Cultural Scholarship Research Articles

From Nollywood to the World: A Cultural Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis of Nollywood Films on Netflix

This study examines the transnationalization of the Nollywood industry in the rise of streaming platforms like Netflix. As nonwestern film industries begin to find global audiences beyond their local space, ideological underpinnings of these industries also continue to shift and become more apparent. The need to compete for global capital while retaining the cultural flavor of the South has been a major challenge of many transnational media industries. Taking Nollywood as a case study, this study argues that the production of Nollywood films on Netflix goes beyond the quest to find global market, instead economic interest, the need to appeal to global audience by producing multicultural relevant content and promulgating a Nigerian identity that non-African audience can understand are important areas that should be considered. Contextualized within the theories of cultural studies and political economy and the method of critical discourse analysis, the study accentuates the changing discourse of the new Nollywood cinema and what it means for critical cultural scholarship of media and communication, especially in the Global South.

Survey Study of the Importance of Cultural Diplomacy of Indonesia in Azerbaijan

Since the existence of the Embassy of the Republic of Indonesia in Azerbaijan, Indonesia began to strengthen its relations with Azerbaijan massively through cultural diplomacy through performances as well as cultural events. Furthermore, the cultural diplomacy of Indonesia and Azerbaijan is also conducted through cultural scholarship, the study of the Indonesian language, as well as learning its dances in the embassy for Azeri students. This study aims to describe the importance of Indonesia's cultural diplomacy in Azerbaijan by employing a descriptive quantitative research method in which the data is obtained through the primary survey conducted by the author. The study found that utilising culture in Indonesia’s diplomatic practices in Azerbaijan is a paramount thing to building a strong bond and trust between countries, especially at the young age of the embassy existence in Azerbaijan.

Reproductive Justice, Race, and the Prescience of the Past

The question of control—over bodies, knowledge, narrative, and nation—interweaves throughout Dana Medoro’s Certain Concealments: Poe, Hawthorne, and Early Nineteenth-Century Abortion and Stephanie Peebles Tavera’s (P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship. Medoro focuses on discourses of life and women’s (non)reproductive sexuality in Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fiction. She establishes that the two authors were deeply skeptical of medicolegal definitions of life that created racial and economic hierarchies; through focal characters and indirect, playful prose, they critique discourses of life that valued some lives over others in the creation of Anglo-American nationalism. Tavera investigates late-nineteenth-century woman-authored medical fiction as directly engaging many of the same concepts Medoro explores. (P)rescription Narratives calls attention to the ways that Comstock-era censorship colluded with race science, medicine, and the law to limit women’s sexual and reproductive autonomy. It demonstrates literature’s agential capacities as the writers it addresses explicitly refute and redirect objectifying narratives. Combined, these texts show that questions of what “counts” as life, and by what (and whose) paradigms those lives can be lived, are hardly theoretical musings. Rather, they determine, systemically and corporeally, “life’s legibility and reproduction … in the name of American citizenship” (Medoro 19). These texts, in other words, are highly relevant and important as literary and cultural scholarship, making a powerful argument for the study of the humanities. But they are also important because they document the subversive and agential power of the written word to discern, document, and possibly heal—to affect change for today and the future.

Nonhuman Futures

Abstract: As a contribution to Theatre Journal ’s 75th anniversary issue, this article poses questions and reflections about the inclusion of the more-than-human in theatre and performance studies. Surveying shifts in the field across the past few decades, the essay engages with the complex valences of the terms “human,” “nonhuman,” and “animal” to argue for greater intersectional, interdisciplinary, and intercultural thinking through performance. The essay argues that as climate and environmental concerns have become a matter of global urgency, nonhuman futures might be a way forward by weighing different and “multi-optic”— to use Claire Jean Kim’s term—approaches to both human and nonhuman problems. Examining how the emergence of the more-than-human in theatre studies continues to intersect with feminist, critical race, eco-, and cultural scholarship, the essay also draws upon the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and how the concept of “infection” might also problematize binaristic thinking about these complex terms. The essay leaves readers with images of Deke Weaver and company’s performance work, The Unreliable Bestiary , in which many nonhuman futures coalesce.

