POSTMODERN CULTURE

Matt Tierney (bio) and Mathias Nilges (bio) As we were composing the introduction to this special issue of Postmodern Culture, a Missouri grand jury delivered its decision not to indict a white police officer, Darren Wilson, for the killing of an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown. This decision, baffling to many, was announced in a […]

Mikko Tuhkanen (bio) Abstract During the half century of his writing, Leo Bersani has worked toward an onto-ethics/aesthetics of fascination in which cinema plays an important part. With the help of Proust, Sade, Caravaggio, Pasolini, and others, he outlines two modes of fascination: the spectator’s active exploration and evisceration of an enigmatic world, and his […]

Ackbar Abbas Ackbar Abbas is Professor of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine. Previously, he was Chair of Comparative Literature and Co-Director of The Centre for the Study of Globalization and Cultures at the University of Hong Kong. Recent works include essays on Chinese cinema and urbanism, the art of Liu Dan and Antony Gormley, and […]

Carey James Mickalites (bio) A review of Van Tuinen, Sjoero, and Arjen Kleinherenbrink, editors. The Politics of Debt: Essays and Interviews. Zero Books, 2020. As I write this, governments the world over are calling boisterously for the “reopening” of global, national, and local markets in the face of the biggest pandemic since the 1918 influenza. […]

Daryl Maude (bio) A review of Akiko Shimizu, “‘Imported’ Feminism and ‘Indigenous’ Queerness: From Backlash to Transphobic Feminism in Transnational Japanese Context.” Lecture and Seminar, University of California, Berkeley, 27-28 Jan. 2020 What does it mean to be trans in Japan, or in Japanese? How does it correspond with transness in North America or in […]

Johanna Isaacson (bio) A review of Jenkins, Jerry Rafiki. The Paradox of Blackness in African American Vampire Fiction. Ohio UP, 2019. At the mention of the word “vampire,” a waxen figure of European origin leaps to mind. However, Jerry Rafiki Jenkins insists in The Paradox of Blackness in African American Vampire Fiction that vampire myths […]

Ackbar Abbas (bio) The world is an enigma, Nietzsche said, but an enigma composed of its various solutions (qtd. in Calasso 3). In much the same way, we can say that fascination in cinema is an enigma made up of its various interpretations. The essays in this special issue of Postmodern Culture, each brilliant in […]

Kwasu D. Tembo (bio) Abstract In the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Lacan, the term fascination – which connotes being immobilized, charmed, enchanted, attracted, enraptured, seized, captured, and/or dazzled by the power of the gaze – also evokes dynamics of power. Fascination is associated with the hypnotic bondage of love that paralyzes critical faculties […]

Calum Watt (bio) Abstract This essay offers a commentary on the French experimental director Philippe Grandrieux’s shooting diary for his film Malgré la nuit (2016). Grandrieux’s quotations from Maurice Blanchot and the diary’s appearance in the journals Trafic and Mettray activate intertextual references relating to Blanchot’s ideas about fascination and inspiration. The essay argues that […]

E. L. McCallum (bio) Abstract Michael Snow’s canonical experimental film Wavelength is commonly understood to model cinematic apparatus theory. This essay reads Wavelength through a different apparatus, one used in physics’ well-known double-slit experiment to demonstrate the wave theory of light. Reading the film via this quantum apparatus orients us to a different mode of […]

Eugenie Brinkema (bio) Abstract This essay argues that Pascal Laugier’s 2008 new-extremist horror film Martyrs generates a formal violence coextensive with the aesthetic fascinations that structure it, rendering an account of violence that is monstrative and creative. Reversing theoretical presumptions that horror is a mixed sentiment comprised of fascination and disgust, or that horror names […]

Mikko Tuhkanen, Guest Editor (bio) Their enchantment is disenchantment.- Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (297) Fascination is our sensation.- Mel & Kim, “Respectable” Speaking to students at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles in 1975, Ingmar Bergman evokes familiar tropes when he enthuses about cinema’s ability to prompt a cognition closer to dream logic […]

John Freeman is a Renaissance scholar with a wide range of research and teaching interests, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet to Thomas More’s Utopia to digital and popular culture (such as the MTV series “Catfish”). His recent publications include “Tupac’s ‘Holographic Resurrection’: Corporate Takeover or Rage against the Machinic?” (CTheory) and “Shakespeare’s Imitation Game, or: How Do […]

Mikko Tuhkanen (bio) A review of Watt, Calum. Blanchot and the Moving Image: Fascination and Spectatorship. Legenda, 2017. In The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (2002), Mary Ann Doane not only maps the new technology’s historical context—masterfully analyzing cinema’s place in the constellation of such nineteenth-century discourses as thermodynamics, eugenics, statistic, and […]

Andrew Kingston (bio) A review of Crockett, Clayton. Derrida after the End of Writing: Political Theology and New Materialism. Fordham UP, 2017. Clayton Crockett has written and edited multiple books on theology, psychoanalysis, and contemporary continental theory. Derrida after the End of Writing represents his first text explicitly dedicated to the work of Jacques Derrida. […]

Brian Glavey (bio) A review of Tyler Bradway, Queer Experimental Literature: The Affective Politics of Bad Reading. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. For better or worse, queer theory has always had, if not a bad reputation, at least a reputation for badness. Animated by a commitment to subversion and non-conformism on the one hand, and organized around […]

Marina Peterson (bio) Abstract “Indefinite urbanism” is the aerial drawn into perceptibility through noise, glass resonating with aircraft noise and infrastructural edge spaces that remain as traces of a history of now inaudible sound. As the age of commercial air travel dawned in Southern California, those living around Los Angeles International Airport turned toward the […]

Steven Swarbrick (bio) Abstract This essay offers a critique of the vitalist turn in queer and ecological theory, here represented by the work of Karen Barad. Whereas Barad advances an image of life geared towards meaningful connection with others, human and nonhuman, Deleuze advances an a-signifying ontology of self-dismissal. The point of this essay isn’t […]