Vernacular Theory Research Articles

The politics of the NPC meme: Reactionary subcultural practice and vernacular theory

The acronym ‘NPC’ originates from videogame culture, where it refers to computer-controlled drones whose behaviour is dictated by their programming. By 2018 the term had gained traction within right-wing subcultural spaces as shorthand for individuals apparently incapable of thinking for themselves. By the autumn of 2018, these spaces were awash with NPC memes accusing liberals and leftists of uncritically accepting progressive doxa and parroting left-wing catchphrases. In mid-October, with midterm elections looming in the US, Twitter banned over 1000 NPC roleplay accounts created by supporters of Donald Trump, citing concerns over disinformation. This event was much discussed both within right-wing subcultural spaces and by mainstream media outlets, serving as an occasion to reassess the political effects of digital media in general and reactionary memes in particular. Here we use a combination of computational analysis and theoretically informed close reading to trace the NPC meme's trajectory and explore its role in entrenching affectively charged political and (sub)cultural faultlines. We show how mainstream attention at once amplified the meme and attenuated its affective resonance in the subcultural spaces where it originated. We also contend that while the NPC meme has served as a vehicle for antidemocratic bigotry, it may yet harbour critical potential, providing a vocabulary for theorising the cultural and political impacts of communicative capitalism.

Reading and ideology: the case of the free public libraries movement

ABSTRACT This article examines social debates on mass reading in Britain, linking them to the free public libraries movement of the mid-19th century. It argues that free public libraries were defended on the grounds of a piecemeal, eclectic, but nonetheless identifiable vernacular theory of ideology that emerged over the course of a century. This theory treated literary texts as containers of ideas and values that could be transmitted to readers. It responded to the social tensions emerging from industrial capitalist society, but located conflict in the realm of ideas, rather than in material reality. It thus offered an idealist account of class conflict, positing both that dissent was rooted in the new phenomenon of mass reading, and that it could be resolved by encouraging workers to consume particular texts. Our aim is to show that, while such a theory of ideology was demonstrably reductive and flawed, it was part of what compelled the British State to pass the Public Libraries Act in 1850 and therefore merits exposition.

Alone Together: Poetics of the Passions in Late Medieval Iberia

Alone Together: Poetics of the Passions in Late Medieval Iberia

"EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED": NETWORKED CONSPIRITUALITY IN NEW AGE MEDIA

Conspirituality refers to the confluence of New Age spirituality and conspiracism that frame reality through holistic thinking—connecting events and energies, the inner self to the outer world in unseen ways. Conspirituality has thrived online: between the pleasure of the weekly horoscope and the obsession with the QAnon drop is a mode of causal promiscuity in which, as Q puts it, “future proves past.” This panel traces forms of conspirituality from MAGA mystics to New Age influencers, from technolibertarian imageboards to Silicon Valley vision quests. While conspirituality marks an online psychographic segmentation, it also traces a formal quality that organizes ways of navigating, knowing, and critiquing the internet, which is undergirded by New Age spirituality’s perennialism: a belief that different spiritual traditions are equally valid, because they all essentially worship the same divine source that emanates throughout the cosmos and the human body. The internet supercharges perennialism, providing a connective medium for New Age ideology of manifesting: the belief that we create our own reality. As users trawl the internet for snippets and statistics to feed their confirmation bias and populate their vision boards, the connective medium of the internet manifests toxicity and misinformation at scale. The papers in this panel develop a line of research on the coevolution of spirituality and technology from organized to new religious movements. Instead of demystification, we use ethnographic, textual, and hermeneutic approaches—examining internet users, governance, genealogies, and internet studies itself—to politicize networked conspirituality as vernacular theories of power and powerlessness.

Nudes and Naked Souls

AbstractThis essay is part of a project historicizing vernacular theories from Latin America to create dialogues across geopolitical and epistemic borders. This article specifically advances a comparatist analysis of the critical phenomenologies of nudity, truth, and social space by two trans thinkers: Marlene Wayar, an Argentine social psychologist and activist, and Talia Mae Bettcher, a Canadian philosopher and activist based in Los Angeles. Pichon-Rivière argues that a core difference between their approaches stems from different geopolitical and disciplinary regimes of visibility and that these paradigms are not as incompatible as they might seem at first glance. Pichon-Rivière's own theorization seeks to integrate these two perspectives into a shared critical phenomenology of collective truth.

