In 1969 Pittsburgh Courier cartoonist Sam Milai published a political cartoon, “September Morn,” a riff on the Paul Chabas painting that depicts a young woman bathing nude. The erotic painting positions the viewer as voyeur who looks on her … Continue reading “Other People's Precarity”
Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism has the uncanny quality of illuminating for readers what we believe we already knew. Her renderings of the affective quality of everyday life at the center of a declining US American empire, offered to us … Continue reading “Optimistic Cruelty”
The subject of the combover stands in front of the mirror just so, to appear as a person with a full head (of hair/ideas of the world). Harsh lighting, back views, nothing inconvenient is bearable in order for the … Continue reading “on (not) mentoring”
Cruel optimism is the provocative concept Lauren Berlant has given to a phenomenon endemic to the present political and affective moment: the holding up of hope as a means of stifling dissent, forestalling change, and ultimately rendering any array of … Continue reading “Cruel Optimism for the Neurologically Queer”
Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism risks thinking the utopian in ways that are both bold and revelatory. My reflections on Berlant’s already influential book open with me taking the liberty of positioning Berlant’s work alongside my own writing on utopia. … Continue reading “Living the Wrong Life Otherwise”
As someone who has been writing about food and eating for a long time, I am most intrigued with Cruel Optimism‘s engagement with eating in the third chapter, “Slow Death: Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency.” My sense is that food exists … Continue reading “How Does It Feel?”
Lauren’s thought is fat: rich and extensive, spreading with pleasure. And I’m headed to murder, fat, and luxury as I seek to fete her. First, however, something in Lauren’s tone is moving. The sly, alluring sadism of optimism … Continue reading “Tone on the Range”
Dana Luciano: I’d like to start by pressing further on your comment (Cruel Optimism 21) about the need to invent new genres for theorizing, genres that can more effectively register, assess and imagine forms of response to the “new ordinary” … Continue reading “Conversation: Lauren Berlant with Dana Luciano”
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”
Click here to read. This dossier takes its cue from one of the Occupy movement’s bedrock slogans, “This Is What Democracy Looks Like” (though this was first nurtured, as were many Occupy paradigms, tactics and customs, in the global … Continue reading “Is This What Democracy Looks Like?”
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”
“Apophatic Sovereignty Before the Law at Guantanamo”
Allen Feldman
Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication
New York University
Date: Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Time: 6-8 PM
Location: 6 East 16th Street, Room 1103
SPONSORED BY THE POLITICS DEPARTMENT, NSSR
