Writing and Space: Writing the City by Stuti Khanna

Writing the City, a collection of essays edited by Stuti Khanna is a noteworthy publication as it includes 13 engaging essays by critically acclaimed contemporary mostly Indian writer. The book has an attractive cover with an infographic map of cities — the theme around which Khanna assembles this collection. This book with only 114 pages can be a treasure trove for researchers of the contemporary Indian writing as “it explores the symbiotic relationship between form and content” (Khanna, 2020, p. xi) as each of these 13 writers present in their introspective mood, “the relationship of their writing to place and space” (Khanna, 2020, p.xi) of their upbringing. Hence, the apt title, Writing the City. The book validates Tim Creswell and other Humanist Geographer’s reverberations that: “Place is the raw material for the creative production for identity” (Cresswell, 2004, p.39)

The Hogarth Press

‘Yet I’m the only woman in England free to write what I like. The others must be thinking of series’ & editors.’ Woolf’s 1925 homage to the impact of the Hogarth Press on her career is well known, signifying a new sense of herself as a woman writer in command of the means of creative production. Less well known is how pervasive were her private and public negotiations with the narratological implications of the feminist materialism she cultivated as a printer and publisher. This article reviews the state of the field, re-reads her early short fiction in the context of her typesetting experiments, which resonate with the conflicted history of women in the printing trades, and argues for a revisionist understanding of Woolf’s feminist modernism as isomorphic with the Hogarth Press.

Beyond the Crew: Hip-Hop and Professionalization in Mexico City

In recent years profesionalización – professionalization – has become an increasingly influential concept in the hip-hop scene in Mexico City. This term can refer to a variety of changing practices relating to artistic presentation, the organization of hip-hop events, and the hip-hop scene’s model of creative production. The influence of professionalization relates to the rising specialization of hip-hop production and the increasing importance of the digital circulation of music and images; increasingly, success is made on YouTube and Spotify. It also relates to new sources of income, such as freestyle rap battles with corporate sponsorship, and to nascent spaces for hip-hop within adult education. Above all, professionalization relates to a series of structural changes connected to the declining influence of crews, oriented around something akin to Spillman’s ‘non-strategic solidarity’: fraternity, informality, and shared identity. In some cases, crews are giving way to more formal ‘teams’, oriented around the solo artists that now dominate the hip-hop scene. This article builds on ongoing ethnographic research since 2012 and a series of interviews with over 40 local hip-hop artists, to explore professionalism and professionalization as emergent, negotiated values within Mexico City’s hip-hop scene. It offers a frame through which different ideas of the ‘professional’ may be considered: object-forming (relating to the creation of a ‘professional’ music object) and subject-forming (relating to the formation of a ‘professional’ subject). Profesionalización cannot be understood in a functionalist sense, nor may the hip-hop ‘professional’ be conceptualized as a straightforward antonym of ‘amateur’. This article instead shows different ways that ‘object-forming’ and ‘subject-forming’ professionalization both incorporate and texture the ‘non-strategic’ and distinguish hip-hop ‘professionalism’ from the same texture the ‘non-strategic’, and distinguish hip-hop professionalism from it.

La donna è mobile : Mujeres errantes en la ficción turística de Chile y Argentina

This article offers an exploration of the creative production of women writers and filmmakers who engage with tourism as a setting for fictional imaginaries. Centering on recent fiction from Chile and Argentina, it examines how tourism has infused new energy into the withering genre of travel writing, opening up a space for the expression of female subjectivities in a field previously dominated by men. Through close reading of works by Uhart, Katz, Scherson and Jeftanovic, it explores how these Latin American women challenge Michel Onfray’s definition of travel literature.

Creative production of Brazilian telenovela fans on Twitter

Analysis of content creation by fans on Twitter based on the narrative arcs of Lica and Samantha, characters in the Brazilian telenovela Young Hearts (Malhação: Viva a diferença) (TV Globo, 2017–18).

The neural basis of creative production: A cross-modal ALE meta-analysis

One of the central questions about the cognitive neuroscience of creativity is the extent to which creativity depends on either domain-specific or domain-general mechanisms. To address this question, we carried out two parallel activation likelihood estimation meta-analyses of creativity: 1) a motoric analysis that combined studies across five domains of creative production (verbalizing, music, movement, writing, and drawing), and 2) an analysis of the Alternate Uses divergent-thinking task. All experiments contained a contrast between a creative task and a matched non-creative or less-creative task that controlled for the sensorimotor demands of task performance. The activation profiles of the two meta-analyses were non-overlapping, but both pointed to a domain-specific interpretation in which creative production is, at least in part, an enhancement of sensorimotor brain areas involved in non-creative production. The most concordant areas of activation in the motoric meta-analysis were high-level motor areas such as the pre-supplementary motor area and inferior frontal gyrus that interface motor planning and executive control, suggesting a means of uniting domain-specificity and -generality in creative production.

Vídeo experimental e autorretrato

In the development of the relationship between the artist and his artistic creation, the deconstruction of concepts and ideas within the scope of artistic praxis leads to the reflection of the crucial role that the artist has in the conception and meaning of the work. His creative production, in turn, appropriates not only the expressive force of the author to assert itself as an artistic creation, but can also assume to be the reflection of the self, its identity and materializes in the form of self-portrait. The self-portrait expands the artist’s interiority, externalizing concerns and questions, and conveys a subjective point of view about himself and his view of art. But how does self-portrait contribute to self-awareness? And how does the artist reveal himself and communicate beyond his appearance?Based on these questions, the objective of this paper is to provide a reflection on self-portrait presenting the results of an artistic installation project that involved photographic language in the form of self-portrait and experimental video to represent feelings of disquiet. Influences such as Cindy Sherman, Lais Pontes or Francesca Woodman, whose creations approach the self-portrait in a not only original, but critical style, stand out.It is a project of academic and artistic nature supported by theoretical foundations. The results allow us to conclude that the artistic installation, which began by presenting a self-portraying self-seeking identity, frees itself from its creator to enhance multiple variable interpretations depending on the observer’s attention.