Medieval Saints and Their Miraculous Songs: Ritual Singing, Funerary Piety, and the Construction of Female Sanctity in Thirteenth-Century Liège

AbstractThis article explores the conspicuous role of singing in the hagiographical construction of saintly women in the thirteenth-century Diocese of Liège. The constellation of Lives about Liégeois women occupies a prominent place in the “origin story” of the new spirituality in the later Middle Ages. However, one aspect of these women's perceived religiosity—their musical and vocal talent—though omnipresent in the sources, has received only sparse attention from scholarship. This article focuses on two of the most important Lives in this group, those of Mary of Oignies and Christina of Sint-Truiden, and demonstrates that hagiographers, mobilizing liturgical vocabulary and ritual ideas identifiable to a local audience, consistently represented women's singing as magnificent ritual performance. By doing so, the hagiographers highlighted these women's privileged access to the divine and distinct potency as intercessors for the living and the dead. This article also intends to show the highly sophisticated ways in which Latin liturgy and its vernacular appropriation, popular ideas and scholastic theories about music were negotiated, developed, and together contributed to a distinctive religious rhetoric in the articulation of female sanctity in thirteenth-century Europe.

Weak passports and bad behavior:

ABSTRACTChinese migrants in Tanzania regularly face inspections by street‐level bureaucrats, inspections that are often resolved by paying “tips.” These encounters make the Chinese feel vulnerable in Africa, although they disagree about why this is so. Some claim they are vulnerable because China lacks a colonial history in Africa, while others put the blame on some migrants’ illicit practices, which have made all Chinese targets for extortion. These contending etiologies reveal competing vernacular theories regarding the relationship between power, ethics, and status. The performance of petty corruption encounters reveals the ambiguities of economic and political power that characterize South‐South exchanges. How to act is therefore a space for experimenting with different possible forms of global Chinese citizenship. [empire, ethics, inequality, migration, corruption, South‐South relations, global China, Tanzania]

Vernacular imaginaries of European border security among citizens: From walls to information management

AbstractOur primary aim in this article is to explore vernacular constructions of Europe’s so-called ‘migration crisis’ from the grounded everyday perspectives of EU citizens. We do so as a critical counterpoint to dominant elite scripts of the crisis, which are often reliant upon securitised representations of public opinion as being overwhelmingly hostile to migrants and refugees and straightforwardly in favour of tougher deterrent border security. In addition to broadening the range of issues analysed in vernacular security studies, the article seeks to make three principal contributions. Theoretically, we argue for an approach to the study of citizens’ views and experiences of migration and border security that is sensitive to the performative effects of research methods and the circular logic between securitising modes of knowledge production and policy justification. Methodologically, we outline and apply an alternative approach in response to these dynamics, drawing on the potential of critical focus groups and a desecuritising ethos. Empirically, we identify a vernacular theory of ‘the border’ asinformation management, and a significantinformation gapprevalent among participants with otherwise opposing views towards migration. These findings challenge bifurcated understandings of public opinion towards migration into Europe and point to the existence of vernacular border security imaginaries beyondeither‘closed’or‘open’ borders.

Picking Up the Pieces: Embodied Theory in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power

This article approaches Bessie Head's nove A Question of Power as a work of vernacular theory engaged with the interactions between power, identity, goodness and suffering. The text's difficulties are seen, first, as characterstics of embattled theory, in which there is no possibility of safe remove or calm reflection. Further, these difficulties are read as tactical, engaging the text and its reader in a form of madness which destablizes the realities formed by power. A fundamental tenent of Head's theory, 'be ordinary', is interrogated: how can ordinariness be disentangled from conformity? Being ordinary may be understood as becoming everyone--a process through which Elizabeth's identity is shattered. Schizophrenic breakdown becomes, then, a position from which Elizabeth can theorise the repressive operations of identity and the intimate functionings of power.

