Cultural Politics

 

Volume 7, Issue 2

 

GENERAL ISSUE

 

July 2011

 

Articles

 

The Hurt Locker: Cinematic Addiction, ‘Critique’, and The War on Terror

Bruce Bennett and Bulent Diken interrogate The Hurt Locker, an enthusiastically-received ‘critical’ film, as a symptom of today’s prevailing cultural and political codes. Dwelling on the homologies between the state of exception and the narrative logic of the film, including its reflection on the banalization of exception, Bennett and Diken emphasize that, ddespite its critical credentials, The Hurt Locker is totally silent on the most crucial aspect of the war against terror, its de-politicizing effects.

 

Che and the Pre-Eminence of Culture in Revolutionary Cuba: The Pursuit of a Spontaneous, Inseparable Integrity

Clive W. Kronenberg on the triumphs and continuity of the Cuban revolution with regard to the close bond that exists between political and cultural practice on the island. Emblematic of Cuban politics, key aspects of Ernesto Che Guevara’s revolutionary thought find expression in Cuban cultural theory and practices in the national, popular, and expressive arts domains, which strikingly sustains the revolution’s goals to bring about an equal and unified national community, a radical anti-imperialist, internationalist political ethos, and a deeply-rooted universal arts tradition.

A People of Seers: The Political Aesthetics of Postwar Cinema Revisited

Julian Reid probes the politics of Gilles Deleuze’s study of cinematic modernity. Issuing a challenge to film studies’ traditional understanding of the political in Deleuze’s studies, Reid argues that understanding and fulfilling the political potential of his works requires analyzing the importance of Deleuze’s account of the rupture between classical and modern cinema for his political concept of ‘a people’, an argument that moves beyond the impoverished state of the debate on Deleuze and ‘political cinema’ by exploring how his works trace the changing relation of cinema to the historical development of a post-national politics of people-production, and especially his account of what it names ‘a people of seers’.

Masquerade

Phyllis Galembo is an American photographer who has traveled extensively in the Caribbean and Africa to witness and document rituals that involve extraordinarily creative masking and costuming. Over the past 20 years, she has traveled to the Republic of Benin, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Brazil, Cuba, Jamaica, and Haiti to photograph traditional priests and priestesses, carnival masqueraders, dancers, and Haitian Vodou practitioners, wearing elaborate costumes created for weddings and burials, initiations, chiefs’ coronations, protests and holidays.

 

On the Political in the Wake: Carl Schmitt and James Joyce’s Political Theologies

Kieran Keohane explores the work of Carl Schmitt and James Joyce and, particular, their response to the crisis of European civilization of the inter-war years. Bringing Schmitt and Joyce into conversation with one another through the mediation of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, Schmitt as representative and advocate of Apollonian logocentrism and Joyce of Dionysian muthos, Keohane investigates the parallels as well as differences in these authors’ works while illuminating the figure of the dictator and the theme of political theology, to reveal the deep affinity between Schmitt and totalitarianism on the one hand and Joyce and radical and plural democracy on the other.

 

The Politics of Transcendence

Harald Wydra on modern politics and its dogmatic separation of politics from religion, of the state from promises of salvation. Making a case for the fundamentally political nature of transcendence, Wydra argues that the changing relationships between authority and salvation depend on culturally crafted engagements of the spiritual and the temporal. Examining configurations of the political in the history of the west, which can be grasped as extraordinary form of “absolute” politics, he shows how ultimate ends influenced the emergence of secular forms of power and how the politics of transcendence must go beyond the friend-enemy distinction by incorporating the potentiality of forms of non-violent political action, where the ends are superior to the means.

 

Traveling Spies and Liminal Texts: Cold War Culture in Asian Spy Films

Leong Yew examines little known Asian spy films and their relationship with Cold War cultural studies. While their Anglo-American counterparts could be discursively analyzed for the way they portrayed Western anxieties about communism, constructed own identities as opposed to the alterity of Russians and communists, these films defy easy categorization because they not only reproduced these cinematic tropes but also weaved in politics, themes, and conventions outside the mainstream Cold War narrative. Exploring four spy/cop action films made by Filipino director, Bobby Suarez, and surveying how a global cinematic circularity shapes the creative and industrial aspects of Asian spy films, Yew considers how the importation of cinematic styles like blaxploitation and the Hong Kong kung fu genre reconfigured Asian culturalist positions and redrew conflict positions from that of capitalism versus communism to that of Asians versus Westerners.

 

Book Review Essay

 

The Limits of Control

Seb Franklin on Raiford Guins’ Edited Clean Version: Technology and the Culture of Control and Jussi Parikka and Tony D. Sampson (Eds.)’ The Spam Book: on Viruses, Porn and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture. Beginning with Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the control society, Franklin analyzes its substantial role in shaping scholarly discourse on new media and politics over the past twenty years prior to foregrounding the problems associated with this perspective and presenting a variety of approaches to the difficulty of critique related to new media.

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About Cultural Politics

 

“Cultural Politics is a welcome and innovative addition.  In an academic universe already well populated with journals, it is carving out its own unique place—broad and a bit quirky.  It likes to leap between the theoretical and the concrete, so that it is never boring and often filled with illuminating glimpses into the intellectual and cultural worlds.” Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina, USA.

 

Edited by

John Armitage, Northumbria University, UK
Ryan Bishop, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Douglas Kellner, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

 

Cultural Politics is an international, refereed journal that explores the global character and effects of contemporary culture and politics. It analyzes how cultural identities, agencies and actors, political issues and conflicts, and global media are linked, characterized, examined and resolved. In doing so, the journal explores precisely what is cultural about politics and what is political about culture. It investigates the marginalized and outer regions of this complex and interdisciplinary subject area.

Each issue publishes artwork by selected artists reflecting contemporary cultural and political issues.

 

Official website here: http://www.bergpublishers.com/BergJournals/CulturalPolitics/tabid/520/Default.aspx