POSTMODERN CULTURE

David Marriott (bio) University of California, Santa Cruz marriott@ucsc.edu   Abstract This essay discusses “My Calling Cards, Series 1#” by artist and philosopher Adrian Piper. It examines the notion of etiquette in her work more generally, and discusses why the question of xenia and xenophobia remains crucial to Piper’s art as well as to her Kantian aesthetics. The […]

 John Beer is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State University. The author of The Waste Land and Other Poems (Canarium, 2010), which received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, he has published literary and dramatic criticism in the Brooklyn Rail, Chicago Review, Review of Contemporary Literature, and […]

Amy Abugo Ongiri (bio) University of Florida aongiri@ufl.edu A review of Sohail Daulatzai, Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012.  Sohail Daulatzai’s Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America ambitiously addresses a highly impactful topic in African American culture […]

Susanne E. Hall (bio) California Institute of Technology seh@hss.caltech.edu A review of Paula Rabinowitz and Cristina Giorcelli, Exchanging Clothes. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012.  “Who are you wearing today?” The question is an awards show cliché, asked of every female celebrity making her way down a red carpet. The repeated asking and answering of […]

Claire Colebrook (bio) Penn State University ccolebrook@me.com A review of Eleanor Kaufman, Deleuze, The Dark Precursor: Dialectic, Structure, Being. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012.  There is quite a lot one might say, and that has already been said, about Gilles Deleuze. In the wake of the first wave of general guides and overviews, there are […]

Sarah Brouillette (bio) Carleton University sarah_brouillette@carleton.ca A review of Loren Glass, Counterculture Colophon: Grove Press, the Evergreen Review, and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2013.  In Counterculture Colophon Loren Glass argues that in the 1950s and 60s Grove Press was singularly important in bringing into the mainstream writing that was once considered […]

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:     This one’s black. As outside chance. Also bigger and unruly. I don’t want to be locked up! I can’t quit thinking  tone Notebook hair mood Doubt or teeth. Truth under fingernail. Tighter interval Dirt under Don’t eat that! But I am […]

John Beer (bio) Portland State University chrysostom2@gmail.com  Judith Goldman (bio) University at Buffalo judithgo@buffalo.edu  In her audacious and accomplished 2009 debut Delinquent, transgressor extraordinaire Mina Pam Dick lovingly travestied the lingoes and conceptual frameworks of analytic philosophy, particularly the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, even as she demonstrated an adept’s awareness of the intricacies of identity […]

Chris Coffman (bio) University of Alaska Fairbanks cecoffman@alaska.edu  Abstract This essay tracks Slavoj Žižek’s reading of Jacques Lacan in order to expose and critique Žižek’s continued investment in a heterosexist account of sexual difference. Attending to Žižek’s politicized recasting of Lacan’s argument that one can traverse—and thereby alter—the fundamental fantasy that structures subjectivity, this essay argues […]

Amit S. Rai (bio) Queen Mary, University of London a.rai@qmul.ac.uk   Abstract This essay uses media assemblage analysis to pose ontological questions of the embodiment of mobile phone technologies. The name for this throughout much of South Asia is jugaad, meaning a pragmatic workaround. In other words, this essay analyzes mobile telephony in India by […]

Herschel Farbman (bio) University of California, Irvine hfarbman@uci.edu     Abstract This article looks at the peculiar way the live streaming video of BP’s broken well in the Gulf of Mexico connected its viewer, in the spring and summer of 2010, to a part of the earth where he or she could not be—where nobody […]

Kirsten Locke (bio) University of Auckland k.locke@auckland.ac.nz   Abstract This paper explores the notion of infancy in the work of Jean-François Lyotard as a state of unadorned openness and receptiveness to sensorial affect. It identifies debt and reparation as the conceptual thread running throughout his exploration. The purpose of the paper is to explore the […]

Nitzan Lebovic Lehigh University nil210@lehigh.edu   Abstract Biopolitical cinema, exemplified by Michael Winterbottom, Roland Emmerich, and others, has questioned the ability of representative democracy to handle a catastrophic situation. Beyond that, biopolitical film has undermined the moral and political legitimacy of the democratic system as a whole. This article examines the formative moments of biopolitics: its […]