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Building on analyses of the relationship between race, aesthetics and politics, the volume elaborates on the epistemological possibilities arising from collaborative and decolonial methodologies at the intersection of ethnography, art, performance and the urban space. It moves from practice-based and collaborative research with young Mapuche and mestizo artists and activists in Santiago (Chile), drawing together a range of different materials: from artworks to theatre and performance; from graphics to audio and visual materials. An edited collection, the book is constructed by shifting between different authorships and changing perspectives from the individual to the collective. This approach, while to a certain extent within the classical structure of editors/authors, plays with the roles of researcher/research participant, highlighting the ambiguities, frictions and exchanges involved in this relationship. Elaborating on indigenous knowledge production, the book thus addresses the possibility of disrupting the social and material landscape of the (post)colonial city by articulating meanings through artistic and performative representations. As such, the essays contained in the book put forward alternative imaginations constructed through an aesthetic defined by the Mapuche concept of champurria (‘mixed’): a particular way of knowing and engaging with reality, and ultimately an active process of home- and self-making beyond the spatialities usually assigned to colonised bodies and subjects. Actively engaging with current debates through collective writing by indigenous people raising questions in terms of decolonisation, the book stands as both an academic and a political project, interrogating the relationship between activism and academia, and issues of representation, authorship and knowledge production.
. The issue was primarily one of BBC policy, dictated by nervousness about being seen to undermine the British film industry. This was a fear that only gradually receded and which seems quaintly groundless in an era of cross-media production. 04-chap 03 26/2/07 82 10:14 am Page 82 Tony Garnett Kes: social realism and critical naturalism – the development of a political aesthetic Based on A Kestrel for a Knave, a novel by Barry Hines, Kes marks a pivotal moment in Garnett’s career (the same is true of the careers of its director, Ken Loach, and cinematographer
The physical world is experienced and understood through the five senses. This is especially true of the interior where decorators and designers, both professional and amateur, have long experimented with, embraced and harnessed new materials, objects and technologies to enhance or heighten sensory awareness and wellbeing. Yet a discussion of sight, touch, smell, hearing and taste is too often overlooked in the histories and historiography of interior design and design history. Interiors do not solely exist in abstract or inchoate form: it is through the senses that the body navigates and negotiates the experiences that interior design offers. Drawing from fields including design history, design studies and sensory studies, The senses in interior design charts the somewhat fragmentary histories of how the senses have been mobilized within various forms of interior. Grouped into three thematic clusters exploring sensory politics, aesthetic entanglements and sensual economies respectively, the contributions brought together in this volume shed light on sensory expressions and experiences of interior design throughout history. Examining domestic and public interiors from the late sixteenth century to today, the authors give back to the body its central role in the practices, understanding and uses of interiors. In so doing, they explore fundamental considerations about identities, social structures and politics that reveal the significance of the senses in all aspects of interior design and decoration.
This chapter discusses how by the end of the nineteenth century Victorian dantismo began to be practised and understood as a form of public outreach and engagement as well as of political and cultural exchange on a national and international level. It retraces the dynamics of disciplinary specialisation of Dante studies from the perspective of the scholarly activities of the Oxford, London and Manchester Dante Societies established between 1876 and 1906, and the creation of Dante Collections at University College London and at the John Rylands Library. It illustrates how these professional institutions were responsible for catalysing the methodological turn from dantophilia to dantismo, and the institutionalisation of the teaching of Dante in academic (established and extramural) courses. This reconstruction rests on the perusal of archival holdings including the Societies’ records, minute books, teaching syllabi and transcriptions of lectures as witnesses of the diverse political, aesthetic, and ideological make-ups of the Societies as well as of the cultural exchange nationally and internationally. The chapter pays particular attention to figures such as Henry Clark Barlow, Edward Moore, Paget Toynbee, Charles Tomlinson and Azeglio Valgimigli for the way their personal trajectories exemplified the historical and socio-cultural evolution of the Dante enthusiast into a Dante scholar: a turn that fostered the conditions for the creation of one of the most eminent scholarly Dante traditions outside Italy.
