Bøger i Critical Perspectives on Theory, Culture and Politics serien

The notion of the Anthropocene is founded on the premise that traces of human activity on the earth will remain legible in the geological strata for millions of years to come, showing evidence of an anthropogenic ''signature'' inscribed in the rock by the human species. Spectrality and Survivance shows how embedded in this understanding of the Anthropocene is a speculative and specular gesture that transforms the notion of the future into an anthropocentric reflection of the present, prohibiting any true engagement with the possibility of a non-anthropocentric and post-anthropocenic world. In this volume, Marija Grech develops an alternative conceptual paradigm from which to think the Anthropocene beyond any limited notion of human language, human thought, human systems of meaning, or even a human world. Grech considers how the geological trace of the Anthropocene might be said to ''survive'' outside of the possibility of any human readership, and how the very survival of the human in and beyond the Anthropocene might necessitate such thought.

This book rethinks the history of colonisation by focusing on the formation of the European aesthetic ideas of indigeneity and blackness in the Caribbean, and how these ideas were deployed as markers of biopolitical governance.

Offers an original analysis of the role of journals in the institutionalization of critical and cultural theory in Canada and the USA.

Contested Borders broadens understandings of dissident sexualities in Africa through focusing specifically on the Maghreb. It examines new representations of same-sex desire emerging in new francophone life writing, memoir, and literature from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia.

Chinese Subjectivity and the Beijing Olympics develops the Foucauldian concept of productive power through examining the ways in which the Chinese government tried to mobilize the population to embrace its Olympic project through deploying various sets of strategies and tactics.

Looking at a number of memorials, memory sites and artworks relating to the Holocaust the book uses this idea of synaesthetic perception to explore trauma, memory and the production of art in relation to painful memories.

In its unique analysis of resistance, this book sets up a new methodology with which to study the settler colonial project in Palestine. Levering the insight that Zionism evolved as a project of 'double elimination' - of both the Native and shared life - the book sees to inform political work and political imagination.

This book explores the Romanian Revolution in relation to the ongoing questions around its authenticity. It offers a critical theoretical re-examination of the revolution using the concept of performative contradiction as an analytic tool.

Provides a materialist analysis of the field of vaginal microbicides highlighting the problems of materialising the concept of empowerment through biomedical process, while utilising the microbicide as an analytical ally in a provocative debate with contemporary feminist theory on materiality.

Explores the impact of nostalgia on the construction of individual and collective identity for diasporic South-Asians in the UK and US. It argues that in the postcolonial context the affect produced by this nostalgia can have radical potential as a form of resistance.

This is a study of vulnerability as a dominant cultural discourse today, especially as it manifests in ';extreme cultures'. These are cultural practices and representations of humans in risky, painful or life-threatening conditions where the limits of their humanity are tested, and producing heightened sensations of pain and pleasure. Extreme cultures in this book signal the social ontology of humans where, in specific conditions, vulnerability becomes helplessness. We see in these cultures the exploitation of the body's immanent vulnerability in involuntary conditions of torture or deprivation, the encounter with extreme situations where the body is rendered incapacitated from performing routine functions due to structural conditions or in a voluntary embracing of risk in sporting events wherein the body pits itself against enormous forces and conditions.The Extreme in Contemporary Culture studies vulnerability across various conditions: torture, disease, accident. It studies spaces of vulnerability and helplessness, the aesthetics and representations of vulnerability, the extreme in the everyday and, finally, the witnessing of (in)human extremes. Extreme cultures suggest shared precarity as a foundational condition of humanity. A witness culture emerges through the cultural discourse of vulnerability, the representations of the victim and/or survivor, and the accounts of witnesses. They offer, in short, an entire new way of speaking about and classifying the human.

