Digital Humanities

This chapter examines material published in the field of digital humanities in 2020. It begins with an article in Digital Humanities Quarterly by a group of early-career scholars taking a novel approach to understanding the field, using topic modelling to query a dataset of definitions of digital humanities. The article brings into focus the proliferation of texts in this area, and the extent to which this ongoing discourse impinges on those, particularly early-career, scholars seeking to enter the field. It also observes the upsurge in writing about the lack of diversity and inclusion in the digital humanities, making the arrival of Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein’s Data Feminism all the more welcome. This hugely important text offers an intersectional approach to the study of historical and contemporary social and cultural data, urging scholars to take up their seven principles for uncovering the ways in which power can be uncovered, examined, analysed, and challenged. They offer a vision of what data justice could look like in theory and in practice. Richard Jean So’s Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction takes just such an approach to the analysis of literary culture in post-war America. Using an incisive combination of data science and traditional literary scholarly methods, So paints a compelling picture of the persistence of whiteness in literary culture, analysing the whole cycle of literary production to uncover the ways in which power moves through the system.

Poetics

This review examines three books published in the field of poetics in 2020: Candice Amich’s Precarious Forms: Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas; Ren Ellis Neyra’s The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics; and Anthony Reed’s Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production. I show that these three books, which discuss poetry in connection with other art forms, each call for a reordering of the senses through which we perceive and analyze poetry (and other texts). While Ellis Neyra advocates multisensorial listening and Reed calls for a mode of listening attentive to what remains unnamed within current perceptual and political schema, Amich shows the importance of paying attention to the embodied rhythms and tactility of poetry and performance texts. For all three authors, these alternatives to individualized, detached, and indeed deadened linguistic contemplation proffer strategies for remaking not only common sense, but the common itself. The chapter is structured under the following headings: 1. Introduction; 2. Poetics; 3. Sensoria; 4. Politics.

Visual culture

This chapter addresses books published in the field of visual culture in 2020, and is divided into three sections: 1. Curatorial Practice; 2. Thinking About Space; and 3. The New Craft. The books under review cover a range of subjects within their specialities but reflect general trends in contemporary writing and study in the field of visual culture. The first section looks at publications that examine curatorial practice (In the Meantime: Speculations on Art, Curation, and Exhibitions, by Jens Hoffman; Museums Inside Out: Artist Collaborations and New Exhibition Ecologies by Mark W. Rectanus); the second section examines books that describe theories of space (Architecture and Ekphrasis: Space, Time and the Embodied Description of the Past by Dana Arnold; Construction Site for Possible Worlds, edited by Amanda Beech and Robin Mackay); and the third and final section examines publications about craft and its ethics (The New Politics of the Handmade: Craft, Art and Design, edited by Anthea Black and Nicole Burisch).

Economic Criticism

This overview of recent work on the relationship between economics and culture takes the occasion of the Covid-19 pandemic to reflect on the urgency of creative thinking about biopolitics, in the process questioning the utility of apparent divisions between Foucauldian- and Marxist-derived approaches to the question of social reproduction.