After the opening shot of a dilapidated house, Beasts of the Southern Wild begins mise-en-scène with a tight close-up of the house’s interior, the screen filled with small brown crossed legs, a cluttered dirty floor, and a small brown hand holding a … Continue reading “Beasts of the Southern Wild – The Romance of Precarity I”
This film should have been a choice text for me; I love post-apocalyptic stories that end badly. But the heaps of critical praise the film has garnered don’t even seem to notice it as a dystopia. “This movie is a … Continue reading “Beasts of the Southern Wild – The Romance of Precarity II”
Lauren Berlant’s most recent book, Cruel Optimism (Duke UP, 2011), undertakes the ambitious and necessary project of thinking the political present. Cruel Optimism attends closely to what goes undernoticed about living in relation to waning or worn-out models of legibility, sovereignty and sustainability. This dossier assembles … Continue reading “Cruel Optimism: New Social Text Periscope Dossier”
Click here to read. On the one year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, Social Text is pleased to debut “Is This What Democracy Looks Like?” a collection of original essays on horizontalism in theory and practice. Written and edited by faculty and graduate … Continue reading “Social Text Periscope on OWS”
Work Reviewed: Holland, Sharon Patricia. The Erotic Life of Racism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2012. xii + 168 pp. Then she touched me, and then I did stop dead. […] I do not know. I know only that my entire … Continue reading “The Touch of Flesh with Flesh”
I just untied my copy of Critical Making, edited by Garnet Hertz. When I pulled it from the hand addressed brown paper envelope I was startled by its handmade, twine-wrapped beauty. It has the spirit of an old school zine, … Continue reading “Untying Critical Making”
CUNY Graduate Center, Center for Humanities Apr 11, 2013, 6:30pm, room 9206 Education outside of a traditional classroom is on the rise. Again. Spurred on by DIY culture, a tidal wave of student debt, and changes in technology, new non-traditional … Continue reading “Experiments in Extra-Institutional Education”
Bishnupriya Ghosh’s new book Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular is a thorough but at times confounding account of the Icon in our media-saturated global age. In her book, Ghosh treats dominant and popular representations of three women — Mother … Continue reading “On Icons and Their Critics”
We love our little objects. Perhaps you are reading this on yours, pinching and stroking the screen to enlarge the text. These physical interactions with the things themselves, with the actual media of media, are part of the history of … Continue reading “The Sixties in a Cube”
Graduate Center, CUNY — Center for Humanities Nov 26, 2012, 6:30pm | The Skylight Room (9100) Ashley Dawson, Matthew K. Gold, Michael Mandiberg, Tavia Nyong’o What are the radical possibilities of open access publishing? This panel will bring together a … Continue reading “Digital Publishing Today”
The digital material presented here is meant to supplement the article “Hip Hop from ’48 Palestine: Youth, Music, and the Present/Absent” from the current issue of Social Text (30.3, Fall 2012). An abstract for the article can be read below.
Sex work, which I knew nothing about while standing with deep longing and trepidation moving in my body, was not what I intended to provide. No, I wanted to perform love work and traveling to the netherworld of ambiguity was, in my mind, well-worth it. I sought after liberation: freedom from the anxieties of heteronormativitity. And, if I am honest, I wanted to have boundless sex with another man in a “world” that did not create me, but in one that I created. And isn’t it the case that we, queers, are often in search of other worlds because we have been shamed in this one? Read more
Zone Books is pleased to announce the publication of Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism, edited by Meg McLagan and Yates McKee. Political acts are encoded in medial forms–feet marching on a street, punch holes on a card, … Continue reading “Sensible Politics: Book Release”
