Cultural Moment Research Articles

Gender in American Literature and Culture ed. by Jean M. Lutes and Jennifer Travis

Reviewed by: Gender in American Literature and Culture ed. by Jean M. Lutes and Jennifer Travis Aimee Armande Wilson Gender in American Literature and Culture. Edited by Jean M. Lutes and Jennifer Travis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. v + 375 pp. $39.99 cloth/$32.00 e-book. Gender in American Literature and Culture seeks to build on previous generations of feminist and gender studies scholarship. The chapters "honor the tradition of feminist recovery projects," "follow in the wake of previous critics who have redefined some of the texts that are considered canonical," and challenge "the well-entrenched white patriarchy that has often narrowly defined what counts as literary" (3). These may be familiar goals, but they are nevertheless important ones. The outcomes that the earliest feminist literary critics set out to achieve are still as worthy as they are unattained. This is not to suggest that no progress has been made but to recognize that much work remains. As editors Jean M. Lutes and Jennifer Travis point out, "decades of canon-busting have barely nudged white male authors from their primacy of place" (3). Current issues get top billing in Gender in American Literature and Culture; a small sampling includes #MeToo and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movements, settler colonialism, transphobia, and attacks on reproductive rights. The book's scope is admirably diverse, citing "texts by forty-three white authors and forty-six writers of color, written as early as 1630 and as recently as 2018" (3). Many of these authors are well known, such as Anne Bradstreet, Edith Wharton, and Zora Neale Hurston. The book covers just as many lesser-known authors, too, including Gerda Saunders, author of a contemporary Alzheimer's memoir, and 'Afīfa Karam, an early-twentieth-century Lebanese-American journalist, novelist, and translator. As with any volume covering such a large swath of authors, topics, and time periods, comprehensiveness is impossible. The editors admit that they are not attempting comprehensiveness and, furthermore, confront the intellectual flaws of such grand-sweep styles of literary scholarship. In one of the most insightful moments in the introduction, Lutes and Travis establish the scope of the book while simultaneously commenting on the state of literary studies in 2021: "While we believe that understanding the cultural and historical operations of gender in the United States is more pressing than ever, we also recognize that a chastened model of literary criticism has emerged, one that is less confident in its transformative potential, more skeptical of liberatory claims, and more modest in its sense of what it can accomplish" (2). Although the volume was completed before the global pandemic and its continuing fallout, the inequities laid bare by these events were evident long before, and the writers in this volume respond to those extant [End Page 125] inequities. If anything, the pandemic years have made this book timelier and more urgent. As would be expected given this feminist approach, the volume does not shy away from political issues. Indeed, the feminist underpinnings of the volume can be seen in the editors' open embrace of presentism. Lutes and Travis state that the book "responds to this cultural and political moment with chapters that are presentist and activist but also keen to avoid overreaching" (2). At its best, the presentism employed by the writers in this volume simultaneously considers differences between historical periods as well as bridges between them in service of a better understanding of the conditions that led to current tragedies and political flashpoints. Each of the book's three thematic sections is organized chronologically. In the first, "Intimacies," writers consider literary depictions of intimate relationships. Chapters focus on the various forms of desire and violence contained in these relationships. Standouts include Marion Rust's "Post-Reproductive Female Sexuality and the Early American Novel," which is part of a resurgence of scholarly interest in sexuality in early American literary studies, and Travis M. Foster's "The Effeminate Man in Nineteenth-Century America," which considers the intersection of masculinity, eugenics, and white supremacy in the popular press. "Aggressions," the second section, "demonstrate[s] that gendered violence is endemic to American literary history and culture" (8). This section is the strongest of the...