Fugitive Bakery's un-recipe-like recipe book

Our reception and consumption of cultural scholarship often fall under a hierarchy of mediums, wheretext-based pieces are deemed superior to alternative and digitally porous forms of knowledge transfersuch as YouTube videos, social media content, verbal and gestural activations, and more. Thisemphasis is reinforced through traditional forms of pedagogy that operate in a one-way social orderbetween lecturer and pupil. This structural obsession toward text-exclusive, one-way pedagogicpractice limits the contaminative possibility of knowledge. The incorporation of public pedagogy in thecontemporary art domain enhances the potential for commoning. Likewise, an artist's increasingagency in initiating public pedagogy correlates with the expanding definition of what a contemporaryart initiative can be.Fugitive Bakery is a concept bakery that invites its collaborators to share their personalresponses to and interpretations of scholarly and non-scholarly texts with Anathapindika Dai and LizaMarkus—collectively known as Dika+Lija—in exchange for handmade baked goods provided free ofcharge. In an anti-academic spirit, the duo ‘digest’ the books through baking and dialogue. In line withtheir anti-capitalist beliefs, they provide each Bake free of charge while resisting set menus and rigidworking hours. Through this, the duo aims to address untraceable productivities, abstract values oflabour, hoarding of resources, profit maximisation, greed, hierarchies of scholarly credibility, theinsatiable need for factual accuracy, and the bias of statistics, ego, and pride.

Bubbles, fortresses and rings of steel: risk and socio-spatialities in Australians’ accounts of border controls during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT During the COVID-19 pandemic, several jurisdictions have exerted controls over people’s mobilities as a way of containing viral spread. In Australia, international borders were closed for almost two years and internal borders were periodically shut and policed as part of strong public health measures implemented by federal and state governments. In this article, we discuss how Australians conceptualized risk in relation to border controls, drawing on a set of interviews conducted in 2021 in which participants were asked to recount their experiences of the pandemic. Our analysis builds on social and cultural scholarship to understand the symbolic meanings and socio-spatialities of our participants’ accounts of living in COVID times, in which they were confined within both national and internal borders. Our findings suggest three main socio-spatial imaginaries at work in participants’ accounts of life behind closed borders during COVID-19. The first imaginary is an idea of immunity as a spatial property, supporting the concept of geographic immunity. The second is an ambivalent distinction between Self and Other produced through borders hastily thrown up along state lines. The third is the experience behind closed borders of living in a state of ‘suspension’, whereby risk is provisionally held off spatially, yet projected into the future.

Brand Storytelling Melalui Pendekatan Morfo-Semantik Pada Tradisi Syawalan Kupat Jembut di Pedurungan Semarang

This research is to uncover brand storytelling through a morpho-semantic approach to the tradition of kupat jembut syawalan in Pedurungan Semarang. This article is the finding of a descriptive study using Ogden & Richard's semantic approach, using Crespo's storytelling theory of the Syawalan kupat-jembut tradition in Semarang, then analyzing its morphology to see its essence. The results of the study show: that the kupat jembut is used as a medium to attract the community so that the Syawalan tradition of the Pedurungan Semarang community can be preserved for the next generation. The naming does not reduce the essence of syawalan which is an expression of gratitude and hospitality. The research implication, narrative experience brings understanding to the essence of Islamic tradition to be preserved. Research is expected to contribute to Islamic cultural scholarship. 
 
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Making a Loss

This article considers zine making as a form of independent literary production that can offer new insights into the understanding of creativity in literary studies and the humanities more broadly. It situates zines as a form of literary writing, reading, and distribution that cannot be incorporated into dominant accounts of literature or creativity because of their ephemerality. The article examines case studies by Kathy Acker, David Wojnarowicz, and the poet Hakim to demonstrate the unique forms of creativity zine making enacts. The author argues that the study of independent media requires the development of new, creative methodologies in cultural scholarship that can expand our understanding of the uses of creativity beyond understanding it as a practice that generates forms of value that can be transferred to other areas of civic life.

