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Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga
by Pamela Newkirk“A riveting account of one of the more startling episodes in the . . . history of race in America” (Wall Street Journal).Ota Benga, a young African man, was featured as an exhibit at the St. Louis World’s Fair. Two years later, the New York Zoological Gardens displayed him in its Monkey House, caging him with an orangutan. The attraction became an international sensation, drawing thousands of New Yorkers and commanding headlines from across the nation and Europe.Spectacle explores the circumstances of Ota Benga’s captivity and the international controversy it inspired. Using primary historical documents, Pamela Newkirk traces Ota’s tragic existence, from the Congo to St. Louis to New York and finally to Lynchburg, Virginia, where he lived out the remainder of his short life.Spectacle simultaneously explores New York City during the early years of the twentieth century, a racially fraught era that led to a rising tide of political disenfranchisement and social scorn for African Americans.Praise for Spectacle2016 NAACP Image Award WinnerNamed a Best Book of the Year by NPR, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Root, and the Huffington Post Black Voices“Here is a gripping and painstaking narrative that breaks new ground. Now, after a century, Benga has finally been heard.” —New York Times Book Review“Deeply researched and thoughtful. . . . Writing with precision and moral clarity, Newkirk indicts a civilization whose ‘cruelty was cloaked in civility,’ leaving us to examine its remnants.” —Boston Globe“This is an explosive, heartbreaking book. It unfolds with the grace of an E. L. Doctorow novel and spins forward with the urgency of a wild tabloid story.” —James McBride, National Book Award–winning author of The Good Lord Bird
Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome
by Donald G. KyleThe elaborate and inventive slaughter of humans and animals in the arena fed an insatiable desire for violent spectacle among the Roman people. Donald G. Kyle combines the words of ancient authors with current scholarly research and cross-cultural perspectives, as he explores* the origins and historical development of the games* who the victims were and why they were chosen* how the Romans disposed of the thousands of resulting corpses* the complex religious and ritual aspects of institutionalised violence* the particularly savage treatment given to defiant Christians.This lively and original work provides compelling, sometimes controversial, perspectives on the bloody entertainments of ancient Rome, which continue to fascinate us to this day.
Spectacles of Waste
by Warwick AndersonThe modern bathroom is an ingenious compilation of locked doors, smooth porcelain, 4-ply tissue and antibacterial hand soap, but despite this miracle of indoor plumbing, we still can’t bear the thought that anyone else should know that our bodies produce waste. Why must we live by the rules of this intense scatological embarrassment? In Spectacles of Waste, leading historian of medicine Warwick Anderson reveals how human excrement has always complicated humanity’s attempts to become modern. From wastewater epidemiology and sewage snooping to fecal transplants and excremental art, he argues that our insistence on separating ourselves from our bodily waste has fundamentally shaped our philosophies, social theories, literature and art—even the emergence of high-tech science as we understand it today. Written with verve and aplomb, Anderson’s expert analysis reveals how in recent years, humanity has doubled down on abstracting and datafying our most abject waste, and unconsciously underlined its biopolitical signature across our lives.
Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema (Comedia)
by Yvonne TaskerWhile films such as Rambo, Thelma and Louise and Basic Instinct have operated as major points of cultural reference in recent years, popular action cinema remains neglected within contemporary film criticism.Spectacular Bodies unravels the complexities and pleasures of a genre often dismissed as `obvious' in both its pleasure and its politics, arguing that these controversial films should be analysed and understood within a cinematic as well as a political context.Yvonne Tasker argues that today's action cinema not only responds to the shifts in gendered, sexual and racial identities which took place during the 1980s, but reflects the influences of other media such as the new video culture. Her detailed discussion of the homoeroticism surrounding the muscleman hero, the symbolic centrality of blackness within the crime narrative, and the changing status of women within the genre, addresses the constitution of these identities through the shifting categories of gender, class, race, sex, sexuality and nation. Spectacular Bodies also examines the ambivalence of supposedly secure categories of popular cinema, questioning the existing terms of film criticism in this area and addressing the complex pleasures of this neglected form.