‘Unmute This’: Captioning an (audio)visual microgenre

Abstract I argue that ‘Unmute This’ videos constitute an Internet video microgenre, and as particular intersections of behaviour, devices and content, these videos function as an entry point into a number of broader issues within twenty-first–century audio-visual media and participatory behaviour. First, the moment of encounter with an ‘Unmute This’ video post elucidates a reframing of the digital sensorium: how ears and eyes, watching and listening, are configured and reconfigured in tandem with ubiquitous devices like smartphones and earbuds, and via the affordances and behaviours of various digital and social media platforms. Secondly, directives to ‘Unmute This’ point to a distinct mode of online socialization, a particular ‘sociality’ of social media. In collaboration with the devices and platforms of their everyday experience, users build a vernacular theory of media use based on their own behaviours and practices. They then implement that theory while seeking to impart an ideal content experience for others, platform users potentially far removed from the poster/commenter’s own acquaintances. In this article, then, I begin by unpacking the implementation of autoplaying video and the assemblage of the ubiquitous digital sensorium – that is, what sensory behaviours and practices map on to dealing with autoplaying video, at least as suggested by ‘Unmute This’ directives. I then consider ‘Unmute This’ videos as a genre, sketching out some patterns in the form and content of videos that one might be most likely directed to ‘UNMUTE IMMEDIATELY’, and interrogating how such stylistic and formal details might be emergent in response to platform affordances, ubiquitous devices and norms of Internet-mediated sociality. Finally, I suggest a theorization of vernacular media theory, drawn from the particulars of ‘Unmute This’ videos and their creators and disseminators, and I unpack some implications for the kinds of assumptions about sociality, behaviour and trust that are built into such theorizing and user responses to it.

Motherhood Reimag(in)ed: A study of domestic photography in the digital age

This essay presents a reflective and critical investigation into the relationship between photographs of children and maternal experience. It employs Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida as a model for the project’s structure, style, and methodology; accordingly, images represent sites of inquiry and discovery within the text. In 20 sections, images, reflections, theories, and anecdotes are pieced together to perform an analysis of domestic photography in an attempt to access the essence of motherhood and understand what that essence demands of and means for mothers. The critical apparatus consists of scholarship related to vernacular photography, family photography, feminist motherhood, and critical theory. The essay argues that photography in the digital age ultimately dissolves distinctions between mother and child, image and identity, and reproduction and representation. At the same time, it considers the inventive potential of photographs and photographic practices to reclaim and validate personal understandings of motherhood.

Vernacular theories of everyday (in)security: The disruptive potential of non-elite knowledge

Citizens increasingly occupy a central role in the policy rhetoric of British National Security Strategies, and yet the technocratic methods by which risks and threats are assessed and prioritized do not consider the views and experiences of diverse publics. Equally, security studies in both ‘traditional’ and ‘critical’ guises has privileged analysis of elites over the political subject of threat and (in)security. Contributing to the recent ‘vernacular’ and ‘everyday’ turns, this article draws on extensive critical focus-group research carried out in 2012 across six British cities in order to investigate (1) which issues citizens find threatening and how they know, construct and narrate ‘security threats’, and (2) the extent to which citizens are aware of, engage with and/or refuse government efforts to foster vigilance and suspicion in public spaces. Instead of making generalizations about what particular ‘types’ of citizens think, however, we develop a ‘disruptive’ approach inspired by the work of Jacques Rancière. While many of the views, anecdotes and stories reproduce the police order, in Rancière’s terms, it is also possible to identify political discourses that disrupt dominant understandings of threat and (in)security, repoliticize the grounds on which national security agendas are authorized, and reveal actually existing alternatives to cultures of suspicion and unease.

The Significance of Signifying: Vernacular Theory and the Creation of Early African American Literary Study

