive justice framework can begin to deconstruct this problematic flow.

Epistemic Contests in Journalism: Examining Struggles over Journalistic Ways of Knowing

In the face of struggles over journalistic epistemology arising in the present, this study proposes the concept of “epistemic contests” as a way of analyzing efforts by various actors to shape knowledge production norms and practices. Epistemic contests are not reducible to a single event or example, but instead encompass broader ongoing debates around the legitimacy of various epistemic practices of news. In analyzing these debates, this approach is attuned to the nuances of the present digital media culture as well as the current political and cultural moment. This article lays out key theoretical and methodological components of epistemic contests as applied to journalism and suggests a future research program for digital journalism studies scholars with special attention directed toward journalistic objectivity and its attendant norms. The value of this concept lies in providing a tool to examine the contestation over appropriate knowledge practices, the power to make such distinctions, and the forms of news that emerge.

Becoming User: Oracle, Barbara Gordon, and Representations of the User in Popular Culture

Abstract This essay considers the figure of the “user” as an emergent subject of late twentieth-century US culture, in relation to the World Wide Web and the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. The user is a subject position that is historical in the sense that use relations have always determined social formations within capitalism, but it has been newly energized in contemporary modes of capitalism after digital computing, and newly weighted in contemporary renderings of the nation-state as service provider. This essay turns to a cultural moment in which a privatized user subject was coming into formation, using comic books of this moment to find the user figure and its stories. The DC Comics archive might not seem the most likely place to find answers to these concerns. But superhero origin stories are always about becoming user in late capitalist imaginaries. Superheroes learn to use their histories to reproduce the world they want. The then newly inaugurated DC Comics character Oracle, aka Barbara Gordon (formerly Batgirl), is becoming a wheelchair user and a computer user. Reading Oracle's 1990s user origin stories, this essay attends to scenes of wheelchair and computer use to work out a theory of user history and user time emerging in 1990s US culture. The comics reveal that the process of becoming user is always intersecting with the processes of becoming a racialized, gendered, classed, (dis)abled subject. They also open up the possibility for other affordances: becoming user as a process which can be torqued in its unfolding.

Cultural Studies, Big Data, Scalability: Benjamin Versus Bourdieu

Abstract This essay argues that to be true to its name, Cultural Studies relies on a Big Data tapestry of culture against which individual events may be foregrounded. In the majority of cases, this cultural background is the implied first premise of a syllogism and the scholarly argument becomes an enthymeme. Sometimes, however, the presentation of Big Data becomes the argument in and of itself. After explaining the concept of Cultural Studies with which I am working, as well as the definition and difficulties posed by Big Data, I analyze and compare two precursor works that plainly gather and analyze Big Data to explain cultural moments: Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk (Arcades Project); and Pierre Bourdieu’s La distinction (Distinction). Both works raise the question of how their examples can be scaled to the totalizing visions of culture that they seek, and the two researchers take wildly different approaches to the question of scalability that always lurks behind Big Data approaches.

The Use of Thread and Fabric in Feminist Zines

The Use of Thread and Fabric in Feminist Zines

The Social Work of Lying: Medicine and Murder in 1865

Abstract Research suggests that we may engage in cultural self-deception to maintain community. More strikingly, we may be willing to tolerate grave violence by and against some individuals in order to strengthen social constructs that are perceived to benefit the broader community. Some social beliefs, such as faith in medicine and doctors, might have such a high value that, to preserve them, the community might engage in collective self-deception that lets someone get away with murder. Engaging in collective self-deception can foster high-value cultural narratives perceived (whether consciously or unconsciously) as more important to maintain, even at the cost of human lives. To explore this concept, this article examines the sensational Scottish Dr. Pritchard murders of the mid-1860s. Here, self-deception seemed to play a key role for the murderer, for the professionals associated with the case, and, just as significantly, at scale for the culture at large. Such inquiry has become increasingly important during a cultural moment in which we face new and constantly evolving lies on a massive social scale. As humanists, we have a responsibility to explore these questions in ways that will add our voices, insights, and methodologies to those of our colleagues in the social and natural sciences.

Enacted Offstage Images, Reported Onstage Action, and Parallel Fictional Worlds in Dead Centre’s Chekhov’s First Play (2015) and Tim Crouch and Rachana Jadhav’s Total Immediate Collective Imminent Terrestrial Salvation (2019)

This essay addresses how the collision of image, text, and speech in contemporary scripted performances discloses something significant about both being in and thinking about the theatre. It examines cases wherein recent examples of theatre practice disrupt long-standing expectations about the form and function of reported offstage action. While Tim Crouch and Rachana Jadhav’s Total Immediate Collective Imminent Terrestrial Salvation (2019) literalises the relationship between text and performance by putting the play script in the hands of the audience and employing illustrations as a means of reporting that inverts established ekphrastic modes, Dead Centre’s Chekhov’s First Play (2015) literalises offstage presence through the audio narration of a figure named as ‘The Director’. These acts of staging literally key conceptual and practical challenges of theatrical representation work in both cases to reveal instances of mimetic disjuncture. Audiences are not sure which version of each performance to invest in: the staged action or illustrated text of Terrestrial Salvation and the onstage adaptation or The Director’s critical reporting in Chekhov’s First Play. By making available different versions of the same theatrical event, each production connects resonantly to a cultural moment wherein we are often exposed to alternative narratives but may not always recognise or acknowledge these alternate perspectives. Reviewed together, these two productions present a wide-ranging sensorial problematising of theatrical representation. They construct points of meaningful divergence through unscripted performances and the disaggregation of actor and character. Methodologically, this essay works to address these questions of representational multiplicity through a form of discursive practice that reports between the two case study examples. This approach serves to reveal the discourse of theatre and performance studies as frequently grounded in ekphrastic reportings that recount theatrical images no longer available to view. The argument marks out first how reported action and other forms of ekphrastic representation have historically been about what cannot be staged in order to propose that what comes to be unrepresentable in these examples – even as it is the means of representation – is theatrical performance itself. The essay then traces how these metatheatrical questions related to the representational affordance of these performances – in this case to do with impossibility of representing the theatre itself – ripple into wider consequences that can have substantial implications related to race, freedom, and collective endeavour.