Tales that Touch: Migration, Translation, and Temporality in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century German Literature and Culture ed. by Bettina Brandt and Yasemin Yildiz

Reviewed by: Tales that Touch: Migration, Translation, and Temporality in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century German Literature and Culture ed. by Bettina Brandt and Yasemin Yildiz Ela Gezen Tales that Touch: Migration, Translation, and Temporality in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century German Literature and Culture. Edited by Bettina Brandt and Yasemin Yildiz. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022. Pp. 354. Hardcover €99.95. ISBN 978-3110778236. Divided into four riveting parts, this co-edited volume in honor of Leslie A. Adelson centers migration, translation, and temporality as key terms emanating from the main areas for her interventions which are also presented as threads that appear in a variety of thematic, disciplinary, and analytical guises. Scholarly contributions are framed by two literary tributes from Yoko Tawada (“Der Name und die Zeit,” The Name and the Time) and Zafer Şenocak (“Ausreisen und Reißaus nehmen,” To Exit or to Escape) who “stand out for their recurring place in her scholarship from the 1990s to the present” (19). Thanks to English translations provided by co-editor Bettina Brandt, these original literary texts are accessible to a broader readership and can therefore be included in a variety of courses and curricula, while also paying homage to Adelson’s own critical contributions as translator (which Deniz Göktürk also takes up in her contribution). The first section, “Reframing Time and Exile,” “take[s] up writing about exile and refuge in different constellations and literary modes” (14) with contributions by Jamie Trnka, Anna M. Parkinson, and Bala Venkat Mani. The ensuing part, titled “Multilingualism, Translation, Transfer,” reflects on linguistic dimensions of translation and multilingualism, featuring chapters by Ulrike Vedder and Erik Porath, John Namjun Kim, Göktürk, and Yuliya Komska. The third section, “Narratological Itineraries,” illustrates literary close readings in a narratological framework consisting of chapters by Claudia Breger, Katrina L. Nousek, and Paul Michael Lützeler. The fourth and final section, “Communities/Constellations on the Aftermath,” where “different constellations of the aftermath of catastrophe and hope are at stake” (17), comprises chapters by Barbara Mennel, Brett de Bary, Gizem Arslan, and Damani J. Partridge. Apart from thematic and/or methodological intersections within each section, the co-editors illustrate further connections between contributions across these four sections, foregrounding the “presence of ‘migration’” (11) in particular. “Tales that touch are . . . something being explored with the tools of literary and interdisciplinary cultural scholarship” (5), as co-editors Brandt and Yasemin Yildiz underline in their introduction. They further emphasize as commonality across all contributions the disciplinary expansion of German Studies in transnational, multilingual, and intermedial terms in their exploration of touching tales (which is highlighted in the title, in addition to the key terms included in the subtitle). This conceptual tool and mode of inquiry is characterized by its openness in resisting restrictive binaries, categorizations, and essentializations including singular national frameworks, instead shifting the attention to the exploration of the “cultural labor [End Page 338] [texts] . . . perform” (Adelson cited on p. 3). As readers, we are not only given the opportunity to re-engage and re-examine Adelson’s signature concepts including touching tales, future sense, and the riddle of referentiality, but also to discover new “touches,” proximities, and modes of contact this volume engenders: from Chilean writer Carlos Cerda and his exile in the GDR (Trnka) to German-Jewish writer Hans Keilson’s publication history (Parkinson) and Anita Desai’s novel of refuge (Mani); Uljana Wolf’s poetic insights on Bertha Pappenheim (Vedder and Porath); betweenness and lines of literary affiliation in Yoko Tawada (Kim, de Bary); Saša Stanišić’s exploration of fabulation and the significance of intermedial archives (Nousek and Breger); the relationship between theory, the everyday, and artistic practice in Irene von Alberti’s essay film (Mennel); José F.A. Oliver’s intertextual tributes to Rose Ausländer and Paul Celan (Arslan); intertexts in Peter Schneider’s literary engagement with the student movement (Lützeler); translation and multilingualism in Şenocak’s recent Turkish-language novels (Göktürk); multilingual archives in connection to H. A. Rey’s line drawings (Komska); and anthropological (re)considerations of touch to comprehend relatable experiences (Partridge). Not only do we encounter different disciplines ranging from Film Studies, German Studies...

What’s Going on with Whiteness?

AbstractCalls to “de-center whiteness” in contemporary literature and cultural scholarship raise questions about the meaning of whiteness studies, a field that flourished in the 1990s. This article surveys four recent books that focus on white identity and asks what they tell us about the state of the field today.[A]re there still things going on that we don’t know, but need to know, about the great white whale?

