New Materialisms

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liedeke Plate
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Theory And Criticism ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Death Of The Author ◽  
Empirical Approaches

New materialism (and new materialisms) is part of the material turn currently sweeping through the humanities and social sciences and entails a paradigm shift toward a more material(ist) understanding of social and cultural life. From new materialist thinking, new (empirical) approaches, methods, methodologies and objects of study ensue. The new materialisms emerge from feminism, philosophy, and science and technologies studies and critique the foundational binaries of modern thought, especially the nature/culture, object/subject, human/thing dualisms, whose anthropocentric biases are seen to have led to the current ecological and civilizational crisis and the incapacity to think through and adequately engage with them. Proposing to give things their due, new materialisms are interested in “the force of things” and debate “the agency of things.” The post-anthropocentric interest in the vitality of things parallels the non-dualist modes of thinking of indigenous ontologies on which some new materialisms may in fact be based, but whose influence has so far insufficiently been acknowledged. At its most radical, new materialism is posthumanist, part of the nonhuman turn. A number of scholars have sought to bring the insights and concerns of new materialism(s) into the fields of literary theory and criticism, developing “thing” or “stuff” theory and seeking to conceptualize and operationalize a new literary materialism. For this, they draw on insights from a range of disciplines, including material culture studies, book and print culture studies, and comparative textual media studies. Given the importance attached to the linguistic turn as the cultural moment and textual approach in relation to which new materialists agonistically construct the newness of their material(ist) endeavors, the publication context of Roland Barthes’s famous essay “The Death of the Author”—the multimedia magazine in a box Aspen 5+6—is highlighted as an important site for critiquing a nonmaterial approach.

Words or Things in American History?

2020 ◽  
pp. 15-34
Author(s):  
Steven Conn
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Social History ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Material Culture Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter uses John Kouwenhoven’s 1963 essay “American Studies: Words or Things” as a touchstone to examine the history of the relationship between material culture and the study of the past. Material culture studies promised access both to the history of those who left no written records and to a different kind of cognitive insight than could be gained from traditional historical sources. While this was of a piece with the development of the “new social history” in the 1960s, the chapter looks back to the early twentieth century to put Kouwenhoven’s call for the study of material culture in a longer historical context, and it traces what happened to material culture studies over the last half-century. The chapter suggests that despite its many accomplishments, the use of material culture remains on the edges of most historical work, especially after historians took the linguistic turn, which refocused their attention on texts rather than things.

Material Evidence in the History Curriculum in Eighteenth-Century Göttingen

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter N. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
History Curriculum ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
University Of Göttingen ◽  
The University ◽  
Required Courses ◽  
Material Evidence

This chapter considers the “material turn” in the latter half of the eighteenth century, particularly when the first academic curriculum for material culture studies was created. It happened at the University of Göttingen, a new foundation (from 1734, formal opening in 1737) that was envisioned as the model of an enlightened university, and was, during the last decades of the eighteenth century, an extraordinary hothouse for humanities research. With a professionalized training regimen for historians came the idea of required courses, and the auxiliary sciences of history were born. This curriculum lingered at Göttingen for a long time, though little effort has been made to study its development.

New Materialisms

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Diener
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Theory ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Middle Ground ◽  
Western Thought ◽  
Human Relations ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
Material Turn

Abstract This review considers work in the field of new materialisms, bearing in mind the wide range of approaches that make up the broader ‘material turn’ in critical and cultural theory but focusing in particular on the feminist new materialist conversation that draws on the work of Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, Samantha Frost, Rosi Braidotti, and others. It notes the new materialisms’ continued heterogeneity and describes a turn to method in the field, one that enables a vibrant dialogue between applied and theoretical scholarship. The pieces reviewed share an engagement with that trend. They also illustrate two important problems that the field has engaged with in 2019. The first question concerns the new materialisms’ politics of citation, and the need for a decolonial practice that engages with indigenous and non-western thought. The second is the question of a new materialist ontology: how to reconcile the tension between ‘flat’ and differentiated, subject-oriented accounts of agency, significance, and value. The new materialists this review follows seek a middle ground, one that allows them to emphasize the political stakes of human and more-than-human relations. Following the introduction, sections are: 1. New Materialist Practice, Feminist Ends; 2. Indigeneity and the New Materialisms; 3. Sensation in a Material World; 4. A Cartography of the New Materialisms; 5. Reading's Situation; 6. Exclusion and Activist New Materialism; and 7. The Things We Imagine.

scholarly journals Materiality and Classics: (Re) Turning to the Material

2019 ◽  
Vol 139 ◽  
pp. 222-232
Author(s):  
Lilah Grace Canevaro
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Art History ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Material Object ◽  
Material World ◽  
New Directions ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
The World ◽  
Material Turn

AbstractIn this article I review 11 books published since 2010 that bring the ‘material turn’ to classics. Some start from emic ancient perspectives on matter and materiality; others take their cue from current theoretical models such as those of the new materialisms. All offer new insights into our relationship with the material world and consider the material object as active within different paradigms. In reviewing these important volumes together, I question entrenched boundaries: from those between (sub-)disciplines to those between human and non-human agents. I explore the material turn not as an isolated phenomenon, but, first, as a cyclical ‘re’-turn and, second, as an integrated set of ideas incorporating (to name but a few strands) aesthetics, cognitive humanities, embodiment, affect and the senses. The books reviewed range from literary studies to archaeology to art history to material culture to heritage. Taken together, they set new directions for classics, and indeed for our thinking about our place in the world.

scholarly journals American Art Matters: Rethinking Materiality in American Studies

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-84
Author(s):  
Erika Doss
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Technological Process ◽  
Art History ◽  
American Studies ◽  
American Art ◽  
Keynote Lecture ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
American Art History

Abstract The “material” turn has steadily gained currency in cultural studies and the humanities, with scholars increasingly attentive to theorising things and examining their presence, power, and meaning in any number of fields and disciplines. This essay stems from the keynote lecture given at the conference MatteReality: Historical Trajectories and Conceptual Futures for Material Culture Studies, held on March 23, 2017, at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Freiburg. Focused in particular on the meaning of materiality in American art history and American Studies today, it opens with an examination of the factors of monetisation and mobility and segues to a consideration of more efficacious ways to assess, theorise, and critique the material turn. Two areas that are particularly relevant in terms of rethinking, and mediating, materiality in American art and American Studies are those of technological process and affect: how things are made and how things make us feel.