Urban-human faces and the semiotic right to the city: From the USSR propaganda machinery to the participatory city

Now that the usage and meaning of urban spaces have been dramatically challenged by the global pandemic, several debates and reflections are going on around the manner in which cities – both as concerns the public and the private spaces – have been designed. The article observes how “urban-human face” representations have served different models of urbanity across times and cultures.
 Using a framework deriving from semiotics of culture, according to which the city represents a model of the world, the article attempts to interpret how portraits of faces have been modelling the city through different urban faciality mechanisms. The focus is on a sample of what we call ‘urban-human faces’, ranging from Soviet propaganda posters to the digital #selfiecity project. The expression refers to series of representations that bring together the city and the face. It can be argued that both the city and the face, produced at a specific historical and cultural moment, with their figurative and plastic elements, deploy the struggle for the city ownership and authorship.
 Nonetheless, the commensurability of the city and the face can be just based on the fact that both semiotic configurations represent an excess with the help of cartographic reproduction (the city) and the portrait (the face), respectively. A city can be represented by a face to the extent to which it is also multifaceted as a polylogue. On the basis of such instable commensurability, the article will ultimately attempt to bring together the semiotics of the face and the semiotics of the city.

FICÇÃO ESPECULATIVA: O processo de hibridização na Ficção Científica e na Fantasia

ABSTRACT: This study aims at promoting a debate about speculative narratives, particularly those commonly classified as Science Fiction or Fantasy, assuming that the first works of speculative literature were not intended to encompass a single generic category given their dialogue with epistemological changes and their close connection with religious and mythological discourses. By close readings and bibliographic analyses, we build on the literary scholarship of Gunn (2005), Alkon (1994), Araújo (2020), and Manlove (1975), among others. The results suggest that there is no stylistic uniformity in Science Fiction or Fantasy narratives, as they directly dialogue with historical, political, and cultural moments, as well as with existing literary styles or movements.
 Keywords: Speculative fiction; Science Fiction; Fantasy; Hybridization

A Study of Gen MZers’ Vinyl LP Collecting and Purchasing Experience

This study examines the vinyl collection craze among members of Gen MZ (20 to 30 year olds), with particular attention to their experiences, motivations, and interactions with other collectors and buyers. The Gen MZers who are driving the vinyl phenomenon did not grow up with vinyl records so why are they so enthusiastic about a retro media? We analyze research on cultural product consumption patterns and our field data and use grounded theory to apprehend the experiential world of Gen MZ vinyl record collectors through individual and focus group interviews and participant action research. Our goal is to gain insight into how their vinyl collecting, purchasing, and product creation activities affords them satisfaction, builds cultural capital, and contributes to shaping this moment in popular culture. In general, we found that the vinyl collecting craze among Gen MZers is driven by several factors, notably a strong sense of dissatisfaction with popular culture and the typically passive consumption of its products, coupled with the sense of fulfillment the collectors get from developing the specialized and exclusive knowledge that builds cultural capital. These factors intersect with certain distinctive personality traits of collectors, expressed in their impulse to establish themselves as uniquely discerning arbiters of musical taste and value, to produce a typically nostalgic trajectory through the world of collecting and consuming yesterday’s commercial audio technology.

Republican Constellations A Reflection by José Bergamín

This note reflects on the need to reevaluate labels that protagonists of Spanish republican cultural life gave to themselves. Reasons provided by Bergamín, one of its protagonists, dismantle the importance of a famous act in Seville that canonised only a part of the actors of that cultural moment. Furthermore it allows us to understand that using those labels expand the composition of an heterogeneous group who worked together in a new political project to modernise the country. The time has come to become aware that the nomenclature still used is the product of literary historiography, strongly politicised by a dictatorial state.

Stages of Tectonic Blackness

Stages of Tectonic Blackness is a many-staged performance project and video piece tarrying with the paralleled processes of dehumanization and extraction, emergence and rebellion, as sustained by Black bodies and rock bodies. In our cultural moment so racked with urgency, Stages of Tectonic Blackness invites those engaging in the work to move slowly in order to feel more deeply into this time. As a durational practice of Black queer resistance, this work prioritizes Black experience, Black time, Black bodies and our racialized relationship to the earth.

