Bøger af Rodanthi Tzanelli

A potter living in the village of Cairncastle, Northern Ireland, a tourism studies student from London and the Game of Thrones TV show have nothing in common, until a hallucination connects their fortunes. Then, we find out that the protagonists of this story may not be who or what we think they are, or know what they are capable of achieving. Reality begins to be rearranged by an ancient hermaphrodite demon, who wants to claim control over our heroes' lives.

On 16 July 3580 Franz Nelson Möbius, lead scientist of the Gaia III mission on Earth, records a long message on the central database of Mars's Armageddon Colony, where humanity had to relocate when earth was declared unliveable. His message includes a selection of fragments from the 'Virocene': the long epoch humanity and earth entered when COVID-19 was declared a pandemic - one of the many viral onsets that would lead to the human species' relocation to Mars. Lost to plundering, political airbrushing and misplaced activism, the archives of the Virocene are now a strange hybrid of science fiction screenplays, distorted history and records of political espionage previously stored in Langley, London, the metropolitan headquarters of a network of Chinese colonies. Among them, Franz finds the Chronicles of the 'Daisy Rainbow Knights Order', a small anarchist cell comprised of Melissa Dreary, PVJB, SKA and TCE, which believes in a society free of the inequality sustained by authoritarianism and climate change. Its work on the invention of a master vaccine that will free humanity of hatred and illness is plotted in the context of progressive human rights repression and environmental pollution. Willing to risk everything, the cell's members decide to release their vaccine on the rift created between this world and the world of ancestral spirits, where, centuries into the Virocene, the government eliminated black populations protesting against inequality. However, the road to recovery and reconciliation proves as difficult as a coherent reading of the surviving records of the cosmogonic event that the Daisy Rainbow Knights Order set in motion with their actions: the 'Commemoration Troubles' of SARS-26-Covid 3004.The Virus Diaries unfolds as a collection of different stories that converge behind the idea of a social and environmental crisis, as this is narrated by several voices across millennia in the Virocene. Its central plot, which borrows from cinematic and discursive renditions of magical realism, science fiction and memory studies, forms an allegory of real problems that humanity and our planet face today.

A malleable concept, 'Ultraism' was born in early twentieth century Spain as an attempt to innovate poetic techniques in response to the dominant at the time European trends of futurism, dadaism and surrealism. However, 'Ultraism' was already etymologically and contextually embedded in the extreme post-World War I political philosophies of belief and action that would lead to the 'final solution'. Where Ultraist poetry narrated modernity's hypermobile stylistics of the enervating urban life, the anonymous masses of the streets, and the increasing mechanisation of sociality, Hitler's Ultraism would result in the dehumanization of planetary futures. This collection of poems asks a burning question: is the twenty first century harbouring the preconditions for a return of what humanity thought was not going to be repeated again?

The symbol # is one of the most frequently used symbols in social media platforms. Its compact form reduces a variety of interactions and intentions to an image. This collection of poems takes hashtags as a unifying symbol of protest, a way of 'breaking the silence' over injustices against fellow humans and the environment. Each poem comes with its own composite image and hashtag to tell a different story rooted in the specifics of a particular place and time in planetary history.

Maria is a woman whose life has been shaped by domestic violence. This story examines her life in four frames: through her diaries as a student, a letter she writes to a man with whom she becomes obsessed, a second letter that she writes to her abusive boyfriend when she decides to leave him, and some newspaper cuttings narrating a violent incident with her as the primary victim.

Biopolitical Entanglements is the second book of the Trilogy Altermodernities. The Trilogy mobilises the ideas of renown social scientists and two thinkers of modernity with an interest in art, Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin. In the tradition of classical critical theory and the literary and social movement of the New Objectivity, it treats "modernity" as an episodic expression of reality, in diverse "momentary images" or "snapshots". Altermodernities refers to the plurality of these snapshots or frames, and thus the danger of further fragmentation and disconnection, but also the possibility of discovering and/or creating new worlds of belonging. Book 2 uses poetic language to explore the ways humans are subjected to political, cultural and social classification, with a direct impact on diversity, freedom and equal opportunity.

The present book is a collection of ideas that I published in a series of short critical thought pieces between 2009 and 2020 across different blogs. Despite the temporal discrepancies across them, they are naturally organised into four thematic clusters that converge behind a single conceptual umbrella: that of worldmaking.Section one (Gendered Worldmakings: Interplays of Culture with Politics) considers the behaviour and actions of some political leaders and former politicians, who tend to adopt gendered styles in the discharge of their duties or the choices they make, with various consequences of international or cultural significance. Section two (Small Acts with Grave Consequences) does something similar, but selects incidents whose protagonists are not celebrities but common citizens who react to particular pressures. Section three (Markets and Intersectional Worldmakings) considers the worldmaking power of international markets, especially with regards to their ability to trap or liberate human subjects from structures of inequality. The last section (Worldmakings and Sustainability) interrogates the ways organisations and state institutions act to create or sometimes unintentionally destroy liveable environments for world societies.

The present collection emerged from my participation in one of the 2020 Two Sylvias Press Advent Calendar poetry prompts events. Over the same period, I gained audio-visual insight into contemporary and historical MR repertoires through my engagement with a 'Magical Realism' Facebook community of international artistic practitioners and scholars. My interest in the ways contemporary developments in MR art-scenes have enlarged understandings of 'amplification' to include both enhancements of reality and an escape from it (rather than exclusively an attachment to place, as is the case with the original definition of the term), features prominently in Nocturnals. Nocturnals treats place attachment with suspicion for its production of small-mindedness and resentment towards change. At the same time, it does not seek to denigrate belonging, but approach it from the perspective of a world traveller into myth and popular cultural trivia.

Through methodological elaborations on case studies, Tzanelli explains that we have entered a new era of tourism and hospitality mobilities dominated by crises of cultural representation and host presence.

Taking the delayed Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games as a case study, Tzanelli explores mega-event crisis and risk management in the era of extreme urbanisation, natural disasters, global pandemic, and technoscientific control.

This book examines the London 2012 opening and closing ceremonies and the handover to Rio 2016 as articulations of national and cosmopolitan belonging. The ceremonial performances supported imaginative travel and created a tornadoros: an ideal form of 'human' that manipulates audiovisual narratives of culture and identity for global audiences.

Hollywood screening of tourist destinations has generated tourist industries globally, transforming conventional tourist marketing and experience. This book provides a look at the phenomenon of 'cinematic tourism', exploring audiences' perceptions of film and their covert relationship with tourist advertising campaigns.

This book offers a provocative theorization of nationhood, focusing on the key role played by dialogic relations of hegemony, resistance and reciprocity in the birth of the modern European nation. The relationship between Greece and Britain at the end of the nineteenth century uncovers the linguistic construction of nationalism.