Decolonial Erotics: Power Bottoms, Topping from Bottom Space, and the Emergence of a Queer Sexual Theology

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 286-296
Author(s):  
Robyn Henderson-Espinoza
Keyword(s):  
Liberation Theology ◽  
Feminist Theology ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Power And Control ◽  
Queer Theology ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Sexual Theology ◽  
And Control

Indecent Theology has provided both Feminist Theology and Liberation Theology with new contours for rethinking bodies, power, dominance, and submission. With regard to the logic of dominance that radically pushes the margins of the margins into a form of inexistent living, I suggest a material turn to rethink the contours that are evoked with Indecent Theology. Materialism has long stood as a philosophy opposing the overwhelming dominance of language and the poststructuralist emphasis that has emerged as the ‘linguistic turn’. Considering ‘new materialism’ as a theoretical platform to reread Indecent Theology provides theologies and ethics an opportunity to re-imagine indecent methodologies through indecency, a sort of ethical perversion. I suggest an indecent turn in mobilizing materialism and kink as theories to reread indecent theology for a productive queer materialist sexual theology. The feminist liberation theology of Marcella Althaus-Reid pushes both feminism and liberation into new contours of power and submission and initiates new contours of queer sexuality into the discourse. When analysing Althaus-Reid’s work, we are brought to attention to the margins of the margins, an awareness of the struggle for power and control by those deemed less than. There are contours of power at and in the margins of the margins, those who occupy ‘bottom space’. From a kink/BDSM orientation, I propose to reread Alrhaus-Read’s feminist liberation theology as decolonial erotics that helps to generate a productive materialist queer sexuality. The overarching methodology of this article is a quasi-auto ethnographic investigation into the ways in which the contours of race, class, gender, sex, sexuality, and ability affect power and submission and in turn reframes both queer theology and queer sexuality that is rooted in the living out of a very particular theology and ethics, which is rooted in queer relating. Theology can neither materialize in a vacuum nor in isolation. An indecent turn to(wards) a queer sexual theology that is rooted in a queer relationality demands attention to the interdependence of queer relating that is materialized through the interdependency of the growing queer desires of bodies, power, dominance, and submission.

Karl Lamprecht and the “Material Turn” c. 1885

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter N. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Strong Influence ◽  
Academic Work ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Material Sources ◽  
Material Turn

This chapter looks back to an eminent predecessor of these twentieth-century antiquarians and artists, Karl Lamprecht (1856–1915). Arguably the most important historian for the twentieth century and yet one of the least known to non-specialists, Lamprecht fills the role of grandfather to the formulators of “material culture studies”—and father to the pioneers who wrote history from material sources without giving their vision a name. Today, Lamprecht is mostly recognized for the debate about his cultural history, the Lamprecht-Streit, which was as much a debate about what history should constitute as it was a debate about whether Lamprecht was a good historian. Yet Lamprecht's career goes further than that, as this chapter shows, and his academic work has left a strong influence on the twentieth-century proponents of material culture discussed in the previous chapter.

Longing for agency: New materialisms’ wrestling with despair

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brigitte Bargetz
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
Critical Theories ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Opening Up

In recent years, feelings such as melancholia, paranoia, despair and political depression have been deemed distinctive political moods, also within critical theories. This, the author argues, is the affective landscape for understanding and situating new materialist endeavours. As much as new materialist approaches have been praised and even celebrated lately, they have also provoked highly controversial reactions and evoked questions, such as: Why a new materialism, why at this historical moment? And what is so attractive about this material turn? In this article, the author argues that new materialist approaches seek to oppose the contemporary affective condition of political depression, despair and hopelessness by desiring and mobilizing to achieve a different political future, one that ultimately relates to care and commonality as well as to (new) modes and modalities of political agency. However, while new materialist approaches doubtlessly provide engaged and powerful inventions and interventions within contemporary struggles for agency, the author also demonstrates the risk of depoliticization inherent in this longing for something different, which can ultimately even compromise opening up possibilities for agency. This article, thus, aims to discuss new materialist concerns within the context of contemporary political and theoretical landscapes in order to better decipher the new materialist signals of our times, but also to critically push further the possibilities for political agency within feminist theory, at times even against all odds.

How Far Are We from a Hot Bath?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lilah Grace Canevaro
Keyword(s):  
New Materialism ◽  
Gender Theory ◽  
Thing Theory ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
The Status ◽  
Hot Bath

Chapter 1 places this book against a backdrop of New Materialisms, using the framework of Thing Theory in its various manifestations to unpack seemingly innocuous but in reality surprisingly loaded terms like ‘object’ and ‘agent’, and raising the question of boundaries: to what extent does the Materialist slogan ‘Things are us!’ apply to Homer? It explores the issue of representation and the substantial difference it makes to the status of objects and the location of agency, and tackles the productive tension between this book’s core approaches: Gender Theory and New Materialism. The historical and social ramifications of the book are addressed, and some initial dichotomies and categories begin to be drawn out, with a particular focus on memory.

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