scholarly journals Brandon is a Network Not a Name: Fictocriticism & the Cyberfeminist Art of Shu Lea Cheang

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zach Pearl

The cyberfeminist art practice of Shu Lea Cheang evinces a particular relation of generative complicity with the art object—what Canadian cultural theorist Jeanne Randolph referred to as “the amenable object” (1983). Randolph, who pioneered “ficto-criticism”—a method of writing that intentionally blurs theory, poetics and narrative—wrote of the amenable object as an incomplete creation whose “ambiguous elements” allow the viewer to make “subjective interventions” in the work. Likewise, Cheang’s participatory installations and non-linear online narratives operate as amenable object-texts, requiring the user to not only navigate but contribute to them through acts of critical play and improvisation. Across Cheang’s oeuvre is also a nomadic politics of border-crossing that resonates as loudly with Donna Haraway’s cyborg as it does with the experimental feminist writing that became associated with fictocriticism. In this paper, I examine correlations between fictocritical approaches and formal tactics in Cheang’s studio practice to consider them as interrelated cyberfeminist strategies of resistance and dissent; ones that arose in counterpoint to the proliferation of deterministic, technocapitalist narratives. In particular, I look at how the fragmentation, partiality and double-voicing seen in many fictocritical texts were echoed in the user-experience of Cheang’s Brandon (1998), a sprawing network that posited the queer body as a collective series of actions. I conclude by looking at how these same techniques recall methods from Dadaism and Surrealism in the early 20th century and reflect on the recurrent role of indeterminacy in art and literature more generally to stem the entropy of binary paradigms.

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 38-47
Author(s):  
Chinpulat Kurbanov ◽  

The author in this scientific article examines the stage-by-stage development and formation of customs in Turkestan in the second half of the 19th -early 20th centuries. The author studied the history of customs in Turkestan and its role in establishing a single customs line in the future with neighboring khanates. The author focuses on the role of Russia in the establishment of a single customs line and the development of customs in Turkestan


2021 ◽  
pp. 135406612110338
Author(s):  
Joanne Yao

The Antarctic Treaty System (ATS), created in 1959 to govern the southern continent, is often lauded as an illustration of science’s potential to inspire peaceful and rational International Relations. This article critically examines this optimistic view of science’s role in international politics by focusing on how science as a global hierarchical structure operated as a gatekeeper to an exclusive Antarctic club. I argue that in the early 20th century, the conduct of science in Antarctica was entwined with global and imperial hierarchies. As what Mattern and Zarakol call a broad hierarchy, science worked both as a civilized marker of international status as well as a social performance that legitimated actors’ imperial interests in Antarctica. The 1959 ATS relied on science as an existing broad hierarchy to enable competing states to achieve a functional bargain and ‘freeze’ sovereignty claims, whilst at the same time institutionalizing and reinforcing the legitimacy of science in maintaining international inequalities. In making this argument, I stress the role of formal international institutions in bridging our analysis of broad and functional hierarchies while also highlighting the importance of scientific hierarchies in constituting the current international order.


2015 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 94-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Semi Purhonen

This article first examines the role of the concept of generation in Pierre Bourdieu’s work. It shows that Bourdieu’s usage of the concept of generation varied throughout his œuvre and that Bourdieu seldom if ever used the concept in the same sense as Karl Mannheim and many subsequent sociologists who have understood generation as a potential source of identity and political mobilization. However, and second, the article argues that Bourdieu’s sociology does have much to offer for the sociological study of generations, but only if we stop concentrating on those rare passages in which he explicitly used the word ‘generation’. We should focus instead on his more general approach to the genesis of social groupings, classification struggles and the difficult relationships of representation. The application and extension of Bourdieu’s ideas demonstrated here can provide a welcome antidote to so-called generationalism – a simplified and exaggerated picture of generations, which dates back to early 20th-century European intellectuals and which can still be found in today’s popular discourses as well as in academic studies.