Rape

The Victorian period was notorious for its oblique representations of sexual violence. This article argues that rape is a necessary word and concept for Victorian studies and, we contend, a keyword for a growing subfield of literary and cultural scholarship, humanistic rape studies. Without rape as a stable signifier of specific acts, we find ourselves transported back to the nineteenth century, fumbling like Tess Durbeyfield for language that adequately describes what happened. Rape remains an indispensable domain of nineteenth-century literary studies precisely because it is a thoroughly historically contingent phenomenon. It is part of the power of rape, of its current structural pervasiveness, that it is capable of shaping people's expectations to such an extent that it suggests itself as a timeless, eternally recurring fact of life, when it actually amounts to an intensely situated set of behaviors, many of which crystallized into their current forms in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, propelled by changing labor conditions, European imperialism, and shifting family and romantic configurations. Literary scholarship, especially in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies, has traditionally attempted to tether representations of gender-based violence to “objective,” transhistorical frameworks such as “the law” and psychology, a move we wish to counter here.

Lacan and Romanticism ed. by Daniela Garofalo and David Sigler

Reviewed by: Lacan and Romanticism ed. by Daniela Garofalo and David Sigler Chris Washington (bio) Daniela Garofalo and David Sigler, eds. Lacan and Romanticism. Albany: SUNY Press, 2019. Pp. vii + 183. 2 illustrations. $95.00 (hard) / $32.95 (paper). Let’s set aside, for the moment, the Lacan part of Lacan and Romanticism to make clear the larger intervention this collection undertakes, which is more expansive than the title fully conveys. As Daniela Garofalo and David Sigler write in their introduction, while a “study of Lacan and romanticism might seem a quixotic enterprise” (xi), its dissimulative quixoticism is part of the charm of its contribution to the larger re-envisioning of the field that is currently underway, enabled by the fact that “historicism has just begun to loosen its three-decades-long grasp on the field” (xi). More, though, the collection also joins hands with the return to close reading and to the aesthetic without investing in a theoretical absolute: “far from asserting timeless truths of the unconscious, current iterations of Lacanian literary criticism, including the contributors to this volume, critically examine and even vastly destabilize the political uses to which texts might, or might have historically, been put. They do so by attending to, rather than displacing, the aesthetic aspects of texts” (xiii). In this expansive sense of close aesthetic reading, “Lacanian literary theory and cultural scholarship . . . participates in a recent scholarly reaction against the assumptions of historicism, distant reading, and data collection” (xiv). Turning from Lacanian literary theory to Romanticism is, they contend, necessary because Romanticism, “in Britain and throughout Europe, was closely involved in the representation, analysis, and production of human desire . . . and thus in many ways inaugurated psychoanalytic discourses” (xii). But Romantic authors are not mere myrmidons or advance-guard ambassadors of psychoanalysis; instead, they “commit errors of psychoanalytic interpretation that challenge and distort psychoanalytic orthodoxies,” thus the collection works to expand Lacanian psychoanalysis by “bringing Romanticism to Lacan,” even while the authors generally eschew the Lacanian theory revival brought about by the international, and sometimes suffocating, even befuddling fame of Žižek. A major strength of the collection is, in fact, that the scholars gathered here draw on a good deal of new Lacan writing that has only recently appeared [End Page 464] as well as helpfully and illuminatively reveling in some work that remains unpublished (xiv). The guiding thread that traverses the essays is the Lacanian principle of lack with subtending concerns like the gaze, the sublime, and utopia animating and organizing the essays into loose groupings. Paul Vatalaro and Rithika Ramamurthy both explore the gaze in Romanticism but in wildly—and welcome—different fashions. Vatalaro goes to that paradigmatic Romantic text, Frankenstein, for its Lacanian keystone, “the unavoidable peril of being exposed prematurely to the paternal gaze and, therefore, to the uncanny awareness of loss and lack we cannot escape” (2). For Lacan, the mirror stage involves the moment of the child’s recognition that it can see and can be seen, a symbolic castration Lacan calls the gaze, which Vatalaro’s wonderful reading tracks across the novel as controlling the creature’s subjective social and linguistic deformation. Ramamurthy, meanwhile, in a wonderfully illuminating essay, focuses on Francisco Goya de Luciente’s series of paintings, Los Caprichos, to study how they reveal “the impossibility of the sexual relation” and the “gaze as such” as “that which is presented as travesty” (21). On Ramamurthy’s mesmerizing interpretation the gaze makes women, in the paintings, both visible and invisible—the gaze “betrays an anxiety about the feminine” wherein “sexuality itself proves to be the problematic disaster of the social world” (28, 33). Colin Carman and Daniela Garofalo also deal with lack, though not as disastrous, but as loss (although this can, of course, be a form of disaster), with Carman exploding the common notion that took hold after Derrida’s critique of Lacan in The Animal That Therefore I Am that Lacan has not much to tell us about animals, while Garofalo takes the uncommon but cool and revelatory step to extend Lacanian methods to Jane Austen. As Carman notes, animals lack the ability to experience jouissance, since, according to Lacan, “bestial enjoyment, is especially...

