scholarly journals Ghosts of Britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st century folk horror revival

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-93
Author(s):  
Alberto Andres
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Theoretical Ground ◽  
Late Capitalism

This article aims at investigating the emergence of the American folk horror revival of the 2010s, focusing on texts such as Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019) or Robert Eggers’s The VVitch (2015). This survey of the folk horror revival will inevitably lead us to the genre’s past, particularly to the so-called Unholy Trinity, comprised by three films released in Great Britain during the late 1960s and early 1970s. This temporal and geographical dislocation will be situated against a larger background of cultural production, arguing that the appearance of the folk horror revival sheds some light on the debate on nostalgia and pastiche as the predominant artistic modes under late capitalism. The notion of hauntology, as explored by Jacques Derrida, Mark Fisher, or Katy Shaw, will be used throughout the essay in order to provide a form theoretical ground on which this debate can take place.

The Golden Age of Stealing: An Analysis of Queer Appropriation and Exploitation in 21st Century Popular Culture

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian Deveau
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Consumer Society ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
Queer Culture ◽  
Rapid Spread ◽  
Queer Art

Popular media is a series of appropriations and citations of cultural productions, refurbishing past ideas to fit the mold of the present. Representation of art works and cultural products influence the visibility of the groups who produce for popular culture. While social media and contemporary art allow for the rapid spread of ideas through the internet and advertisements, too often are ideas stolen for profit for large companies by exploiting the artistic integrity of uninitiated groups. Queer culture often appropriates historical methodologies for a reclamation of the past to create representation for the future. Queer artists produce landmark aesthetics in visual culture, shaping contemporary fashion trends and artistic movements in the 21st Century. While appropriation as a methodology is not inherently problematic, exploitation develops when artists are neglected credit for works which are exploited for capitalist gain.The research paper The Golden Age of Stealing: An Analysis of Queer Appropriation and Exploitation in 21st Century Popular Culture analyzes the relationship between the appropriation and exploitation of Queer art, using the 1980’s and 90’s club kids as a platform for queer aesthetic production. The paper outlines the dichotomy between representation of queer peoples in the 1990’s and the aesthetics produced to question popular representations and roles within a western consumer society. Using queer performative theories including utopianism, performativity, and disidentification, the paper distinguishes why the stealing of queer art for profit is inherently dangerous and regressive for the queer community, silencing queer voices and perpetrating a heteronormative narrative of cultural production.

scholarly journals The Forms of Value: Problems of Convertibility in Field Theory

2012 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-41
Author(s):  
Göran Bolin
Keyword(s):  
Field Theory ◽  
Production Process ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Full Extent ◽  
Media Environments ◽  
Specific Capital ◽  
Capital Value

Media production in late capitalism is often measured in terms of economic value. If value is defined as the worth of a thing, a standard or measure, being the result of social praxis and negotiation between producers and consumers in various combinations, it follows that this worth can be of other kinds than the mere economic. This is, for example, the reasoning behind field theory (Bourdieu), where the generation of field-specific capital (value) is deeply dependent on the belief shared by the competing agents within the field. The full extent of the consequences of such a theory of convertibility between fields of cultural production, centred on different forms of value, is, however yet to be explored. This is the task of this article. It especially focuses on how value is constructed differently depending on the relations of the valuing subject to the production process, something that becomes highly relevant in digital media environments, where users are increasingly drawn into the production process.