Spectacular Girls: Media Fascination and Celebrity Culture
by Sarah ProjanskyWinner of the 2015 Bonnie Ritter Book Award from the National Communication Association As an omnipresent figure of the media landscape, girls are spectacles. They are ubiquitous visual objects on display at which we are incessantly invited to look. Investigating our cultural obsession with both everyday and high-profile celebrity girls, Sarah Projanskyuses a queer, anti-racist feminist approach to explore the diversity of girlhoods in contemporary popular culture.The book addresses two key themes: simultaneous adoration and disdain for girls and the pervasiveness of whiteness and heteronormativity. While acknowledging this context, Projansky pushes past the dichotomy of the “can-do” girl who has the world at her feet and the troubled girl who needs protection and regulation to focus on the variety of alternative figures who appear in media culture, including queer girls, girls of color, feminist girls, active girls, and sexual girls, all of whom are present if we choose to look for them.Drawing on examples across film, television, mass-market magazines and newspapers, live sports TV, and the Internet, Projansky combines empirical analysis with careful, creative, feminist analysis intent on centering alternative girls. She undermines the pervasive “moral panic” argument that blames media itself for putting girls at risk by engaging multiple methodologies, including, for example, an ethnographic study of young girls who themselves critique media. Arguing that feminist media studies needs to understand the spectacularization of girlhood more fully, she places active, alternative girlhoods right in the heart of popular media culture.
Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience
by Susan G. DavisThis is the story of Sea World, a theme park where the wonders of nature are performed, marketed, and sold. With its trademark star, Shamu the killer whale—as well as performing dolphins, pettable sting rays, and reproductions of pristine natural worlds—the park represents a careful coordination of shows, dioramas, rides, and concessions built around the theme of ocean life. Susan Davis analyzes the Sea World experience and the forces that produce it: the theme park industry; Southern California tourism; the privatization of urban space; and the increasing integration of advertising, entertainment, and education. The result is an engaging exploration of the role played by images of nature and animals in contemporary commercial culture, and a precise account of how Sea World and its parent corporation, Anheuser-Busch, succeed. Davis argues that Sea World builds its vision of nature around customers' worries and concerns about the environment, family relations, and education.While Davis shows the many ways that Sea World monitors its audience and manipulates animals and landscapes to manufacture pleasure, she also explains the contradictions facing the enterprise in its campaign for a positive public identity. Shifting popular attitudes, animal rights activists, and environmental laws all pose practical and public relations challenges to the theme park. Davis confronts the park's vast operations with impressive insight and originality, revealing Sea World as both an industrial product and a phenomenon typical of contemporary American culture. Spectacular Nature opens an intriguing field of inquiry: the role of commercial entertainment in shaping public understandings of the environment and environmental problems.
Spectacular Passions: Cinema, Fantasy, Gay Male Spectatorships
by Brett FarmerThe image of the movie-obsessed gay man is a widely circulating and readily recognizable element of the contemporary cultural landscape. Using psychoanalytic theory as his guide while inflecting it with insights from both film theory and queer theory, Brett Farmer moves beyond this clich to develop an innovative exploration of gay spectatorship. The result, Spectacular Passions, reveals how cinema has been engaged by gay men as a vital forum for "fantasmatic performance"--in this case, the production of specifically queer identities, practices, and pleasures. Building on the psychoanalytic concept of the fantasmatic, Farmer works to depathologize gay male subjectivity. While discussing such films as Kiss of the Spider Woman, The Pirate, Suddenly Last Summer, and Sunset Boulevard, and stars ranging from Mae West to Montgomery Clift, Farmer argues that the particularities of gay men's social and psychic positionings motivate unique receptions of and investments in film. The Hollywood musical, gay camp readings of the extravagant female star, and the explicit homoeroticism of the cinematic male body in gay fanzines are further proof, says Farmer, of how the shifting libidinal profiles of homosexual desire interact with the fantasy scenarios of Hollywood film to produce a range of variable queer meanings. This fascinating and provocative study makes a significant new contribution to discussions of cinema, spectatorship, and sexuality. As such, it will be welcomed by those in the fields of film theory, queer theory, and cultural studies.
Spectatorship, Embodiment and Physicality in the Contemporary Mutilation Film
by Laura WilsonFocusing on the representation of mutilation on the screen and the physical responses this evokes - what the author defines as 'physical spectatorship' - this book is organised around the study of a series of dynamic engagements that reconfigure the film-viewer relationship; these include: corporeal mimicry and the cinematic visualisations of mutilation; generalised anxiety and experimental use of sound; and the nausea generated by audio-visual techniques that both signify and locate the filmic gut in the viewer's body. Combining close textual analyses with theoretical approaches, and traversing a number of national cinemas, Wilson draws upon psychoanalytic, phenomenological and feminist theories of film and spectatorship to explore specific aspects of this often overlooked group of films, aspects such as the assault narrative sequence, the use of extreme frequencies, and haptic sounds and images.
Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire
by Mrinalini SinhaSpecters of Mother India tells the complex story of one episode that became the tipping point for an important historical transformation. The event at the center of the book is the massive international controversy that followed the 1927 publication of Mother India, an expos written by the American journalist Katherine Mayo. Mother India provided graphic details of a variety of social ills in India, especially those related to the status of women and to the particular plight of the country's child wives. According to Mayo, the roots of the social problems she chronicled lay in an irredeemable Hindu culture that rendered India unfit for political self-government. Mother India was reprinted many times in the United States, Great Britain, and India; it was translated into more than a dozen languages; and it was reviewed in virtually every major publication on five continents. Sinha provides a rich historical narrative of the controversy surrounding Mother India, from the book's publication through the passage in India of the Child Marriage Restraint Act in the closing months of 1929. She traces the unexpected trajectory of the controversy as critics acknowledged many of the book's facts only to overturn its central premise. Where Mayo located blame for India's social backwardness within the beliefs and practices of Hinduism, the critics laid it at the feet of the colonial state, which they charged with impeding necessary social reforms. As Sinha shows, the controversy became a catalyst for some far-reaching changes, including a reconfiguration of the relationship between the political and social spheres in colonial India and the coalescence of a collective identity for women.
Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (Film and Culture Series)
by Maggie HennefeldWomen explode out of chimneys and melt when sprayed with soda water. Feminist activists play practical jokes to lobby for voting rights, while overworked kitchen maids dismember their limbs to finish their chores on time. In early slapstick films with titles such as Saucy Sue, Mary Jane’s Mishap, Jane on Strike, and The Consequences of Feminism, comediennes exhibit the tensions between joyful laughter and gendered violence. Slapstick comedy often celebrates the exaggeration of make-believe injury. Unlike male clowns, however, these comic actresses use slapstick antics as forms of feminist protest. They spontaneously combust while doing housework, disappear and reappear when sexually assaulted, or transform into men by eating magic seeds—and their absurd metamorphoses evoke the real-life predicaments of female identity in a changing modern world.Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes reveals the gender politics of comedy and the comedic potentials of feminism through close consideration of hundreds of silent films. As Maggie Hennefeld argues, comedienne catastrophes provide disturbing but suggestive images for comprehending gendered social upheavals in the early twentieth century. At the same time, slapstick comediennes were crucial to the emergence of film language. Women’s flexible physicality offered filmmakers blank slates for experimenting with the visual and social potentials of cinema. Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes poses major challenges to the foundations of our ideas about slapstick comedy and film history, showing how this combustible genre blows open age-old debates about laughter, society, and gender politics.
Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History
by Ian BaucomIn September 1781, the captain of the British slave ship Zong ordered 133 slaves thrown overboard, enabling the ship's owners to file an insurance claim for their lost "cargo. " Accounts of this horrific event quickly became a staple of abolitionist discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. Ian Baucom revisits, in unprecedented detail, the Zong atrocity, the ensuing court cases, reactions to the event and trials, and the business and social dealings of the Liverpool merchants who owned the ship. Drawing on the work of an astonishing array of literary and social theorists, including Walter Benjamin, Giovanni Arrighi, Jacques Derrida, and many others, he argues that the tragedy is central not only to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the political and cultural archives of the black Atlantic but also to the history of modern capital and ethics. To apprehend the Zong tragedy, Baucom suggests, is not to come to terms with an isolated atrocity but to encounter a logic of violence key to the unfolding history of Atlantic modernity. Baucom contends that the massacre and the trials that followed it bring to light an Atlantic cycle of capital accumulation based on speculative finance, an economic cycle that has not yet run its course. The extraordinarily abstract nature of today's finance capital is the late-eighteenth-century system intensified. Yet, as Baucom highlights, since the late 1700s, this rapacious speculative culture has had detractors. He traces the emergence and development of a counter-discourse he calls melancholy realism through abolitionist and human-rights texts, British romantic poetry, Scottish moral philosophy, and the work of late-twentieth-century literary theorists. In revealing how the Zong tragedy resonates within contemporary financial systems and human-rights discourses, Baucom puts forth a deeply compelling, utterly original theory of history: one that insists that an eighteenth-century atrocity is not past but present within the future we now inhabit.