The Power to Structure

Information systems are developed by people with intent—they are designed to help creators and users tell specific stories with data. Within information systems, the often invisible structures of metadata profoundly impact the meaning that can be derived from that data. The Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship project (LINCS) helps humanities researchers tell stories by using linked open data to convert humanities datasets into organized, interconnected, machine-processable resources. LINCS provides context for online cultural materials, interlinks them, andgrounds them in sources to improve web resources for research. This article describes how the LINCS team is using the shared standards of linked data and especially ontologies—typically unseen yet powerful—to bring meaning mindfully to metadata through structure. The LINCS metadata—comprised of linked open data about cultural artifacts, people, and processes—and the structures that support it must represent multiple, diverse ways of knowing. It needs to enable various means of incorporating contextual data and of telling stories with nuance and context, situated and supported by data structures that reflect and make space for specificities and complexities. As it addresses specificity in each research dataset, LINCS is simultaneously working to balance interoperability, as achieved through a level of generalization, with contextual and domain-specific requirements. The LINCS team’s approach to ontology adoption and use centers on intersectionality, multiplicity, and difference. The question of what meaning the structures being used will bring to the data is as important as what meaning is introduced as a result of linking data together, and the project has built this premise into its decision-making and implementation processes. To convey an understanding of categories and classification as contextually embedded—culturally produced, intersecting, and discursive—the LINCS team frames them not as fixed but as grounds for investigation and starting points for understanding. Metadata structures are as important as vocabularies for producing such meaning.

Climate change, coastal built heritage, and critical challenges facing the heritage law frameworks of the United States, United Kingdom, and France

Climate change poses a particular threat to the world’s unique built heritage—historic buildings, sites monuments, and museums. As preserving built heritage resources from climate change becomes a global priority, understanding the current inadequacies of legal frameworks designed to protect built heritage in coastal areas is essential. Only by identifying and examining these shortfalls can countries create resilient legal policies and tools that better protect coastal built heritage from the immediate and long-term effects of climate change. Building on previous comparative cultural heritage law scholarship, this article describes the legal frameworks that the United States, United Kingdom, and France use to protect their respective built heritage in coastal areas and identifies two critical challenges facing each country.

Zimbabwean Popular Cultural Expressions of Alternative Sexual Identities

ABSTRACT The dominant narrative within Zimbabwean popular cultural scholarship largely focuses on the Zimbabwean socio-economic and political crisis at the expense of alternative ideologies, identities and practices. I advocate for the urgency of expansive and wide-ranging epistemological attention to alternative sexual identities as part of a cultural studies research agenda. I argue that, although Zimbabwean homophobia has generally silenced alternative voices, popular culture offers channels through which to engage publicly with that which is generally loathed and feared. I discuss three Zimbabwean popular cultural archives to make the argument that it is through every day cultural practices that Zimbabwean alternative sexual identities can meaningfully be debated and conceptualised. I discuss a Zimbabwean dancehall song titled “Kumba Kwedu” (In Our Home) by the artist named Bazooker, the reception of Facebook activist Tatelicious Karigambe-Sandberg, and Tracy Kadungure’s novel Tanaka Chronicles: The Sexual Awakening. Through the selected popular cultural texts, I show how some Zimbabwean popular cultural expressions of alternative sexualities cleverly undermine heteronormative official values by constantly challenging the assumed heterosexual norm.