provocative difference one notices on the cover of the two editions of Henry Louis Gates's groundbreaking book The Signifying Monkey is the change in the subtitle from A Theory of Literary Criticism to A Theory of African American Literary Criticism, a change that the book helped to enact. In the twenty-five years since its original publication, The Signifying Monkey has earned its place as a classic work of and theory. As with any lasting scholarly work, moreover, it did not merely produce clones of its and method but enabled scholars in a host of disciplines in the arts and humanities and beyond to critique and push beyond its original borders. I still have my original copy from 1988, with the light blue (though frayed by now) book cover. In 1988, I had just learned that was a difference between literary criticism and literary theory and, its subtitle notwithstanding, The Signifying Monkey established that not all emanated from Europe, even as it framed my scholarly coming-of-age-in-the-academy story. To open the text and to realize that Africa had was revolutionary and it is good to have an occasion to reflect on how revolutionary it was. While the study of early African American today has expanded--necessarily and rightly--to encompass archival discovery, biography, and print culture, it began, I think, with Gates's concept of signifyin(g). First, two autobiographical digressions. My journey with early African American began with absence. The one black course at Wake Forest University in 1979 began with Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. The prevailing sense was that was there--really. J. Saunders Redding in To Make a Poet Black (1939) had lumped everything before the Harlem Renaissance under the finely wrought phrase literature of necessity. What writing might have existed was utilitarian, functional, certainly to put on college syllabi or inspire analysis. I didn't question this at age twenty because it resonated with my own truncated family history growing up in the South. There was simply a point where was nothing back there and you learned to be content with absence and silence. In 1988, the year of the first edition of The Signifying Monkey, upon entering the Rutgers University library to do research for a paper on Spenser's Fairie Queene (1590), I encountered an entire wall of books on Spenser. On the way out of the library I stopped by the section and saw two shelves, half full or half empty depending on one's temperament, the books held in place by metal bookends. My subject had found me. I walked out of the library, into Murray Hall and Cheryl Wall's office, and announced that I wanted to write my dissertation on early black American literature. Of course, declaring Afro-American before 1865 as an orals area was also problematic, and I was told by the graduate director that was no such thing. After much reading and many visits to the Rutgers and Princeton libraries, I produced a five-page, single-spaced bibliography of slave narratives, poetry, novels, and essays by black writers before Emancipation and I was able to begin reading for orals. I use these two autobiographical touchstones as a way to reflect for a few moments on the significance of The Signifying Monkey to the creation of early African American (meaning pre-Harlem Renaissance) study. Gates's vernacular as an organizing principle within which to sketch--sometimes more successfully than others--an Afro/African American tradition reconfigured black texts away from biographical and sociological contexts to a consideration of the formal properties of African American intertextuality. Often accused by poststructuralists of creating a canon at the very juncture of the demise of the notion of canonicity, Gates did not achieve a construction of an undeconstructable canon so much as he precipitated a move that posited both an African American authorship and readership in one discursive swoop. …

KEARIFAN LOKAL PADA ARSITEKTUR VERNAKULAR GORONTALO: Tinjauan Pada Aspek Budaya dan Nilai-nilai Islam

This paper aimed to reveal the values of local wisdom in the vernacular architecture of Gorontalo. The research was conducted with a qualitative research method in which the data were grouped into physical and non-physical data. Physical data (tangible) is obtained by measuring, drawing, photo recording, and tracking documents, while the non-physical data (intangible) is gained through interviews with ta momayanga (the expert), basi lo bele (home builders), tauwa lo adati (traditional leader), community /religious figure, architects, academicians and through discussions. The data analysis is done by describing and interpreting the empirical evidence through the vernacular theories to figure out the vernacular concept of the stage house of Gorontalo. Furthermore, the theory of the relation of function, form and meaning is used to reveal the concept of local wisdom. The results show that the architecture of the stage houses contains vernacular factors loaded with the values of local wisdom that can be seen from the shape, layout, construction structure and ornamentation. The values of local wisdom was reinforced after the arrival of Islam in Gorontalo around 15-16 century.

Citizenship from the Margins: Vernacular Theories of Rights and the State from the Interwar Caribbean

AbstractThis essay explores debates over political membership and rights within empire from the interwar British Caribbean. Although no formal status of imperial, British, or colonial citizenship existed in this era, British Caribbeans routinely hailed each other as meritorious local “citizens,” demanded political rights due them as “British citizens,” and decried rulers' failure to treat colored colonials equally with other “citizens” of the empire. In the same years, the hundreds of thousands of British West Indians who labored in circum-Caribbean republics like the United States, Panama, Cuba, Venezuela, and Costa Rica experienced firsthand the international consolidation of formal citizenship as a state-issued credential ensuring mobility and abode. This convergence pushed British Caribbeans at home and abroad to question the costs of political disfranchisement and the place of race within empire. The vernacular political philosophy they developed in response importantly complements the influential theories of citizenship and rights developed by European thinkers of the same generation, such as T. H. Marshall and Hannah Arendt.

