Akin Adesokan: Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, africa, art, cinema, film, neoliberalism, nollywood, politics, postcolonialism
“What happens when social and political processes such as globalization shape cultural production? Drawing on a range of writers and filmmakers from Africa and elsewhere, Akin Adesokan explores the forces at work in the production and circulation of culture in a globalized world. He tackles problems such as artistic representation in the era of decolonization, the uneven development of aesthetics across the world, and the impact of location and commodity culture on genres, with a distinctive approach that exposes the global processes transforming cultural forms.”
Publisher Indiana University Press, 2011
African Expressive Cultures series
ISBN 0253356792, 9780253356796
230 pages
PDF (updated on 2021-1-28)
Comments (2)Fredric Jameson: The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (1992)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, capitalism, cinema, film, film theory, narrative, philosophy, politics, postmodern
Taking contemporary films from the United States, Russia, Taiwan, France, and the Philippines, The Geopolitical Aesthetic offers a reading of some of the most interesting films of the last decade and a general account of filmic representation in the postmodern world. Fredric Jameson poses some essential questions: How does representation function in contemporary film? How does contemporary cinema represent an ever more complex and international social reality? Jameson’s sophisticated and theoretically informed readings stress the ways in which disparate films—for example, Godard’s Passion, Pakula’s All the President’s Men, Yang’s The Terrorizer, Tahimik’s The Perfumed Nightmare, Tarkovsky’s Andrei Roublev—confront similar problems of representation. The solutions vary widely but the drive remains the same—the desire to find adequate allegories for our social existence.
The Geopolitical Aesthetic, a refinement and development of the arguments put forward in Jameson’s seminal work The Political Unconscious, is crucial reading for everyone interested in both film analysis and cultural studies.
Publisher Indiana University Press, 1992
Perspectives Series
ISBN 0253330939, 9780253330932
220 pages
Ian Buchanan (ed.): Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism (2007)
Filed under book | Tags: · architecture, art, capitalism, cinema, cognition, ideology, literary theory, literature, marxism, modernism, philosophy, politics, postmodern, postmodernism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, urbanism, utopia
Fredric Jameson is one of the most influential literary and cultural critics writing today. He is a theoretical innovator whose ideas about the intersections of politics and culture have reshaped the critical landscape across the humanities and social sciences. Bringing together ten interviews conducted between 1982 and 2005, Jameson on Jameson is a compellingly candid introduction to his thought for those new to it, and a rich source of illumination and clarification for those seeking deeper understanding. Jameson discusses his intellectual and political preoccupations, most prominently his commitment to Marxism as a way of critiquing capitalism and the culture it has engendered. He explains many of his key concepts, including postmodernism, the dialectic, metacommentary, the political unconscious, the utopian, cognitive mapping, and spatialization.
Jameson on Jameson displays Jameson’s extraordinary grasp of contemporary culture—architecture, art, cinema, literature, philosophy, politics, psychoanalysis, and urban geography—as well as the challenge that the geographic reach of his thinking poses to the Eurocentricity of the West. Conducted by accomplished scholars from United States, Egypt, Korea, China, Sweden, and England, the interviews elicit Jameson’s reflections on the broad international significance of his ideas and their applicability and implications in different cultural and political contexts, including the present phase of globalization.
The volume includes an introduction by Jameson and a comprehensive bibliography of his publications in all languages.
Interviewers: Mona Abousenna, Abbas Al-Tonsi, Srinivas Aravamudan, Jonathan Culler, Sara Danius, Leonard Green, Sabry Hafez, Stuart Hall, Stefan Jonsson, Ranjana Khanna, Richard Klein, Horacio Machin, Paik Nak-chung, Michael Speaks, Anders Stephanson, Xudong Zhang
Publisher Duke University Press, 2007
Post-Contemporary Interventions series
ISBN 0822340879, 9780822340874
296 pages