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Just Published
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)
Just Published
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)
Franziska Koch Worlding Love, Gender, and Care: Shigeko Kubota’s Sexual Healing
Shigeko Kubota’s pioneering video Sexual Healing (1998) presents an ambivalent take on her disabled husband Nam June Paik in physical therapy. Accompanied by Marvin Gaye’s titular pop song, it considers love, sex, and care in old age within the much-debated field of Fluxus collaborations, and its ideal of working together as equals when fusing life and art. Worlding Love, Gender, and Care delves into the four decades of Kubota and Paik’s time together, reflects on feminist worlding, and investigates the vital contribution of female Fluxus artists to art history.
2023 | Worlding Public Cultures | 10 € (pb)
Carine Zaayman Anarchival Practices: The Clanwilliam Arts Project as Re-imagining Custodianship of the Past
Where is the past? It is not really behind us, but with us, constantly imagined and re-imagined in public discourse through historical narrations. Using the Clanwilliam Arts Project as a case study, this volume is founded on the ‘anarchive’, a conceptual constellation that positions the past in relation to the present, bringing into view strategies to facilitate remembering beyond the colonial archive.
2023 | Worlding Public Cultures | 10 € (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)
The Work of World Literature Ed. by Francesco Giusti and Benjamin Lewis Robinson
The contentious discourse around world literature tends to stress the ‘world’ in the phrase. This volume, in contrast, asks what it means to approach world literature by inflecting the question of the literary. Debates for, against, and around ‘world literature’ have brought renewed attention to the worldly aspects of the literary enterprise. Literature is studied with regard to its sociopolitical and cultural references, contexts and conditions of production, circulation, distribution, and translation. But what becomes of the literary when one speaks of world literature? Responding to Derek Attridge’s theory of how literature ‘works’, the contributions in this volume explore in diverse ways and with attention to a variety of literary practices what it might mean to speak of ‘the work of world literature’. The volume shows how attention to literariness complicates the ethical and political conundrums at the centre of debates about world literature.
2021 | Cultural Inquiry, 19 | 12.50 € (pb) | 25.00 € (hc)