Competing Fantasies and Alternative Realities: Salman Rushdie's The Golden House

This article examines one of the earliest novels of the Trump era, Salman Rushdie's The Golden House (2017), as part of a literary corpus that felt compelled to respond to the derealization of political culture by producing fictions commensurate to the new “American reality.” Spanning the years from the first inauguration of Obama to the election of Trump, the novel depicts a nation that has “left reality behind and entered the comic-book universe,” a turn to fantasy that precedes the final irruption of a wealthy vulgarian who calls himself the Joker, and who subverts any previous sense of identity and of what is “real.” Drawing from the notion of national fantasy as argued by Lauren Berlant (1991), Jacqueline Rose (1996), and Donald Pease (2009), the article suggests that Rushdie's novel performs and invites a rare self-examination in the context of early literary responses to the rise of Trumpism.

Queer Worldmaking

The theory and practice of queer worldmaking is a vital part of the study of queer communication. Rooted in the acts, activism, artistry, and the everyday lives of LGBT+, queer, and proto-queer people across the world, the theorization of queer worldmaking emerged alongside the founding of queer theory itself in the late 1990s. Surfacing in both José Esteban Muñoz’s writing on minoritarian performance and disidentification as well as Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s essay, “Sex in Public,” the term “queer worldmaking” was quickly taken up in communication scholarship, driving Gust Yep’s foundational work on “The Violence of Heteronormativity in Communication Studies.” Evolving according to various disciplinary demands and cultural influences, contemporary endeavors in queer worldmaking in communication studies largely follow three general paths: (a) drawing upon quare/queer of color theories to theorize worldmaking through/as enactments of disidentification(s), queer futurity, queer utopias, hope, and queer relationality; (b) conceptualizing academia, scholarship, and academic pursuits as productive sites for envisioning and creating queer worlds; and (c) tending to the worldmaking potentialities of queer memories, monuments, and archives. These intellectual pathways overlap, interweave, and split off into unpredictable rhizomatic directions, paving the way for scholarship that converses with, diverges from, and pushes forward queer worldmaking in communication studies in curiously queer directions.

Han and/as Ressentiment: Lessons from Minjung Theology

Following calls in recent critical debates in English-language Korean studies to reevaluate the cultural concept of han (often translated as “resentment”), this article argues for its reconsideration from the vantage point of minjung theology, a theological perspective that emerged in South Korea in the 1970s, which has been dubbed the Korean version of “liberation theology”. Like its Latin American counterpart, minjung theology understood itself in explicitly political terms, seeking to reinvigorate debates around the question of theodicy—the problem of suffering vis-à-vis the existence of a divine being or order. Studying some of the ways in which minjung theologians connected the concept of han to matters of suffering, this article argues, offers an opening towards a redirection from han’s dominant understanding within academic discourse and public culture as a special and unique racial essence of Korean people. Moreover, by putting minjung theology in conversation with contemporary political theory, in particular the works of Wendy Brown and Lauren Berlant, this article hopes to bring minjung theology to the attention of critical theory.

Toward a Trans Method, or Reciprocity as a Way of Life

It is reductive yet accurate to assert that Chase Joynt and Jules Rosskam first met because they are both trans people who make documentary films. While the alignment of these affinities does not necessarily prefigure a friendship—in fact, many would argue and experience the opposite—they have found kinship in their shared approach to positions as institutionally embedded academics who are also publicly exhibiting artists. Inspired by Michel Foucault’s “Friendship as a Way of Life” (1997) and the cross-disciplinary, conversational theory making of Lisa Duggan and José Muñoz, James Baldwin and Audre Lorde, and Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, they use dialogue to extend the intimate interdisciplinary legacies and potentials of thinkers collaboratively discussing social issues. Together, they ask what might be possible in envisioning, theorizing, and enacting a trans cinematic method—a praxis for artists and scholars alike to be in meaningful, mutually supportive, world-sustaining relationships.

Narratives of Cruel: Cristian Mungiu’s Cinematic Work and the Political Imaginary of East-Central Europe