2022 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 109-119
Author(s):  
S. E. Azhigali ◽  
L. R. Turganbayeva

This is the fi rst description of a key Kazakh recent permanent settlement at Donyztau, in the northern Ustyurt. Such sites, evidencing major historical processes during the transition of nomadic pastoralists to a semi-sedentary lifestyle (mid-19th to early 20th century), are known as “ritual and housing complexes” (RHC). Kainar, a highly representative site, is viewed as a socio-cultural phenomenon and an integral architectural and landscape ensemble. The excavation history of RHCs in the Donyztau area and their evolution are discussed, and the role of ascetics such as Doszhan-Ishan Kashakuly is described. We highlight separate parts of the complex (the settlement and cemetery) and their elements. The architecture of the RHC is reconstructed with regard to structure, function, and continuity with the landscape. The layout of the site as a whole and of the madrasah with its typical elements are compared with those of similar sites in Central Asia and Kazakhstan. A reconstruction of the complex is proposed and the function of public halls is interpreted. The role of the cemetery and of its parts in the structure of the RHC is evaluated; the evolution of its spatial organization is traced. Types of memorial complexes are listed in terms of harmony with the landscape, archaic beliefs, architecture, and style, specifi cally stone carving. The historical and cultural signifi cance of Kainar as a source of knowledge about the transition to a semi-sedentary way of life and the Islamization of the steppe is discussed.


2007 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 11-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol Terry

With a detailed but not site-specific building program, the librarians at Rhode Island School of Design made the case for a new library three times the size of the existing facility. The site became specific with the donation of an early 20th-century grand banking hall. This paper addresses the role of the librarian in the design and construction process and includes an analysis of the way the new library meets the program objectives. In the early 1990’s after several early attempts to resolve the library’s space constraint at Rhode Island School of Design, the librarian was given a useful bit of advice: Stop trying to find the space. You must focus first on the program. What is it that you really need?


2002 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-150
Author(s):  
Kamran Arjomand

Intellectual history of modernism in Iran has proved to be a subject of lively academic interest. The role of Iranian exiles in late 19th and early 20th century, in particular, has drawn considerable scholarly attention. In recent years, the Iranian press in exile has also become a focus of academic scrutiny. In Germany, Anja Pistor-Hatam has studied the Iranian intellectual community in Istanbul around the newspaper Akhtar (Nachrichtenblatt, Informationsbörse und Diskussionsforum: Ahtar-e Estānbūl (1876–1896)—Anstöße zur frühen persischen Moderne [Münster, 1999]) and Keivandokht Ghahari's doctoral dissertation is concerned with ideas of nationalism and modernism among Iranian intellectuals in Berlin as reflected in the journals Kâveh, Iranshahr, and Ayandeh (Nationalismus und Modernismus in Iran in der Periode zwischen dem Zerfall der Qāğāren-Dynastie und der Machtfestigung Reżā Schah [Berlin, 2001]). In this context, the bibliography of Kâveh is thus a welcomed contribution.


Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (9) ◽  
pp. 519
Author(s):  
Nancy Rushohora ◽  
Valence Silayo

More often than not, Africans employed local religion and the seemingly antagonistic faith of Christianity and Islam, to respond to colonial exploitation, cruelty, and violence. Southern Tanzanians’ reaction during the Majimaji resistance presents a case in point where the application of local religion, Christianity, and Islam for both individual and community spiritual solace were vivid. Kinjekitile Ngwale—the prominent war ritualist—prophesied that a concoction (Maji) would turn the German’s bullets to water, which in turn would be the defeat of the colonial government. Equally, Christian and Islamic doctrines were used to motivate the resistance. How religion is used in the post-colonial context as a cure for maladies of early 20th-century colonialism and how local religion can inspire political change is the focus of this paper. The paper suggests that religion, as propagated by the Majimaji people for the restoration of social justice to the descendant’s communities, is a form of cultural heritage playing a social role of remedying colonial violence.


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