Review

Review

Behaving Badly in Early and Medieval China

Behaving Badly in Early and Medieval China

Yiddish in Israel: A History by Rachel Rojanski (review)

Reviewed by: Yiddish in Israel: A History by Rachel Rojanski Shachar Pinsker Rachel Rojanski. Yiddish in Israel: A History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020. 338 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009421000416 This is an important book for two reasons. First, it is a pioneering study on Yiddish in Israel, a topic that—for reasons that should be interrogated and [End Page 500] explained—has not attracted much scholarly attention until recently. Second, the book is very well documented. It provides a wealth of information on Israeli Yiddish newspapers and journals, theater, academia, and other aspects of Yiddish and Israeli history. In her study, Rojanski unearthed many archival sources of different kinds, mostly from Israeli ministries, political parties, police, and other official governmental and local bodies. The study also makes good use of the Israeli press, both in Hebrew and in Yiddish, in order to shed light on the history of Yiddish in Israel. As such, the book should be of interest to scholars and students in Israel studies, and Jewish history, culture, and language. Apart from a short introduction and epilogue, the book contains seven chapters. The first chapter gives an overview of state policy vis-à-vis Yiddish (and Hebrew). The second chapter deals with the varied Yiddish press that flourished in Israel between 1948 and 1968. The third chapter interrogates Yiddish theater in Israel during more or less the same period. The fourth chapter focuses on "high Yiddish culture," namely the major journal Di goldene keyt (The golden chain), which was edited by the poet Avrom Sutzkever and published in Israel between 1949 and 1995, as well as the chair in Yiddish at the Hebrew University, which was inaugurated in 1951. The fifth chapter of the book tells the story of the establishment of the Yiddish group named Yung Yisroel (Young Israel) that produced what I consider the most important and interesting Yiddish literary texts in Israel. The sixth chapter examines a specific cultural moment, the theatrical production of the play Di megile by Itzik Manger in 1965, which according to Rojanski signaled a moment of change that went hand in hand with nostalgia and the "the return of Eastern Europe to Israel." The last chapter provides a sweeping overview of changes regarding the status of Yiddish in Israel between the 1960s and 1990s, as well as a suggestive analysis of recent trends in Israeli history. The main strength of the study is that it clearly demonstrates that one cannot understand Israeli history and culture without taking into account what was created in Yiddish. At the same time, one cannot understand Yiddish culture after the Holocaust without taking into account what was created in Israel. Thus, the book is truly a launching pad that will set in motion future studies of many aspects of this important and neglected topic. In the introduction, Rojanski writes that her study "challenges the long-held view that Yiddish was suppressed and even rejected by the state of Israel" (2). In the epilogue, she reiterates that her study "strongly contradicts the claims made by Yiddish activists that there was a deliberate anti-Yiddish policy in Israel. … The state of Israel never formulated a definitive policy of Yiddish, certainly not one that negated it" (282). It is difficult to argue with this conclusion, especially because the author provides abundant evidence to back it up, but this also raises many questions: Who are those people who long held the view that there was a deliberate policy against Yiddish in Israel? More importantly, Rojanski's main argument begs the question: Why is the policy of the State of Israel towards Yiddish so significant? The book clearly shows that there was no explicit legislation against Yiddish (or for that matter against any other "foreign" language) in Israel. In chapters 2 and 3, Rojanski also proves that the restrictions that were imposed by official authorities on the Yiddish press and theater were relatively [End Page 501] short-lived. However, the real issue, it seems to me, is not legislation, restrictions, and official policy, but the ideology of the state and the cultural assumptions of the society. If the ideology of the state and the society is antidiasporic and anti-Yiddish...

Water and Libraries. A Combination That Is Only Apparently Distant

The natural element ‘water’ is the most precious resource we have. For years, we have been observing exponentially growing water needs, compared to increasingly the lower availability of water itself, caused by both environmental and socio-economic factors. This project aims at carrying out information, cultural and awareness-raising activities, in order to make citizens more aware on the responsible use of water. The target-audience is diversified, and different initiatives can be planned for children and adults. The resulting impact should benefit the environment (less consumption of water resources), the acquired knowledge (chemical-physical composition of water, origin of water of a specific city, evaluation of mineral waters), and the economic savings of families (how to read a bill, how to save water through simple daily actions and so pay less). Information meetings can be accompanied by cultural moments on the topic of ‘water and civilization’.

