Lisa Lowe: The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1700s, 1800s, abolitionism, asia, black people, capitalism, colonialism, dialectic, governance, history, imperialism, indigenous peoples, intimacy, knowledge, labour, liberalism, marxism, narrative, race, slavery, trade, united states, violence
“In this uniquely interdisciplinary work, Lisa Lowe examines the relationships between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries, exploring the links between colonialism, slavery, imperial trades and Western liberalism. Reading across archives, canons, and continents, Lowe connects the liberal narrative of freedom overcoming slavery to the expansion of Anglo-American empire, observing that abstract promises of freedom often obscure their embeddedness within colonial conditions. Race and social difference, Lowe contends, are enduring remainders of colonial processes through which “the human” is universalized and “freed” by liberal forms, while the peoples who create the conditions of possibility for that freedom are assimilated or forgotten. Analyzing the archive of liberalism alongside the colonial state archives from which it has been separated, Lowe offers new methods for interpreting the past, examining events well documented in archives, and those matters absent, whether actively suppressed or merely deemed insignificant. Lowe invents a mode of reading intimately, which defies accepted national boundaries and disrupts given chronologies, complicating our conceptions of history, politics, economics, and culture, and ultimately, knowledge itself.”
Publisher Duke University Press, Durham, NC, June 2015
ISBN 9780822358633, 0822358638
319 pages
Discussion: Gayatri Gopinath, Alyosha Goldstein, Moon-Ho Jung, Stephanie Smallwood (book roundtable at ASA Conference, Toronto, 2015, video).
Reviews: John Holmwood (Theory, Culture & Society, 2016), Betty Joseph (American Historical Review, 2016), Hossein Ayazi (Qui Parle, 2016), Michael Gaffney (Journal of American Studies, 2016), Adam Nemmers (Women’s Studies, 2016), Marion C. Rohrleitner (Pacific Historical Review, 2016), Lance Bertelsen (Modern Philology, 2017), Harrod J Suarez (Melus: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S., 2017), Jesse van Amelsvoort (Nexus Instituut, n.d.), Hadley Howes (Antipode, 2020).
Kenneth Goldsmith: Seven American Deaths and Disasters (2013)
Filed under fiction | Tags: · language, mass media, media, tragedy, united states
“What are the words we use to describe something that we never thought we’d have to describe? In Seven American Deaths and Disasters, Kenneth Goldsmith transcribes historic radio and television reports of national tragedies as they unfurl, revealing an extraordinarily rich linguistic panorama of passionate description. Taking its title from the series of Andy Warhol paintings by the same name, Goldsmith recasts the mundane as the iconic, creating a series of prose poems that encapsulate seven pivotal moments in recent American history: the John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and John Lennon assassinations, the space shuttle Challenger disaster, the Columbine shootings, 9/11, and the death of Michael Jackson. While we’ve become accustomed to watching endless reruns of these tragic spectacles—often to the point of cliché—once rendered in text, they become unfamiliar, and revealing new dimensions emerge. Impartial reportage is revealed to be laced with subjectivity, bias, mystery, second-guessing, and, in many cases, white-knuckled fear. Part nostalgia, part myth, these words render pivotal moments in American history through the communal lens of media.”
Publisher powerHouse Books, New York, 2013
ISBN 9781576876367
176 pages
via Marcell Mars
Interview (Christopher Higgs, Paris Review, 2013)
Reviews: Dwight Garner (NYT, 2013), Douglas Luman (Found Poetry Review, 2014).
EPUB (updated on 2015-10-9)
Comment (0)Gerald O’Grady, Bruce Posner (eds.): Articulated Light: The Emergence of Abstract Film in America (1995)
Filed under catalogue | Tags: · abstract cinema, avant-garde, experimental film, film, film history, united states
Catalogue for “the most comprehensive retrospective of abstract films ever mounted”, covering the period 1920-1970, curated by Bruce Posner.
With texts by Bruce Posner, Gerald O’Grady, Vlada Petric, Fernand Léger, Oskar Fischinger, Harry Smith, Raúl Ruiz, Stan Brakhage, Cecile Starr, Mary Ellen Bute, Dwinell Grant, William Moritz, Robert Haller, James Whitney, Rani Singh, Hy Hirsh, James Sibley Watson Jr., and a filmography and bibliography compiled by Bruce Posner and Sabrina Zanella-Foresi.
Publisher Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge, MA, and Anthology Film Archives, New York, 1995
16 pages
via Vasulka.org