‘It is a Pokémon world’: The Pokémon franchise and the environment

Originating in 1996, Pokémon has become the second most successful game-based franchise in the world and arguably one of the best-known examples of transmedia storytelling in youth media today. Based around creator Satoshi Tajiri’s love of insect collecting, Pokémon imagines a world where wild creatures exist to be collected, trained and battle with one another. Such an ideology, simultaneously embracing both the conservation and consumption of nature, is emblematic of the larger challenges Japan has had to negotiate as a nation trying to balance economic development and environmental protection. In this way, this article argues that, when subjected to textual analysis, the Pokémon franchise can function as vernacular theory, interrogating the relationship between environmentalism, materialism and sustainable development, a series of popular youth media texts engaging with issues and subjects that are usually reserved for academia.

A note from the editor Hau: Year one

A note from the editor H<scp>au</scp>: Year one

The resonance of captivity

The trope of containment forms a persistent undercurrent in dominant discourses of American freedom. This article describes and performs this trope through the intertextual poetics of stories about captivity, focusing on what the author here calls “resonance,” especially between historical American Indian captivity narratives and UFO abduction accounts. Throughout this article, the idea of the uncanny is used as a way to think through various ethnographic and mediated examples of American ambivalence about the legacy of empire and colonization. The author argues that a vernacular theory of power emerges in people’s sense of ongoing parallels between various narratives of containment in America. The writing mimetically performs, as well as interprets, this narrative resonance.

Introduction: Naturalism and African American Culture

Introduction:Naturalism and African American Culture John Dudley (bio) What—if anything—is African American naturalism? While it is now commonplace to discuss the plural "modernisms" that emerge in the twentieth century, less familiar is the notion of literary "naturalisms." Whether defined through shared philosophical assumptions or a methodology of composition, literary naturalism too often appears as though a monolithic phenomenon, practiced with varying degrees of success or commitment by a disparate group of writers. Indeed, finding mutual aesthetic or ideological expectations among even the most canonical naturalists often proves difficult. Under these circumstances, the prospect of defining African American naturalism as a discrete category offers a particular challenge. While many recent discussions of naturalism have incorporated African American authors, these discussions seldom focus on the unique properties that make these works simultaneously part of both the African American and naturalist traditions. Furthermore, critics have seldom considered the value or utility of considering works by black writers through both scholarly lenses. To the extent that these issues have been addressed, scholars have largely identified naturalist texts by African American authors in one of two ways: as a subset within an expanding naturalist canon, or as transitional efforts that paved the way for more demanding or liberating methods by either these same, or other, African American writers. Both critical approaches offer significant limitations. In a 2007 review essay, Lisa Long usefully addresses the first assumption, questioning the traditional placement of African American authors within the genealogy of literary naturalism, suggesting that "more rigorous interrogations of genre are necessary to make texts by African American authors (and other authors of color) integral to literary histories, rather than relegated to the proverbial [End Page 1] margins when they are added on to the end of literary histories" (172).1 Addressing this point, Jennifer Fleissner, in Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism, notes that "It is a curious fact of American literary history that, while Wright's Native Son and Ann Petry's The Street have been among the twentieth-century works most often discussed in relation to naturalism, this linkage has had little effect on broader theorizations either of naturalism or of African American literature" (276). Likewise, many of the works most frequently cited by critics of naturalism, including the fiction of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and James Weldon Johnson, as well as those later works by Wright and Petry, fit quite differently into the broader narrative of African American literary and cultural history. Within this context, their affinities with literary naturalism assume lesser significance than do their reflection of the historical, cultural, and formal qualities specific to the African American experience, particularly given the recent critical preeminence of vernacular theory.2 Indeed, if American readers and critics have often looked askance at naturalism's ostensible heritage in continental European philosophy and aesthetics, this tendency is compounded by contemporary skepticism toward the Eurocentric master narratives of literary history, as well as toward naturalism's frequent alignment with Social Darwinism and the racial politics of the Jim Crow era. Exploring naturalism's "dual tendencies," toward the sociological study of the group on one hand, and toward the psychological study of the individual on the other, Bernard Bell carves out a place for African American writers within the naturalist canon, and a place for a naturalist approach uniquely shaped by the contours of black culture: When refracted through the double-consciousness and double vision of black American novelists, however, the dual tendencies of naturalism are often suspended in dialectic tension. The sociohistorical source of this tension is the deep-rooted romantic belief of nineteenth-century black Americans in moral responsibility and free will, in a world of purpose and meaning, which contradicted deterministic philosophy and mechanistic despair. As a result, we usually discover a tragicomic vision at the end of Afro-American novels or an ambiguous glimmer of hope beyond despair that concedes life's limitations while celebrating its possibilities. (81) This limited commitment to the perceived deterministic philosophy inherent in naturalism has helped define the role of the "Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem" writers as precursors to the Harlem Renaissance,3 and a similar paradigm applies to the later resurgence...