Prelude: The sleeping song of the Gran Teatro Cervantes de Tangier

The recording through the still and moving image of two buildings of an alleged symbolic nature in the city of Tangier -in the surroundings of the Cornisse- addresses the identity issue in the Mediterranean cultural context and the need to recover a collective memory.The first project, entitled Crossing Lines, registers the Palace of Arts and Culture of Tangier under construction. The second, a videographic performance that gives the title to this contribution, registers as a “reopening” the Gran Teatro de Cervantes in Tangier, currently in ruins, where a Tangerian singer on his stage challenges this devastation with his song. Large erased cartouches with the names of Aeschylus, Corneille, Lope de Rueda, Schiller, Goldoni, Sophocles, Molière or Goethe, peaks of European literature, are revealed in front of his eyes.With both representations, the idea of ​​ruin and that of a project under construction are simultaneously raised to speak of the postcolonial moment of culture and its role in the expanded context of globalization. I intend to open a reflection on the difficulty that currently exists when it comes to articulating cultural meeting spaces between both shores of the Mediterranean.

Monster

Monster

Troubling Apprehensions of Gender-Based Violence in South Africa: Fanon’s Sociogeny as a Psychosocial Lens

ABSTRACT Threading across different discursive, cultural, and political moments of the postapartheid context, gender-based violence, inarguably, is a phenomenon that must be read contextually and as contingent upon intersecting configurations of power that are tied to historical, political, and material fractures of our colonial legacies. Three immediate intersecting threads of analyses are undertaken here: (1) how extant knowledge archives on gender-based violence discursively reference spatial geographies and frozen temporalities of violence that result in the implicit racialization of gender-based violence and the psychological pathologization of its associated subjectivities in South Africa; (2) using Fanon’s concept of sociogeny, we read gender-based violence through a psychosocial lens to address this problematic; and (3) extending Fanon’s idea of psychopolitics, we argue that the trauma, racial alienation, and toxic gendering of society within coloniality is reflected in a neurotic structuring of the psyche itself.

Reconstructing Professional Philosophy: Lessons from Philosophy as a Way of Life During a Time of Crises

This article reflects on the way the Covid-19 hecatomb has disclosed and unraveled the ongoing crisis of professional philosophy, and suggests some lessons that might be taken from the pandemic, urging academic philosophers to take action regarding the future of their work in philosophy departments and institutions. In the first section of the article, we highlight some lasting criticisms to academic philosophy and explore one particular nasty thorn in the side of philosophers doing the kind of work that might speak to broad audiences facing a crisis of meaning and living: the rush to publish instead of “perishing” without a secure academic position. In the next section, we discuss philosophy as a way of life (PWL) as an alternative nascent field in academic philosophy that, while garnering respect and recognition within the academy, has regained connections with a broader public desperate for ways to chart their own paths of meaningful living, especially when facing a deeply challenged and fractured world. PWL helps address the crises of meaning many in the academy face (both teachers and students) and the absence of rich philosophical reflection and communities in the broader public, which otherwise all too easily fall prey to hucksters, con-artists, and authoritarian and conspiratorial forces. We argue that this kind of wholistic critical development of PWL from the ancient world is designed to enact a prefigurative or eutopian politics. We conclude by situating our recommendations into a broader reconstruction of professional philosophy needed at this critical cultural moment.

