Search Results (8)

This article focuses on the genealogy of the Mackintosh archive, showing how subjects are interpellated through archival networks that span imperial and metropolitan sites, linking people, ideas, knowledge and material resources. By tracing the Mackintosh archive across generations of family members embedded in British imperial society, it shows how archives call forth an individual—Sir James Mackintosh—as a symbol and a site of the interconnections between the patriarchal family, the male-dominated state and the production of cultural imaginaries of belonging. Tracing this archive, it argues that the ‘society’ to which James Mackintosh belonged is both reflected in, and constituted through, the letters and journals that comprise his archive. In form and content, they provide the material evidence for the interconnectedness of social, familial, intellectual and political lives. They function both as fantasies and representations of belonging to a social network—a community—and a constitutive part of the consolidation of that network. The letters and diaries that comprise the Mackintosh Archive bear witness to the formation of a literary elite at the turn of the nineteenth century and the mobility of that elite around European-imperial space. Thus, the Mackintosh Archive illustrates the point, made by an increasing number of imperial and global historians, that ideas and identities were forged through inter-connections across space. Full article

This paper analyzes how the 2023 Chinese science fiction blockbuster The Wandering Earth 2 constructs what I call a “disaster empire”—a biopolitical system that seamlessly integrates authoritarian governance with capitalist logic through the constant threat of catastrophe. Through close readings of the film’s reappropriation of the Chinese Moving Mountain fable, its treatment of human sacrifice, and its portrayal of digital afterlife, I argue that the film presents a troubling vision where crisis enables the formation of a homogeneous time-space where the patriarchal family, the nation-state, and bio-capital converge to form a massive, enduring system of domination. While the film has been celebrated for its socialist values of collective survival, I demonstrate how it actually embodies the convergence of authoritarianism and global capitalism in its most insidious form. Drawing on theories of biopower, affect, and dead labor from Marxist scholars, this paper reveals how The Wandering Earth 2 functions as a work of prescriptive realism that faithfully encapsulates the deep drive of authoritarian capitalism. Full article

This essay discusses the pedagogical value of hagiology by examining how medieval Persian hagiographies can be used to explore the concept of “interpellation”: the process by which individuals are constituted as subjects in particular ideological systems. This essay uses an analysis of Rumi’s anecdote, “Moses and the Shepherd”, to demonstrate how hagiological approaches are valuable not just in understanding how a saint is constructed in a particular historical and cultural context but also how an audience is constructed and interpellated. The essay then introduces a pedagogical exercise that connects an analysis of Islamic hagiographies with an exploration of how students are interpellated with modern subjectivities in our contemporary ideological systems. Full article

Australian Muslim women are far more likely to be the target of Islamophobic attacks than men, and common narratives often paint Muslim women merely as victims of Islamophobia. This article takes a new approach and considers how Muslim women may counter Islamophobia and the various audiences they must contend with in their work. Using de Koning’s interpellation framework, this research investigates why Australian Muslim women believe gender matters in public countering Islamophobia work and proposes new developments to the framework based on the way Australian Muslim women must mediate the ascriptions of both non-Muslims and Muslim men. This research draws on in-depth interviews with Sunni, Shi’i, and Ahmadiyya women from around Australia who are active in public countering Islamophobia education initiatives. Full article

Latin American liberation theology appears to be an obsolete phenomenon that is unable to speak about the realities of today’s world. Since the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published two instructions on liberation theology, the Vatican has been considered to have condemned it. Likewise, the Vatican of John Paul II and Benedict XVI focused on the reprobation of several liberation theologians attempting to silence their voices. However, liberation theology aimed at the realisation of justice in a world in which the injustice that gave birth to this phenomenon still prevails in new ways. This article establishes a relationship between liberation theology and critical thinking to offer an alternative to the future of liberation theology. We insist that, despite the end of the era in which both were born, they continue to challenge the present world. Using Adornian optics, we establish how critical thought constitutes a prophetic denunciation. Thus, liberation theology will be understood within this critical tradition and how it critiques the current reality, in which the logic of late capitalism prevails. Afterwards, the contemporary world will be studied from this point of view to try to discover the pending tasks of criticism. It is the question of discovering the tasks of critiques to challenge the present. Full article