Transnational Portuguese Studies ed. by Hilary Owen and Claire Williams

Reviewed by: Transnational Portuguese Studies ed. by Hilary Owen and Claire Williams Mark Sabine Hilary Owen and Claire Williams, eds, Transnational Portuguese Studies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020). xxiv + 386 pages. Print and ebook. The responsibility shouldered by contributors to Liverpool University Press's Transnational Modern Languages series should not be underestimated. By gathering a multi-perspectival corpus of scholarship on cultural traffic that focuses on the permeability of borders, and acknowledges the multi-layered and intersectional nature of purportedly unitary ethnic identities, the series hastens the overdue embedding of the 'transnational turn' in a discipline founded—like it or not—in the epistemology of cultural nationalisms and colonialism. As Hilary Owen and Claire Williams assert in their cogent introduction to this volume, the challenge that transnational research methodologies present to the 'conflation of language, territory and identity' upon which the study of Modern Languages was originally predicated offers 'a transformative means of re-thinking' the pedagogic, social and political agency of the modern linguist (p. 5). It offers this, one might add, at a time when the value of a multilingual practice of scholarship, and of cultural analysis more generally, is increasingly scorned or contested. The current 'boom' in transnational enquiry responds to and informs both contestation of the hegemony of Eurocentric and often racist models of research and cultural value, and the demands of an increasingly multipolar world order. The studies Owen and Williams have gathered justify their contention that research subsumed under the rubric of Portuguese or Lusophone Studies offers especially 'powerful and engaging possibilities' for 'Modern Languages as transnational cultural enquiry' (p. 6). Portuguese Studies' status as a discipline has been determined by the language's global diffusion—centuries before the age of nationalism—and by its historical and geographical proximity to Spanish. Consequently, it has long presented as 'always already requiring a multiply-hyphenated "transcultural" and "transnational" methodology' (p. 7), even as its practitioners have, paradoxically, claimed a discrete 'national-looking' language base, so as to resist conflation with Spanish, or 'Hispanic', Studies. [End Page 99] Moreover, for some decades, historians examining Portugal's colonial expansion have foregrounded how that project's fragility—in the face first of established African and Asian empires, and later of ascendant European rivals—often engendered intricate repartitions of economic and political power that, in turn, brought forth new or hybridized cultural practices and identities. If Portuguese Studies' longstanding examination, and frequent celebration, of hybridities and transculturation qualifies it to offer leadership to sibling Modern Language disciplines, however, its practitioners also need to confront the legacy, in Portugal and elsewhere, of a 'dynamics of ignorance' about all things extra-national promoted by isolationist authoritarian regimes, as Ellen W. Sapega notes (p. 223) in a timely and meticulous study of Portuguese memorialization of the Second World War. They need also acknowledge—as Anna Klobucka's reading of Gilberto Freyre's quasi-anthropological travelogue Aventura e Rotina reminds us (pp. 50–56)—how imperialist, racist and (European) male-supremacist preconceptions and metanarratives often linger within the purview of linguistic and cultural scholarship, even when scholars identify Lusophone communities as inherently transculturated, and their task as inherently translational. Of the volume's four themed sections—'Spatiality', 'Language', 'Temporality' and 'Subjectivity'—the first two present transnational approaches to their titular concepts that are particularly effective for countering imperialist or exceptionalist narratives of a 'Portuguese-speaking world'. Zoltán Biedermann's 'Global Navigations and the Challenge of World-Making' opens up the ideological loading of 'unquestioned […] spatial notions' (p. 24)—'territory', 'nation', 'expansion'—that have long underpinned representations of Portugal's imperial enterprise as a 'linear process of diffusionist-cum-universalist power-building' (p. 40). Biedermann's call for an excavation and acknowledgment of early-modern Portuguese subjects' attraction to and interaction with 'powerful, prosperous and self-confident' extra-European cultural centres (ibid.), and the substantial input of these into the cultures and praxis of colonial and postcolonial world systems, is echoed in José Lingna Nafafé and Toby Green's fascinating critique of the concept of lusofonia, tracing the roots of an instrumentalization of language for imperialist ends back to the writings of Padre António Vieira, but revealing the extent...

When the Medium Was the Mission: The Atlantic Telegraph and the Religious Origins of Network Culture by Jenna Supp-Montgomerie (review).

