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Worlding Public Cultures
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Just Published
Rethinking Lyric Communities
Ed. by Irene Fantappiè, Francesco Giusti, and Laura Scuriatti
In contemporary Western societies, lyric poetry is often considered an elitist or solipsistic literary genre. Yet a closer look at its history reveals that lyric has always been intertwined with the politics of community formation, from the imagining of national and transnational discursive communities, to the use of poetry in episodes of collective action, protest, and social resistance. Poetic forms have circulated between languages and traditions from around the world and across time. But how does lyric poetry address or even create communities — and of what kinds? This volume takes a global perspective to investigate poetic communities in dialogue with recent developments in lyric theory and concepts of community. In doing so, it explores both the political potentialities and the perils of lyric poetry.
2024 | Cultural Inquiry, 30 | 33.5 € (hc) | 17 € (pb)
Displacing Theory Through the Global South
Ed. by Iracema Dulley and Özgün Eylül İşcen
Displacing Theory Through the Global South
calls for reflection on the historical and geopolitical inequalities that have shaped theorization. It asserts that what appears ‘universal’ often involves generalizations that flatten the particular. Critiquing the colonialist, imperialist, and Eurocentric perspectives that have historically impacted theorization in general and, more specifically, knowledge production about the so-called Global South, this volume seeks a different form of engagement that moves beyond such strictures. Featuring essays that unsettle distinctions between the general and the particular, it proposes a commitment to expanding notions of universality, making theorization not only relevant and generative, but ultimately, transformative.
2024 | Cultural Inquiry, 29 | 38 € (hc) | 14 € (pb)
Elena Lombardi
Ulysses, Dante, and Other Stories
Ulysses, Dante, and Other Stories
presents a unique form of creative scholarship. It employs Dante’s late medieval take on Ulysses and his tragic pursuit of ‘virtue and knowledge’ as a prism that refracts an ancient myth of journey and return into a modern story of discovery and nostalgia. Working notes, fragments from Ulysses’ many stories, personal memories, illuminations, and rewritings combine to form a new chain of narratives about the desire to create, the art of travelling, and the will of self-reinvention.
2023 | Cultural Inquiry, 28 | 17 € (pb) | 44 € (hc)
War-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East
Ed. by Umut Yıldırım
War-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East
identifies a conceptual intersection between war, affect, and ecology from the Middle East. It creates a counter archive of texts by ethnographers and artists, and enables divergent worlds to share a conversation through the crevices of mass violence across species. Delving into vital encounters with mulberry trees, wild medicinal plants, jinns, and goats, as well as bleaker experiences with toxic war materials like landmines, this volume expands an ecological sensorium that works through displacement, memory, endurance, and praxis.
2023 | Cultural Inquiry, 27 | 36 € (hc) | 19 € (pb)
Untying the Mother Tongue
Ed. by Antonio Castore and Federico Dal Bo
Untying the Mother Tongue
explores what it might mean today to speak of someone's attachment to a particular, primary language. Traditional conceptions of mother tongue are often seen as an expression of the ideology of a European nation-state. Yet, current celebrations of multilingualism reflect the recent demands of global capitalism, raising other challenges. The contributions from international scholars on literature, philosophy, and culture, analyze and problematize the concept of ‘mother tongue’, rethinking affective and cognitive attachments to language while deconstructing its metaphysical, capitalist, and colonialist presuppositions.
2023 | Cultural Inquiry, 26 | 30 € (hc) | 15 € (pb)
The Case for Reduction
Ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Jakob Schillinger
Critical discourse hardly knows a more devastating charge against theories, technologies, or structures than that of being reductive. Yet, expansion and growth cannot fare any better today. This volume suspends anti-reductionist reflexes to focus on the experiences and practices of different kinds of reduction, their generative potentials, ethics, and politics. Can their violences be contained and their benefits transported to other contexts?
2022 | Cultural Inquiry, 25 | 30 € (hc) | 16 € (pb)
Errans: Going Astray, Being Adrift, Coming to Nothing
Ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer
Today’s critical discourses and theorizing vanguards agree on the importance of getting lost, of failure, of erring — as do life coaches and business gurus. The taste for a departure from progress and other teleologies, the fascination with disorder, unfocused modes of attention, or improvisational performances cut across wide swaths of scholarly and activist discourses, practices in the arts, but also in business, warfare, and politics. Yet often the laudible failures are only those that are redeemed by subsequent successes. What could it mean to think errancy beyond such restrictions? And what would a radical critique of productivity, success, and fixed determination look like that doesn’t collapse into the infamous ‘I would prefer not to’? This volume looks for an answer in the complicated word field branching and stretching from the Latin errāre. Its contributions explore the implications of embracing error, randomness, failure, non-teleological temporalities across different disciplines, discourses, and practices, with critical attention to the ambivalences such an impossible embrace generates.
2022 | Cultural Inquiry, 24 | 29 € (hc) | 14 € (pb)
Openness in Medieval Europe
Ed. by Manuele Gragnolati and Almut Suerbaum
This volume challenges the persistent association of the Middle Ages with closure and fixity. Bringing together a range of disciplines and perspectives, it identifies and uncovers forms of openness which are often obscured by modern assumptions, and demonstrates how they coexist with, or even depend upon, enclosure and containment in paradoxical and unexpected ways. Explored through notions such as porosity, vulnerability, exposure, unfinishedness, and inclusivity, openness turns out to permeate medieval culture, unsettling boundaries, binaries, and clear-cut distinctions.
2022 | Cultural Inquiry, 23 | 32 € (hc) | 17 € (pb)
Over and Over and Over Again: Reenactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory
Ed. by Cristina Baldacci, Clio Nicastro, and Arianna Sforzini
Over the last twenty years, reenactment has been appropriated by both contemporary artistic production and art-theoretical discourse, becoming a distinctive strategy to engage with history and memory. As a critical act of repetition, which is never neutral in reactualizing the past, it has established unconventional modes of historicization and narration. Collecting work by artists, scholars, curators, and museum administrators, the volume investigates reenactment's potential for a (re)activation of layered temporal experiences, and its value as an ongoing interpretative and political gesture performed in the present with an eye to the future. Its contributions discuss the mobilization of archives in the struggle for inclusiveness and cultural revisionism; the role of the body in the presentification and rehabilitation of past events and (impermanent) objects; the question of authenticity and originality in artistic practice, art history, as well as in museum collections and conservation practices.
2022 | Cultural Inquiry, 21 | 35 € (hc) | 22 € (pb)
Queeres Kino / Queere Ästhetiken als Dokumentationen des Prekären
Ed. by Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky and Philipp Hanke
Wenn queeres Kino und queere Ästhetiken das Prekäre dokumentieren, dann intendiert dies auch eine Revolution im Symbolischen. Oder anders formuliert: ihr ästhetisches Unterfangen, Rahmungen zum Vorschein zu bringen, ohne sie zu wiederholen, erweist sich, wie die hier versammelten Beiträge namhafter Film-, Medien- und Queertheoretiker*innen zeigen, als prekäre Form der Dokumentation. Die Beiträge bieten dabei zugleich einen Einblick in den gegenwärtigen Stand des queeren Kinos – seiner Filme, Videos und visuellen Installationen.
2021 | Cultural Inquiry, 22 | 25 € (pb) | 39 € (hc)