Celem poniższego artykułu jest przedstawienie sposobu opisu stanu pomniejszych kultur Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej w filmach Cristiana Mungiu. Rozważania te zostały oparte o pojęcia <em>okrutnego optymizmu </em>oraz <em>impasu</em> autorstwa Lauren Berlant. Analizie poddano filmy <em>4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days</em> (2007), <em>Beyond the Hills </em>(2012) oraz <em>Graduation</em> (2016). Pod uwagę wzięto w szczególności strukturę narracyjną wspomnianych dzieł, płeć bohaterów, uwarunkowania społeczno-ekonomiczne wpływające na ich byt, a także poetykę mediów audio-wizualnych prezentowaną w zakończeniach filmów. Autor argumentuje, że filmy Mungiu stanowią krytykę mapowania wyobrażeniowego na terenach Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej zapoczątkowanego w czasach zimnej wojny, która prezentuje narody zamieszkujące te tereny jako skazane na nieustanne przebywanie w stanie zagrożenia, a co za tym idzie, niewygasającą potrzebę obrony, co naraża je na przeżywanie nieuniknionych cykli politycznych nadużyć. Propozycja rozwiązania przedstawiona jest w powolnych, skłaniających do przemyśleń zakończeniach filmów. Wskazują one na rozwój sytuacji politycznego zawieszenia, która jako zakłócenie statusu quo może pozwolić wyobraźniom politycznym na stworzenie rozwiązań bardziej kreatywnych, pozwalających uniknąć wspomnianych cykli. Przerwa ta wiąże się z pamięcią wydarzeń roku 1989, a także historyczną otwartością, która emergowała w owym czasie. Jako polityczny paradygmat kultur środkowo-wschodnioeuropejskich, zawieszenie jest strategią, która pozwala na zmianę postawy wyobrażeniowej wobec początku roku 1989.

Dystopia: Queer Sex and the Unbearable in Grasshopper Jungle

This chapter draws on Andrew Smith’s 2014 novel Grasshopper Jungle to explore the representation of queerness as a locus of dystopian adolescent experiences and, by hyperbolic extension, the cause of the apocalypse. Smith’s novel satirically amplifies the idea that adolescence is itself a kind of dystopia, and simultaneously points to how queer sex is a kind of darkness—or invisibility—often “experienced as unbearable,” in Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman’s words, by critics of queer young adult literature. Austin, Grasshopper Jungle’s history-obsessed narrator, records in astonishing detail the world’s destruction by mutant bugs, yet Austin’s moment of sexual intimacy with his male best friend remains a striking silence in his otherwise scrupulous account. This chapter concludes that Grasshopper Jungle’s excessive rendering of YA’s storm, stress, darkness, and violence ironically makes visible the novel’s unwillingness to confront the unbearability associated with queer sex.

Old Detroit, New Detroit: “Makers” and the impasse of place change

In Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant describes an impasse as “what it feels like to be in the middle of a shift.” This paper mobilizes that notion of impasse to critically analyze the position of Detroit’s “maker” community against the background of a rapidly changing city. Makers, who might crudely be described as small craft-manufacturers, have found themselves entangled in an emergent narrative of place transition captured by the juxtapositional monikers of “Old Detroit” and “New Detroit.” The goal of this paper is to think through what gets taken up by these Old/New representations of Detroit – and what the shift between the two feels like – as described by makers. I interpret Old and New Detroit to be unique-but-inseparable place imaginaries; they are the representational bracketing around a transitional lifeworld in which the optimism makers brought to Old Detroit has largely come unraveled in New Detroit. This unraveling, I suggest, is not only a collective melancholy associated with feelings of eroding creativity and autonomy, but also a percolating confrontation with the privileged fantasies of Old Detroit. For makers, New Detroit meant professionalization and gentrification: on one hand, the exigencies of New Detroit have occluded the creative and egalitarian form of change they envisioned for the city; on the other, it opened new financial benefits for their small businesses. The resulting impasse tasked makers with adjusting to the economic and moral uncertainties posed by still-unfolding circumstances in a changing Detroit.

Compassion in the Garden: Radical Homemakers or Just More Women’s Work?

Compassion is key to Australian women’s garden stories and return-to-the-home environmentalism. These stories highlight the gendered power implications of women’s work. Questions about who is suffering and who is caring are paramount. Women’s garden narratives are hopeful: they capture the interconnection between the local and global and the ethics of care promoted by ecofeminists. Yet when women gardeners embrace a care ethic which sees their own domestic workload skyrocket in order to alleviate environmental suffering, their compassion stories risk becoming what Lauren Berlant terms ‘collective norms of obligation’. Through aural storytelling in Pip permaculture magazine podcasts, women gardeners consider how the responsibility of ordinary, caring garden work fits within their already numerous, significant, and everyday caring responsibilities. Their collaboration reveals innovative solutions to this conundrum. Their compassionate garden work becomes a domestic practice of time, effort, and joy.

Contagion of the World

This essay demonstrates the centrality of impersonal intimacy to Virginia Woolf’s modernist poetics. In contrast to the major forms of intimacy—marriage, friendship, and family—the “minor” intimacies to which Woolf attends generate a sense of significant relation with a proximate other without the backing of intersubjectivity or of established social form. Focusing on The Voyage Out (1915), “An Unwritten Novel” (1917), and “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1924), the essay highlights minor intimacy as an alternative to the given forms both of intimacy itself and of realistic fiction. Drawing on contemporary critiques of intimacy by Lauren Berlant and Leo Bersani, I argue that sociality in Woolf’s writing is an unhealing scar, a problem of subject-world relation that necessarily persists, but that in doing so, stimulates Woolf’s formal inventiveness. Registering impersonal affective transmission through innovative literary form, Woolf frees her narratives to propose alternative modes of relation.