Reviewed by: When the Medium Was the Mission: The Atlantic Telegraph and the Religious Origins of Network Culture by Jenna Supp-Montgomerie Timothy H. B. Stoneman (bio) When the Medium Was the Mission: The Atlantic Telegraph and the Religious Origins of Network Culture By Jenna Supp-Montgomerie. New York: New York University Press, 2021. Pp. 312. The tale of the Atlantic telegraph (1858–66) has been told many times (Gordon, A Thread across the Ocean, 2002, Muller, Wiring the World, 2016). The reader need not worry, however, since the title of the current treatment is slightly misleading. The book only tangentially covers the history of the Atlantic telegraph and the electromagnetic telegraph. And it does not concern the missionary or religious usage of the transatlantic cable in any traditional sense. The author, a religious and communications studies scholar at the [End Page 300] University of Iowa, uses her study on the attempt to create the world's first undersea cable connection to pose a larger and arguably more important question. How did the Atlantic telegraph succeed so remarkably in the popular American imagination despite its marked early technical failures? And why did the telegraph experience become the template for how we think about all subsequent networked communication technologies, including the contemporary internet? To answer the question, Supp-Montgomerie forays into new ground by connecting the history of technology with the history of American religion and a range of critical theoretical approaches. For the author, the initial technical failure to lay the Atlantic telegraph was fundamental to its success. The unreliability of the underwater cable, which operated briefly for twenty-three days, prompted American popular imagination of a utopian global community united through communication technology. "Infrastructural religion" in the form of public Protestantism in the United States provided critical resources that proved essential for creating social imaginaries of communication through connection. The early failure of the 1858 Atlantic telegraph cable created a formative and durable template, and as a result, "we broadly define networks as systems of connection." The chapters of When the Medium Was the Mission cover an array of topics that follow the discursive components of the author's argument (rather than chronology). The book begins by recounting the story of the Ottoman telegraph, emphasizing the role of Baptist missionaries, from initial efforts in 1847 to the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1919 (ch. 1). Then it considers nineteenth-century alternatives to the electromagnetic telegraph, including the optical, spiritual, grapevine, and teaching telegraphs (ch. 2). A case study of the Oneida Community (1848–81) in upstate New York follows as a stand-in for U.S. religious utopianism around the telegraph (ch. 3). More abstract is the following chapter, which applies structural and post-structural theories of communication to analyze the content of the 1858 cable (ch. 4). An epilogue suggests the continued influence of religious motifs, "protestant dreams for the telegraph," in imaginaries of the internet and social media technology today (p. 32). Readers of Technology and Culture will find this work a frustrating read at times. It draws heavily on media and cultural theory and resorts all too often to seemingly jargonistic language. The author's argument focuses exclusively on a narrow, unrepresentative time period (1858–66) in the history of the Atlantic telegraph characterized by endemic difficulty and prior to longer-term stabilization. Supp-Montgomerie brings no new major archival research to light and relatively little primary evidence, relying on discourse analysis and the forceful elaboration of her conceptual argument to make her central case. In the end, she fails to demonstrate exactly how or why "fractures and failures" are foundational to both nineteenth-century communication-based globalization and network logic more generally. [End Page 301] Nonetheless, When the Medium Was the Mission well warrants the effort to wade through its theory-driven waters. The book serves as a useful introduction to contemporary critical cultural scholarship on media and communication as well as major media scholars. The author shows an adept familiarity with several subfields in the history of technology, while her "infrastructural approach to network media" develops the intersection between media studies scholarship and STS/history of technology (p. 27). Supp-Montgomerie makes...

Kristen Jones-Bonofiglio, Health Care Ethics Through the Lens of Moral Distress

Concerns of moral distress in health care have never been more relevant. In her book, Health Care Ethics Through the Lens of Moral Distress, Kristen Jones-Bonofiglio provides a comprehensive review of the effects of moral distress on providers and health care delivery, while highlighting the complexities of making ethical decisions in practice. Jones-Bonofiglio’s thoroughness and use of interdisciplinary, historical, and cultural scholarship makes this book an excellent introductory resource on moral distress for health care providers and researchers alike.

Critical Future Studies and Age: attending to future imaginings of age and ageing

This paper draws on cultural gerontology and literary scholarship to call for greater academic consideration of age and ageing in our imaginations of the future. Our work adds to the development of Critical Future Studies (CFS) previously published in this journal, by arguing that prevailing ageism is fuelled by specific constructions of older populations as a future demographic threat and of ageing as a future undesirable state requiring management and control. This paper has two parts: the first considers the importance of the future to contemporary ageist stereotypes. The second seeks potential counter representations in speculative fiction. We argue that an age-aware CFS can allow us not only to imagine newfutures but also to reflect critically on the shape and consequences of contemporary modes of relations of power.

Matters of Empire in American Humor: An Introduction to the Special Issue

Matters of Empire in American Humor: An Introduction to the Special Issue