By juxtaposing two ostensibly divergent characters, the Jewish art historian and Egyptologist Hedwig Fechheimer (1871–1942) and Soviet filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948), this paper investigates how both approaches folded time, creating Cubist chronologies. Fechheimer adapted the philological focus of her Berlin School contemporaries to create an ahistorical, anti-teleological grammar of ancient Egyptian art which espoused an artistic affinity between the Egyptians and the Cubist movement. Eisenstein, who held a copy of one of Fechheimer’s books in his personal library, took a similar approach in the development of his critiques of historical allegory. This paper looks specifically at two shots of a sphinx during the bridge sequence in the 1927 film October to demonstrate how they correspond to Fechheimer’s views on Egyptian art and also function peculiarly within the film. Ultimately, I aim to demonstrate how the interpellations of the sphinx demonstrate a particular critique of historicity that Eisenstein later expands upon in his Ivan the Terrible films. Full article

This essay comparatively reads the intellectual contributions of Luisa Capetillo and Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta. I argue that Capetillo and Rodríguez Acosta offer unique and under-appreciated perspectives on what I term the assemblages of belonging that resist the regulatory normalization of sexuality and the reduction of the maternal body as the source of home and place making in the context of Puerto Rico and Cuba respectively. As the paper demonstrates, what it means to belong, in the context of Antillean women writers, is not entirely tied to a particular place or the identity of people. Rather, belonging is assembled through tactics that are always already decentered given the status of womanhood and its interpellations in the Caribbean at the turn of the 20th century, which was performatively accomplished through the acts of writing and reading. I argue that Capetillo and Rodríguez Acosta assemble notions of belonging through performative mechanisms that place them at the cross-roads between the affective, embodied, and relational dimensions of what it means to belong in a place that is not and continues not to be for any(body). Thus, they both betray the idea of being on one side or another. Full article

Good Times is primarily remembered for the situation comedy that it became, rather than how the series began. As a part of what Means Coleman classifies as “The Lear Era: Social Relevancy and Ridiculed Black Subjectivity,” the series was the first sitcom in TV history to feature a loving, working-class, Black nuclear family—the Evanses—with a focus on recounting their racial and socioeconomic challenges and gains. While the representational treatment of the Evanses as a whole and full family by network television (CBS) was groundbreaking, Good Times, perhaps, still reinforced implicit schemas regarding Blackness as the Evanses were poor and lived in Chicago’s rough-and-tumble Cabrini Green Housing Projects. Further, as the series progressed, narrative attention focused on the character J.J., a ‘Jim Crow’ stereotype (i.e., eye-bulging, wide-smiling, hustler) whose emergence as the centerpiece of the series eventually prompted co-star, John Amos, to leave the once stereotype-busting show out of protest. Although Good Times ultimately fell into the stereotype trap, the first two seasons of the series worked effectively in representing Blackness as complex and worthy. This article focuses on “Thank You Black Jesus”, a season-one episode that centers on J.J.’s painting of Black Jesus, an artistic interpretation that is in line with the Bible’s description of Jesus. “Thank You Black Jesus” begs several important questions surrounding religious and secular symbols, the interpellation and hailing of Blackness, and faith or suspending one’s disbelief. In this article, we conduct a critical, cultural analysis to explore the meanings that are associated with symbols, Blackness, and faith. We also consider the staying power of the “Black Jesus” episode in contemporary popular culture, as witnessed in the form of memes, intertextual references to the episode in other media texts, and as elucidated by continued debates surrounding the race of Jesus and the ways to pursue an iconography of inclusiveness. Full article