Print, Performance, Personhood, Polly Honeycombe

Print, Performance, Personhood, Polly Honeycombe David A. Brewer (bio) Print, performance, personhood, Polly Honeycombe. Four terms in my title; not many more pages to sketch out their interrelations. In some ways it helps that the first three are already so familiar to us (or at least we tend to think of them as familiar). Print has been more or less constantly on our scholarly radar for three or four decades; performance for at least two; depending on how we define it, personhood has been a category of interest since the dawn of anthropology, or perhaps is even coterminous with the humanities themselves. But the familiarity of these terms has rarely translated into very satisfying ways of thinking about their relations with one another. In general, we have tended to regard them as either strictly opposed to one another or else as so closely intertwined as to be, in effect, identical. So, for example, print has traditionally been set against performance as letter to its spirit, disembodiment to its corporeality, permanence to its ephemerality. Yet both terms have also been treated as the very negation of personhood, as purveyors of commodified or inauthentically “stagey” selves to be poised against that within which passeth show. More recently, of course, the converse (but structurally identical) view has often appeared: that personhood is nothing but performance, or that the subject positions hailed by various kinds of print are all that historians can ever recover. I am caricaturing, of course, but not, I think, particularly unfairly. For all the ways in which we have been taught to shun binary oppositions, our [End Page 185] professional lives are still full of them, perhaps especially when it comes to thinking about the novel and the theater, which is what most discussions of eighteenth-century print and performance boil down to. Here, both in our scholarship and our curricula, there is a distressing (and distressingly frequent) tendency to go for all too easy, and just plain wrong, stories of supercession, in which, say, the drama is where the action is up to 1740, and then the novel just takes over and we don’t have to worry about the playhouse anymore—often because, either as a corollary or an explanation, people were supposedly externally oriented and “theatrical” up to 1740, and then they turned inward, and the modern subject was born. Again, I caricature, but I have read enough manuscripts and looked at enough syllabi to feel sadly confident that while I am painting with a broad brush, the likeness is more than recognizable.1 Enter Polly Honeycombe. A Dramatick Novel of One Act. This text, an afterpiece by George Colman the Elder, was one of the most successful farces of the entire century. In its first three seasons, it received sixty-three performances in London, and appeared in three London editions. In the same period, it ran through at least four other editions—and, I strongly suspect, performances linked to those editions—in Cork, Dublin, and Edinburgh. And thereafter, it settled into a career as a repertory staple which lasted well into the nineteenth century.2 Now farces are not where we generally go for shrewd theoretical insight. Rather, their appeal typically lies in their slapstick and broad humor, their stock situations and flat characters. But Colman is nothing if not clever, and so I would like to propose that there is a kind of vernacular theory to be drawn from Polly Honeycombe, if we can only open our eyes and prick up our ears long enough to attend to how it unfolds in the time and space of Drury Lane. Farces are, of course, fundamentally plot-driven, and so we should probably begin by just sketching out what happens in Polly Honeycombe. Our heroine is a pert young woman who lives with her parents in the City (i.e., the commercial center of London), and delights in the romance and intrigue offered up by the circulating library. Indeed, she triumphantly proclaims that “A Novel is the only thing to teach a girl life, and the way of the world, and elegant fancies, and love to the end of the chapter.”3 Alas, her parents—a retired...