Spectral Evidence: Poems
by Gregory PardloA powerful meditation on Blackness, beauty, faith, and the force of law, from the beloved award-winning author of Digest and Air TrafficElegant, profound, and intoxicating—Spectral Evidence, Gregory Pardlo&’s first major collection of poetry after winning the Pulitzer Prize for Digest, moves fluidly among considerations of the pro-wrestler Owen Hart; Tituba, the only Black woman to be accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials; MOVE, the movement and militant separatist group famous for its violent stand-offs with the Philadelphia Police Department (&“flames rose like orchids . . . / blocks lay open like egg cartons&”); and more.At times cerebral and at other times warm, inviting and deeply personal, Spectral Evidence compels us to consider how we think about devotion, beauty and art; about the criminalization and death of Black bodies; about justice—and about how these have been inscribed into our present, our history, and the Western canon: &“If I could be / the forensic dreamer / . . . / . . . my art would be a mortician&’s / paints.&”
Spectral Spaces and Hauntings: The Affects of Absence (Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies)
by Christina LeeThis anthology explores the spatial dimension and politics of haunting. It considers how the ‘appearance’ of absence, emptiness and the imperceptible can indicate an overwhelming presence of something that once was, and still is, (t)here. At its core, the book asks: how and why do certain places haunt us? Drawing from a diversity of mediums, forms and disciplinary approaches, the contributors to Spectral Spaces and Hauntings illustrate the complicated ways absent presences can manifest and be registered. The case studies range from the memory sites of a terrorist attack, the lost home, a vanished mining town and abandoned airports, to the post-apocalyptic wastelands in literary fiction, the photographic and filmic surfaces where spectres materialise, and the body as a site for re-corporealising the disappeared and dead. In ruminating on the afteraffects of spectral spaces on human experience, the anthology importantly foregrounds the ethical and political imperative of engaging with ghosts and following their traces.
Spectres of Pessimism: A Cultural Logic of the Worst
by Mark SchmittThis book argues that philosophical pessimism can offer vital impulses for contemporary cultural studies. Pessimist thought offers ways to interrogate notions of temporality, progress and futurity. When the horizon of future expectation is increasingly shaped by the prospect of apocalypse and extinction, an exploration of pessimist thought can help to make sense of an increasingly complex and uncertain world by affirming rather than suppressing the worst. This book argues that a cultural logic of the worst is at work in a substantial section of contemporary philosophical thought and cultural representations.Spectres of pessimism can be found in contemporary ecocritical thought, antinatalist philosophies, political thought, and cultural theory, as well as in literature, film, and popular music. In its unsettling of temporality, this new pessimism shares sensibilities with the field of hauntology. Both deconstruct linear narratives of time that adhere to a stable sequence of past, present and future. Mark Schmitt therefore couples pessimism and hauntology to explore the spectres of pessimism in a range of theories and narratives—from ecocriticism, antinatalism and queer theory to utopianism, from afropessimism to the fiction of Hari Kunzru and Thomas Ligotti to the films of Camille Griffin, Gaspar Noé, Denis Villeneuve and Lars von Trier.
Spectrum of Independence: How to Teach Your Neurodiverse Child Daily Life Skills
by Kristin Lombardi Christine DrewAs a parent of a neurodiverse child, milestones that many families take for granted--like seeing your kid graduate from high school or college, get a rewarding job, and, eventually, leave the nest--may be fraught with uncertainty. How can kids who need loads of support to get through the day ever learn to take care of themselves? This motivating, practical book gives you concrete strategies for maximizing the independence of your child or teen with autism, intellectual disabilities, or other forms of neurodiversity. Exercises and downloadable worksheets are rooted in scientifically based behavioral principles and illustrated with vivid, empathic examples. By breaking down tasks like getting dressed, brushing teeth, or making a sandwich into manageable "microsteps," you will learn to phase out assistance gradually and systematically as kids take ownership of their routines. Actively boost your child's autonomy--this book shows how.
