POSTMODERN CULTURE

James Sherry (bio)jamestsherry@verizon.net Abstract Fiona Templeton’s play YOU-The City was originally produced for an audience of one in the Times Square neighborhood of New York City. The theatrical event presents an ecosystem where connections and logistics predominate over character and plot. It establishes a peer relationship between actors, audience, and their interactions that finds expression throughout […]

Nasser S. Hussain (bio)Leeds Metropolitan Universitynassershussain@gmail.com Abstract This essay takes as its focus Ron Silliman’s 1978 marathon street-side reading of his long poem Ketjak in San Francisco, and examines the “special effects” of a poet’s theatre when it is extended beyond the physical and ideological boundaries of the traditional, contemporary poetry reading.    When in the […]

Heidi R. Bean (bio)Bridgewater State Universityheidi.bean@bridgew.edu   Contemporary poet’s theater audiences might best be characterized by community rupture: each member experiences an individual identification in the collective space of the theater. This essay takes a closer look at this audience formation through the work of Carla Harryman, a poet-playwright associated with the San Francisco branch […]

Karinne Keithley Syers (bio)CUNY Graduate Centerkarinnekeithley@gmail.com   Abstract Mac Wellman’s theater is filled by a weird array of voices that are neither strictly human, nor even strictly material. These pseudosolid voices map a topological obsession with holes, hollows, and the filling up of space by emptiness. This essay explores Wellman’s theater as a “strange hole,” where […]

Heidi R. Bean (bio)Bridgewater State Universityheidi.bean@bridgew.edu Laura Hinton (bio)City College of New Yorklaurahinton12@gmail.com     This special issue of Postmodern Culture takes up a subject until now only rarely discussed in the annals of academic scholarship: that of contemporary American poet’s theater. But what exactly is a “poet’s theater”? Is it primarily a type of […]

Dwayne Dixon is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University where he is completing his dissertation on young people in Tokyo and their relations to urban space, changing economic conditions, and visual technologies. Mark Driscoll is an Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of Carolina, Chapel Hill. […]

Scott C. Richmond (bio)Wayne State Universityscr@wayne.edu Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures. Washington: Zero Books, 2010. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, eds., The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Melbourne: re.press, 2011.   In his little book on “the ontology of film,” Stanley Cavell imagines that photography satisfied “the human wish, […]

Daniel Herbert (bio)University of Michigandanherb@umich.edu Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, eds., Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010.    It has been ten years since the publication of Global Hollywood, in which Toby Miller et al. characterize Hollywood not so much as a place but as a fundamentally international organization of […]

Chloë Taylor (bio)University of Albertachloe.taylor@ualberta.ca Lynne Huffer, Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory. New York: Columbia UP, 2010.    Lynne Huffer’s new book, Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory, is a provocative contribution to what she calls the “Foucault machine”—that academic mechanism that is constantly pumping out new translations […]

Mark Driscoll (bio)University of North Carolina, Chapel Hillmdriscol@email.unc.edu Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth. Cambridge: Belknap P, 2011.    A few months ago a graduate student came to see me to discuss her section on postcolonial studies for her Ph.D. exams. Talking about the ways the Japanese colonial past continues to affect everyday life in […]

Hong-An Truong (bio)UNC Chapel Hillhatruong@email.unc.edu Dwayne Dixon (bio)Duke Universitydedixon@duke.edu Abstract   This video is composed of two channels: the first depicts Tokyo and Saigon in small vignettes on a split screen while the second channel is another split screen image of a man and a woman in separate rooms each singing karaoke in a choreographed […]

Alexander García Düttmann (bio)Goldsmiths, University of LondonA.Duttmann@gold.ac.uk Abstract This essay, a conversation setting different ideas against each other, is an examination of how the concept of the contemporary can be used meaningfully, especially in the context of art. Two forms of the contemporary are distinguished. On the one hand, there is the contemporary that remains subject […]

Arkady Plotnitsky (bio)Purdue Universityplotnits@purdue.edu Abstract Taking as its point of departure Jean-François Lyotard’s inaugural argument concerning postmodernity in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, this article considers the character of postmodern thought, especially postmodern theoretical thought, and resistance to it, which has been and remains formidable. The article also offers an assessment of our theoretical […]

Jan Mieszkowski (bio)Reed Collegemieszkow@reed.edu Abstract This essay argues that a demand to be written on is intrinsic to architectural constructs. Beginning with the debates that surrounded the renovation of the Berlin Reichstag and the decision to preserve the graffiti left on it by conquering Soviet soldiers in 1945, wall writing is shown to be a profoundly […]

Eyal AmiranUniversity of California, Irvineamiran@uci.edu    It’s been twenty years of Postmodern Culture. The journal published its first issue in September, 1990, and was then the lone peer-reviewed electronic journal in the humanities. PMC was first edited by John Unsworth and myself, then by Stuart Moulthrop and Lisa Brawley, Jim English, and by myself again. The […]