This essay develops a theoretical framework of biopolitical performance, or more simply bioperformance, with which to approach the 1957 televised broadcast of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s A Drum Is a Woman. Presented on the drama anthology program The United States Steel Hour, … Continue reading “Madam Zajj and US Steel: Blackness, Bioperformance, and Duke Ellington’s Calypso Theater”
Issue: Issue 113 Winter 2012
Rap and Revolt in the Arab World
Nouri GanaThis essay approaches the phenomenon of Arab rap music as an emergent form of cultural and communal intelligibility and solidarity; its simultaneous influence on and indebtedness to global hip-hop and youth cultural movements has transformed it into an increasingly transnational … Continue reading “Rap and Revolt in the Arab World”
Targeting Translation: Counterinsurgency and the Weaponization of Language
Vicente RafaelMuch has been written about the vicissitudes of counterinsurgency as a crucial complement to counterterrorism in the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan since 2005. Such a strategy necessarily depends on the mastery of local languages by way of translation. … Continue reading “Targeting Translation: Counterinsurgency and the Weaponization of Language”
The Enregisterment of Colla in a Bolivian (Camba) Comedy
Karl SwineheartColla and camba are two racialized, regionally indexical, and contrasting stereotypic characterological figures of Bolivian national personhood. This paper examines the enregisterment of an other-centric rendition of the colla register through an analysis of stylized performances within a Bolivian (camba) comedy, NEO. Like other … Continue reading “The Enregisterment of Colla in a Bolivian (Camba) Comedy”
Hinging on Exclusion and Exception: Bare Life, the US/Mexico Border, and Los que nunca llegarán
Abraham AcostaThis essay argues that recent developments at the US/Mexico border, specifically the passing of SB 1070 and HB 2281 in Arizona, have irrevocably altered an already conflicted political and sociocultural landscape, prompting an unprecedented crisis of resistance for which a … Continue reading “Hinging on Exclusion and Exception: Bare Life, the US/Mexico Border, and Los que nunca llegarán”
Imagination: Cinematic, Anthropological
Anand PandianThis essay arises from anthropological fieldwork on the making of south Indian popular cinema. Ethnographic attention is lent to a series of cinematic situations to further relay the intertwining of cinematic and anthropological imagination. The essay is composed as a … Continue reading “Imagination: Cinematic, Anthropological”