Modernity without a Project: Essay on the Void Called Contemporary

Published: 01/03/2015

This provocative and interesting book argues that the celebratory discourse of ‘the contemporary’ is not as innocent as it seems, but is geared towards cancelling out or negating the capital-unfriendly scepticism of modernism and postmodernism. This study contributes significantly to the field of what might be termed critical cultural studies, particularly with regard to the[…]

The Witch and the Hysteric

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Published: 08/08/2014

Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 Swedish/Danish film Häxan (known under its English title as Witchcraft Through the Ages) has entranced, entertained, shocked, and puzzled audiences for nearly a century. The film mixes documentary with fantasy, history with theatrics, religion and science, the medieval past and modern culture. This uncanny content is compounded by the film’s formal strangeness,[…]

Itinerant Spectator/Itinerant Spectacle

Published: 12/20/2013

Read Ayanna Thompson’s review of Itinerant Spectator/Itinerant Spectacle in Theatre Journal! Itinerant Spectator/Itinerant Spectacle moves across the landscape of European performance in late 20th and early 21st centuries, recounting performance in circulation across national borders and across the itinerant bodies of spectators who travel to meet performances that travel. Itinerant Spectator/Itinerant Spectacle suggests spectating is[…]

The Afterlife of Genre: Remnants of the Trauerspiel in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

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Published: 02/21/2014

Could there have been television without California? California without television? The one shows the other: the ostentatiously novel singularity of the place and the seemingly self-effacing transparency of the medium. Yet if television and California both promise again and again to offer us something new, young, immaculate in its transience — a pure surface that[…]

The Funambulist Papers, Volume 1

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Published: 10/23/2013

This book is a collection of thirty-five texts from the first series of guest writers’ essays, written specifically for The Funambulist weblog from June 2011 to November 2012. The idea of complementing Lambert’s own texts on his blog with those written by others originated from the idea that having friends communicate with each other about[…]

Commonist Tendencies: Mutual Aid Beyond Communism

Published: 07/23/2013

As capitalist societies in the twenty-first century move from crisis to crisis, oppositional movements in the global North have been somewhat stymied (despite ephemeral manifestations like Occupy), confronted with the pressing need to develop organizational infrastructures that might prepare the ground for a real, and durable, alternative. More and more, the need to develop shared[…]

Freedom, Responsbility, and A Non-Sad Militancy: Building Illegitimate Public-ations

by EILEEN JOY I am just returned from the annual meeting of the Cultural Studies Association in Chicago [23-25 May 2013], where I was asked to deliver plenary remarks on Publics and Publications for Cultural Studies, and so I thought I would share those remarks here. I shared the plenary with Ted Striphas and Mark[…]

continent. Year 1

Published: 12/12/2012

continent. maps a topology of unstable confluences and ranges across new thinking traversing interstices and alternate directions in culture, theory, politics and art. continent. Year 1: A selection of issues 1.1-1.4 collects a variety of thoughts and tropes from the 2011 issues of continent., ranging from work on Greek poetry to deep brain recordings, from speculative[…]