This chapter explores the pro-uprising images that workers shared over WhatsApp and imagine. I argue that their political aesthetic is distinct from “Arab Spring artwork” displayed in regional and Western capitals – art produced by self-recognised (and institutionally-recognised) “artists.” When I talked to my informants about why they shared any given image, it was evident some idea of political “intentionality” is at the heart of aesthetic choices. We learn in this chapter that workers are not interested in pictures that (re-)present aspects of regime violence – like scenes of smashed bodies, or mutilated flesh. Rather, images set as profile pictures on WhatsApp, or passed to each other over Bluetooth, appeared to always intend to do something within the context of an emergent revolutionary commitment. They broke with the barrier of fear and asserted everyday people as a new political force. Worker artwork brashly traverses prior limits of what could be said and not said. And this was achieved not by presenting visceral images capturing of regime violence, but by superimposing a donkey’s face over the president’s head.
There is no soundtrack is a specific yet expansive study of sound tactics deployed in experimental media art today. It analyses how audio and visual elements interact and produce meaning, drawing from works by contemporary media artists ranging from Chantal Akerman, to Nam June Paik, to Tanya Tagaq. It then links these analyses to discussions on silence, voice, noise, listening, the soundscape, and other key ideas in sound studies. In making these connections, the book argues that experimental media art – avant-garde film, video art, performance, installation, and hybrid forms – produces radical and new audio-visual relationships that challenge and destabilize the visually-dominated fields of art history, contemporary art criticism, cinema and media studies, and cultural studies as well as the larger area of the human sciences. This book directly addresses what sound studies scholar Jonathan Sterne calls ‘visual hegemony’. It joins a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship that is collectively sonifying the study of culture while defying the lack of diversity within the field by focusing on practitioners from transnational and diverse backgrounds. Therefore, the media artists discussed in this book are of interest to scholars and students who are exploring aurality in related disciplines including gender and feminist studies, queer studies, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, urban studies, environmental analysis, and architecture. As such, There Is No Soundtrack makes meaningful connections between previously disconnected bodies of scholarship to build new, more complex and reverberating frameworks for the study of art, media, and sound.
At a time when monolingualist claims for the importance of ‘speaking English’ to the national order continue louder than ever, even as language diversity is increasingly part of contemporary British life, literature becomes a space to consider the terms of linguistic belonging. Bad English examines writers including Tom Leonard, James Kelman, Suhayl Saadi, Raman Mundair, Daljit Nagra, Xiaolu Guo, Leila Aboulela, Brian Chikwava, and Caroline Bergvall, who engage multilingually, experimentally, playfully, and ambivalently with English’s power. Considering their invented vernaculars and mixed idioms, their dramatised scenes of languaging – languages learned or lost, acts of translation, scenes of speaking, the exposure and racialised visibility of accent – it argues for a growing field of contemporary literature in Britain pre-eminently concerned with language’s power dynamics, its aesthetic potentialities, and its prosthetic strangeness. Drawing on insights from applied linguistics and translation studies as well as literary scholarship, Bad English explores contemporary arguments about language in Britain – in debates about citizenship or education, in the media or on Twitter, in Home Office policy and asylum legislation – as well as the ways they are taken up in literature. It uncovers both an antagonistic and a productive interplay between language politics and literary form, tracing writers’ articulation of linguistic alienation and ambivalence, as well as the productivity and making-new of radical language practices. Doing so, it refutes the view that language difference and language politics are somehow irrelevant to contemporary Britain and instead argues for their constitutive centrality to the work of novelists and poets whose inside/outside relationship to English in its institutionalised forms is the generative force of their writing.
describe all the work he has been responsible for). Garnett has been consistently selfaware of this struggle, placing it in a political, aesthetic and moral context; he is both a practitioner and an intellectual – indeed, a practising intellectual in that his thinking is most evident in his practice. He has also pursued the realist project across the developing forms of television drama, from the single play to the mini-series to the renewable, multi-episode series/serial hybrid. ‘Social realism’ comes laden with expectation, and popularly connotes a drama that reveals
kind of human being. I will look at how the material environment was shaped and conceptualized with the intent to forge this New Man.Through a series of case studies, I present Soviet architecture – the nexus between utopia and reality, power and individual agency – as episodic history. These case studies span consecutive but radically different political, aesthetic, and economic milieus – the New Economic Policy, followed by the Five-Year Plans. Historians have come up with a variety of ways to distinguish between these periods. One is to summarily characterize the
political aesthetic defined by the Mapuche concept of champurria (‘mixed up’); this concept, which originally referred to racial mixture in a pejorative way, has recently been appropriated by Mapuche living in urban contexts and constantly negotiating between different identities and senses of belonging, and, often coming from mixed families, claiming their own mestizaje or miscegenation as something creative, heterogeneous, yet still entirely indigenous, as will be discussed further in this introduction. What we refer