Twenty-First-Century Realism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulka Anjaria
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Indigenous Literature ◽  
Oral Storytelling ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Political Conservatism ◽  
Literary Histories

Realism has a bad reputation in contemporary times. Generally thought to be an outdated mode that had its heyday in Victorian fiction, the French bourgeois novel, and pre-revolutionary Russian literature, literary histories tend to locate realism’s timely end in the ferment of interwar modernism and the rise of the avant-garde. Outside of the West, realism might be said to have met an even worse fate, as it was a mode explicitly presented to colonized societies as a vehicle of modernity, in opposition to what were deemed the poetic excesses, irrational temporalities, and/or oral-storytelling influences of indigenous literature. Yet despite this sense of realism’s outdatedness and political conservatism, the first decade-and-a-half of the 21st century has witnessed, across a wide range of literature and cultural production, what might be seen as a return to realism, not simply as a resistance to today’s new culture of heterogeneity and digitization but as a new way of imagining literary and political futures in a world increasingly lacking the clear-cut lines along which politics, history, and capitalism can be imagined. The arc of 21st-century realism can be seen through contemporary debates around the term, suggesting that considering 21st-century realism not as a residual mode or grouping of texts but as a particular perspective on literary futures—as the coming together, for instance, of unresolved and newer conflicts over relations of power and the politics of knowledge—offers a different story of global form making.

Belonging and language

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-182
Author(s):  
Chris Peers
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
Early Childhood Education ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
National Curriculum ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Childhood Education ◽  
Existentialist Philosophy ◽  
Philosophical Debates

This article contributes to a growing debate within the field of early childhood education about the concept of ‘belonging’. It continues from earlier discussions that commented on the adoption of Belonging as a key term in the development of a national curriculum for the early years in Australia in 2009, as well as increasingly common references to belonging in various aspects of debate within the field. The article focuses specifically on the idea of belonging as it has emerged within existentialist philosophy in the 20th century, and more recent post-structuralist theories, especially the work of Jacques Derrida. The article ties belonging to language as a means of redefining approaches in early childhood education to the notions of place and context, so as to more rigorously connect ‘belonging’ to the philosophical debates of the 21st century.

Science Fiction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerry Canavan
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Popular Narrative ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Marvel Cinematic Universe ◽  
Political Economic

Science fiction (SF) emerges as a distinct literary and cultural genre out of a familiar set of world-famous texts ranging from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) to Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek (1966–) to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (2008–) that have, in aggregate, generated a colossal, communal archive of alternate worlds and possible future histories. SF’s dialectical interplay between utopian optimism and apocalyptic pessimism can be felt across the genre’s now centuries-long history, only intensifying in the 20th century as the clash between humankind’s growing technological capabilities and its ability to use those powers safely or wisely has reached existential-threat propositions, not simply for human beings but for all life on the planet. In the early 21st century, as in earlier cultural moments, the writers and critics of SF use the genre’s articulation of different societies and different possible futures as the occasion to reflect on our own present, in ways that range from full-throated defense of the status quo to the ruthless denunciation of all institutions that currently exist in the name of some other, better world. SF’s global popularity has grown to the point where it now looms quite large over cultural production generally, becoming arguably the most popular narrative genre in existence, particularly in the sorts of SF action spectacles that have dominated the global box office of the first two decades of the 21st century. It has also become increasingly difficult to tell the difference between the things we used to think of as SF and the advanced communication, transportation, and entertainment technologies that have become so ubiquitous and familiar that we now take them for granted, as well as the growing prevalence of political, economic, and ecological crises now erupting out of the pages of our science fictions, like our very worst dreams come to life.

Heritage and the Use of the Past in East Africa

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Giblin
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Heritage Management ◽  
Eastern Africa ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Heritage Studies ◽  
Critical Heritage

This article outlines historical and ongoing uses of the past and academic heritage research into those activities within eastern Africa. The use of the past will be discussed as a deep historical practice in the area that is the EAC in the 21st century, demonstrating how political elites have constructed versions of the past to suit contemporary and future aims for hundreds of years. Then there is an outline of the colonial introduction of formalized Western heritage institutions and legislation in the early 20th century, the subsequent nationalization of these in the mid-20th century, and the late-20th- and early-21st-century internationalization of heritage. These overviews are followed by a discussion of different approaches to heritage research including early studies of museums, traditions, heritage management, archaeological introspections, and more recent “critical heritage studies,” which interrogate the use of the past as a form of cultural production.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document