This essay explores the acoustic regime of two twentieth-century internment camps: Boven Digoel (1927–43), in the Dutch East Indies, and Terezín or Theresienstadt (1942–45), in the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, today the Czech Republic. Based on archival … Continue reading “Thick Whisper and Thin Victory: Concentration Camps' Contribution to Modern Acoustics”
Issue: Issue 122 Spring 2015
"Whether or Not Words Were Said…": Chai Soua Vang, Gran Torino, and the Problem of Historicizing Racialized Violence
Catherine FungThis article cross-reads the 2005 trial of Chai Soua Vang, a Hmong American man who was convicted of murdering six Caucasian hunters in Wisconsin, with the 2008 film Gran Torino, a story of a Korean War veteran who mentors a … Continue reading “"Whether or Not Words Were Said…": Chai Soua Vang, Gran Torino, and the Problem of Historicizing Racialized Violence”
Cinema, Transgenesis, and History in The Skin I Live In
Carla MarcantonioPedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In is a film whose glossy surface belies its investment in history—cinema’s history, Spain’s history, transnational history. It tracks a correspondence among cinema, transsexuality, and medium specificity through the trope of transgenesis: skin … Continue reading “Cinema, Transgenesis, and History in The Skin I Live In”
Infrastructural Drift in Seismic Cities: Chile, Pacific Rim, 27 February 2010
Stephanie C. KaneRetrospective narrations by maritime authorities trace decision making in the compressed time frame between earthquake and tsunami, when geological events literally rupture the skein of communication devices and flows that animate social life and disaster relief. Bringing together ethnography … Continue reading “Infrastructural Drift in Seismic Cities: Chile, Pacific Rim, 27 February 2010”
Vaso de Leche [photographs of performance]
Cecilia VicuñaPhoto documentation of a site-specific performance in Bogota, 1979.
In the Life: Black Women and Serial Murder
Terrion L. WilliamsonThis article uses the occasion of the Don Imus dustup in 2007, in which the radio shock jock became the subject of intense public censure after referring to the Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos” on air, to … Continue reading “In the Life: Black Women and Serial Murder”