The attention economy is a notion that explains the growing value of human attention in societies characterised by post-industrial modes of production. In a world in which information and knowledge become central to the valorisation process of capital, human attention becomes a scarce and hence increasingly valuable commodity. To what degree is the attention economy a specific form of capitalist production? How does the attention economy differ from the industrial mode of production in which Marx developed his critique of capitalism? How can Marx's theory be used today despite the historical differences that separate industrial from post-industrial capitalism?The Attention Economy argues that human attention is a new form of labour that can only be understood through a systematic reinterpretation of Marx. It argues that the attention economy belongs to a general shift in capitalism in which subjectivity itself becomes the territory of production and exploitation of value as well as the territory of the reproduction of capitalist power relations.

The image of the Caribbean figure has been reconfigured by photography from the mid-19th century onwards. Initial images associated with the slave and indentured worker from the locations and legacies associated with plantation economies have been usurped by visual representations emerging from struggles for social, political and cultural autonomy. Contemporary visual artists engaging with the Caribbean as a 21st century globalised space have focused on visually re-imagining historical material and events as memories, histories and dreamscapes. Creole in the Archive uses photographic analysis to explore portraits, postcards and social documentation of the colonial worker between 1850 and 1960 and contemporary, often digital, visual art by post-independent, postcolonial Caribbean artists. Drawing on Derridean ideas of the archive, the book reconceptualises the Caribbean visual archive as contiguous and relational. It argues that using a creolising archive practice, the conjuncture of contemporary artworks, historical imagery and associated locations can develop insightful new multimodal representations of Caribbean subjectivities.

Gunther Anders's prolific philosophy of technology is undergoing a major revival but has never been translated into English. Prometheanism mobilises Anders's pragmatic thought and current trends in critical theory to rethink the constellations of power that are configuring themselves around our increasingly ';smart' machines. The book offers a comprehensive introduction to Anders's philosophy of technology with an annotated translation of his visionary essay ';On Promethean Shame', part of The Obsolescence of Human Beings 1 published in 1956.The essay analyses feelings of curtailment, obsolescence and solitude that become manifest whilst we interact with machines. When technological solutions begin to make humans look embarrassingly limited and flawed, new emotional vulnerabilities are exposed. These need to be thought, because our wavering confidence leaves us unprotected in an ever more (un)transparent, connected yet fractured world.

When ';revolution' becomes a recurring theme in mainstream culture, where do we look for the tools for a critical engagement with the present? Addressing the link between allegory and cultural critique in contemporary culture and resisting the thematic abstraction of sexy, fast, revolutionary content, this book suggests that one way is to pay attention not so much to content as to form. Culture Control Critique provides an analysis of how representations of political systems in contemporary mainstream culture may be understood not so much by looking at their apparent critical message but by shifting our critical gaze to an underlying and recurring political logic that controls the desire for political change.

Proposes new ways of 'thinking trauma', foregrounding the possibility of healing and the task that the critical humanities has to play in this healing. Where is its place in an increasingly terror-haunted world, where personal and collective trauma is as much of an everyday occurrence as it is incomprehensible?

This book engages with the question of making sense of seeing in today's technologically dominated world. It does so by exploring the notion of the 'hypermodern', a term which is used to capture the drive in contemporary culture to achieve ever greater speed and efficiency.

Bringing together both established and emerging scholars from critical and cultural theory, literature, philosophy, and theology, this book examines the intersection of economics and religion.

This book examines the relevance of Francois Laruelle's innovative notion of non-standard philosophy to critical and constructive discourses in the humanities, bringing together essays from prominent Anglophone scholars of Laruelle's work and includes a contribution from Laurelle himself.

This book examines the relevance of Francois Laruelle's innovative notion of non-standard philosophy to critical and constructive discourses in the humanities, bringing together essays from prominent Anglophone scholars of Laruelle's work and includes a contribution from Laurelle himself.

Partitions and their Afterlives engages with political partitions and how their aftermath affects the contemporary life of nations and their citizens.

Partitions and their Afterlives engages with political partitions and how their aftermath affects the contemporary life of nations and their citizens.

Bringing together both established and emerging scholars from critical and cultural theory, literature, philosophy, and theology, this book examines the intersection of economics and religion.