The Loss of the Popular: Reconstructing Fifty Years of Studying Popular Culture

This article starts from the observation that popular culture resides in a contradictory space. On the one hand it seems to be thriving, in that the range of media objects that were previously studied under the rubric of popular culture has certainly expanded. Yet, cultural studies scholars rarely study these media objects <em>as</em> popular culture. Instead, concerns about immaterial labor, about the manipulation of voting behavior and public opinion, about filter bubbles and societal polarization, and about populist authoritarianism, determine the dominant frames with which the contemporary media environment is approached. This article aims to trace how this change has come to pass over the last 50 years. It argues that changes in the media environment are important, but also that cultural studies as an institutionalizing interdisciplinary project has changed. It identifies “the moment of popular culture” as a relatively short-lived but epoch-defining moment in cultural studies. This moment was subsequently displaced by a set of related yet different theoretical problematics that gradually moved the study of popular culture away from the popular. These displacements are: the hollowing out of the notion of the popular, as signaled early on by Meaghan Morris’ article “The Banality of Cultural Studies” in 1988; the institutionalization of cultural studies; the rise of the governmentality approach and a growing engagement with affect theory.

An Uneasy Return to the Role of Popular Culture

The editorial for the thematic issue of <em>Media and Communication</em>, “From Sony’s Walkman to <em>RuPaul’s Drag Race</em>: A Landscape of Contemporary Popular Culture,” looks at the prevailing themes of earlier studies of popular culture, from Raymond Williams’ organic culture to the postmodern embrace of commodity culture, in relation to the current cultural moment of disruption and unease. The editorial then synthesizes the articles contained in the issue against where the study of popular culture has been and where we may anticipate it going.

Rules Matter: How Can Professional Associations Remap Intracommunity Norms around Sexual Violence?

This article describes and analyzes the American Anthropological Association’s adoption of a sexual harassment and sexual assault policy as a part of the groundswell of recognition that sexual violence detrimentally shapes scientific inquiry, a recognition catalyzed by the #MeToo cultural moment. This is a case study of what Marcel Mauss terms “policy as total social phenomena,” which narrates a significant historical pivot in the story of feminism that evidences feminist theorizing in praxis, per a framework developed by bell hooks. We critically situate this transformation within what Marshall Sahlins calls “contingent circumstance,” which enables institutional transformation. We argue that professional associations can set normative expectations and best practice standards to mold cultural change. The article outlines the reframing of sexual violence as professional misconduct to emphasize the element of community while not denying that there are interpersonal harms. The policy recognizes the foundational impact of gender oppression on a discipline’s methods, training practices, and the expected entitlements of professional success. Building on the scholarship and activism that have documented anthropology’s all-too-typical history with sexual violence, we offer a rare insider’s understanding into the unfolding process of designing and adopting norms intended to compel behavioral change. The article concludes with the questions that remain in the exercise of community responsibility for sexual harassment and sexual assault. We suggest that while the intentional reorganization of institutional practices, policies, and training processes can facilitate cultural change that curtails sexual violence, long-term transformations require community action in terms of intentional investments in policy review and educational programming.

Ritual

Ritual

The song of power

In this paper I take the form of the fugue in music to query a contemporary dynamic. It is one where hopefulness entwines with worrisome, oppressive realities that pervade biosocial trends concerning race. Genetic ancestry testing, forensic uses of DNA, and President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative are all examined as aspects of this cultural moment where biosociality must be engaged for its potential contradictory outcomes, which I argue are regenerative in form, yet often dystopian.

Subarctic landscape adaptations and paleodemography: A 14,000-year history of climate change and human settlement in central Alaska and Yukon

Central Alaska and Yukon represent the longest continuously inhabited region in the Americas, with a rich record of research on technology, subsistence, and decision-making spanning over 14,000 years. Still, archaeologists debate whether the changes observed in the material and paleodemographic record can be interpreted as the result of environmental influences. This paper presents a multivariate analysis of regional occupation chronology, paleodemography, site placement, and climate data to investigate how past populations were affected by climate change. This research shows that populations were larger than expected at some of the earliest periods and that significant climatic and environmental events do not correspond with significant population decreases as researchers have previously argued. Changes in land use were gradual and unidirectional, with decreases in average site slope, increases in average site size, and consistent average site elevation through time. Trends in land use and paleodemography correspond to cultural phases assigned by regional experts, though environmental shifts undoubtedly played a role in shaping land use and culture throughout the past. This research has possible implications for our understanding of important cultural moments in the region's history, such as initial and subsequent migrations throughout the Americas.