Spectrum of Sex: The Molecular Bases that Induce Various Sexual Phenotypes
by Minoru Tanaka Makoto TachibanaThis book introduces cutting-edge studies on the spectrum of sex. The sex spectrum can be understood as an interwoven mechanism sustaining graded phenotypes between the two sexes. The book overviews three elements that develop the sex spectrum: genetics, the endocrine system, and the environment. Part I discusses the genetic regulation during sex determination, which often results in a mixture of two sexes or sex reversal. The evolutionary aspects of the genetic determinants are also discussed. Part II presents the involvement of endocrine regulation in the sex spectrum, which covers a broad range of phenotypic events, including sexual behavior and metabolism. Interestingly, sex hormones can also act as sex determinants. Finally, Part III shows that intrinsic factors, such as sex-determining genes and sex hormones, are not the only factors in sex development. The environment surrounding organisms, such as symbiosis and metabolism, act on the sex as critical factors, generating the sex spectrum. Determination and development of the two sexes have been a topic of great interest and a long-standing issue in biology. The book updates the conventional view that biological sex is fixed after birth and sets new perspectives for understanding sex as a spectrum manifested in multiple phenomena. Each chapter contributed by leading experts explains the sex spectrum in various organisms and their underlying mechanisms from the latest ongoing studies. The book provides a valuable resource for not only experts in developmental biology, physiology, and medical science, but also non-scientists and anyone interested in the topic.
Spectrum of Terror
by Richard H. DekmejianSince 9/11, images of fanatical jihadists have become the international symbol of terrorism. In the wake of the attacks, journalists and academics alike have taken up the task of trying to make sense of these seemingly alien terrorist organizations. Many of these sources have perpetuated the idea that terrorists are unknowable or irrational. What is often missed is the degree to which terrorists have motivations that can be grasped and understood.In his new text, Dekmejian places terrorism within a spectrum of political violence, creating a typology of terror based on scale and intent as well as by type of actor—from isolated attacks by individual bombers, to large scale attacks against state targets by organized networks, to state-sponsored genocide and politicide—thus facilitating comparisons across multiple cases. As well, the book’s model of conflict is informed by game theory, enriched with understandings of psychological, cultural, and historical contexts, helping students focus on the strategies and desired outcomes of different parties to conflict. This analytic approach enables students to trace the changes in mutual perceptions and preferences between terrorists and their targets and leads to a fuller understanding of the causes and dynamics of political violence. The book’s uniquely comprehensive coverage of terrorism includes extended cases on the IRA, the Tamil Tigers, Chechen rebels, Al Qaeda, Aum Shinrikyo, Hizbullah, and Hamas. Each case looks at the historical origins, political factors, leadership, and organization of the group to give context. Discussions of typical tactics, patterns of violence, the role of external actors, and outcomes help readers to explore possible solutions that might stop the cycle of violence and promote peaceful coexistence among the antagonists. Appendix materials include glossaries of terrorist groups and technical terms.
Spectrums: Autistic Transgender People in Their Own Words
by Maxfield SparrowWritten by autistic trans people from around the world, this vital and intimate collection of personal essays reveals the struggles and joys of living at the intersection of neurodivergence and gender diversity.Weaving memories, poems and first-person narratives together, these stories showcase experiences of coming out, college and university life, accessing healthcare, physical transition, friendships and relationships, sexuality, pregnancy, parenting, and late life self-discovery, to reveal a rich and varied tapestry of life lived on the spectrums.With humour and personal insight, this anthology is essential reading for autistic trans people, and the professionals supporting them, as well as anyone interested in the nuances of autism and gender identity.
Speculations on the Question: What Is Housing? (Routledge Focus on Housing and Philosophy)
by Peter KingThis book consists of a single essay that speculates on the question what is housing?, and its opposite question, what is not housing? The essay is organised around two distinct discourses around which housing can be framed. The first, which is the dominant discourse, is what I term policy thinking. This is where housing is seen solely in terms of policy formulation and action. The second discourse is private dwelling, which describes housing in terms of a private space used by households. Private dwelling might be seen as a product of policy, but, in actuality, it precedes policy thinking in being the very purpose of policy. Having made this distinction between policy thinking and private dwelling, and so stated in principle what housing is, the subsequent sections of the essay explore the nature of private dwelling in more detail and so substantiate the distinction between the two forms of discourse.
Speculative Affect: Objects and Emotions (Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism)
by Charmaine EddySpeculative Affect: Objects and Emotions is an edited collection examining the intersection between affect and objects in the fields of literature, cultural theory, and cultural production. The word “speculative” in the title references recent philosophical and cultural work in the “speculative turn,” a philosophical field that includes speculative realism, new materialisms, “thing” theory, or object-oriented ontology, where the object is analyzed apart from human consciousness and human use-value. By linking this return to an ontological object realism beyond human consciousness with affect theory’s reimagining of corporeality by exploring attachments, bodily sensations, autonomic responses, and emotions as embodied forces beyond conscious knowing, this work addresses the last frontier in radically reconfiguring the status of human life – the division and hierarchy between so-called inert material and the apparent “superiority” of humanity.
Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction
by André M. CarringtonIn Speculative Blackness, André M. Carrington analyzes the highly racialized genre of speculative fiction—including science fiction, fantasy, and utopian works, along with their fan cultures—to illustrate the relationship between genre conventions in media and the meanings ascribed to blackness in the popular imagination.Carrington&’s argument about authorship, fandom, and race in a genre that has been both marginalized and celebrated offers a black perspective on iconic works of science fiction. He examines the career of actor Nichelle Nichols, who portrayed the character Uhura in the original Star Trek television series and later became a recruiter for NASA, and the spin-off series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, set on a space station commanded by a black captain. He recovers a pivotal but overlooked moment in 1950s science fiction fandom in which readers and writers of fanzines confronted issues of race by dealing with a fictitious black fan writer and questioning the relevance of race to his ostensible contributions to the 'zines. Carrington mines the productions of Marvel comics and the black-owned comics publisher Milestone Media, particularly the representations of black sexuality in its flagship title, Icon. He also interrogates online fan fiction about black British women in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Harry Potter series. Throughout this nuanced analysis, Carrington theorizes the relationship between race and genre in cultural production, revealing new understandings of the significance of blackness in twentieth-century American literature and culture.
Speculative Futures: Design Approaches to Navigate Change, Foster Resilience, and Co-Create the Citie s We Need
by Johanna HoffmanHow the emerging field of speculative futures can help us dream--and build--better, sustainable, and more equitable cities for everyone.Speculative futures--design approaches that help us visualize new and potential worlds--move us beyond what currently exists into what could one day be. Inspired by art, film, fiction, and industrial design, they use speculation to provoke, imagine, and dream into what lies ahead.Written for futurists, urbanists, and artists looking to enact city-wide transformation--and for readers at the intersection of disruption, design, innovation, and city living--this book offers creative paths toward urban resilience, using design tools that already exist.Artist and urbanist Johanna Hoffman uses an interdisciplinary lens informed by her experience in architecture, art, engineering, and construction to examine how we can reimagine our cities at every level: as individuals, in community, and on a professional scale.Hoffman blends precedent studies, compelling research, and professional memoir, connecting urban development issues with the processes and actions best positioned to create better solutions for our cities. The result is a dynamic field guide that uses speculative futures to imagine, advocate for, and adapt to modern scales, scopes, and speeds of change.While this book is of great utility to professionals in the urban design and planning industries, it&’s also for people who resist received, capitalistic, technocratic ways of thinking--readers who seek new solutions to old problems with anti-colonial, living-systems-oriented lenses.
Speculative Geographies: Ethics, Technologies, Aesthetics
by Thomas Keating Nina WilliamsThis book explores how speculative thinking is shaping how we relate to our entangled social, mental, and environmental ecologies. It examines how speculative philosophies and concepts are changing geographical research methods and techniques, whilst also developing how speculative thinking transforms the way human, non-human, and more-than-human things are conceptualised in research practices across the social sciences, arts, and humanities. Offering the first dedicated compendium of geographical engagements with speculation and speculative thinking, the chapters in this edited collection advance debates about how affective, imperceptible, and infra-sensible qualities of environments might be written about through alternative registers and ontologies of experience. Organised around the themes of Ethics, Technologies, and Aesthetics, the book will appeal to those engaging with architecture, Black political theory, fiction, cinema, children’s geographies, biotechnologies, philosophy, rural studies, arts practice, and nuclear waste studies as speculative research practices appropriate for addressing contemporary ecological problems.Chapters 1, 3 and 4 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin
by Amy J EliasOver the course of a thirty-eight-year friendship, painter Beauford Delaney and writer James Baldwin shared their private lives and shaped one another’s artistic values. Speculative Light brings together scholars, critics, and artists who analyze the stylistic and historical import of Delaney's and Baldwin’s works and examine how this friendship fundamentally shaped the pair's ideas about art and life. The book’s contributors explore how the two men, sharing identities as queer Black American artists, first in New York and then as expatriates in France, created a speculative space in their work to think about more just and creative Black futures. Essay topics and issues range from masculinity, queerness, Blackness, and Americanness to the relationship between jazz, painting, and writing. Throughout, the contributors establish a positive history for Delaney's and Baldwin’s arts that refuses a subordinate role to white artists of the modernist avant-garde. Ultimately, Speculative Light demonstrates that Delaney and Baldwin's bond provides revolutionary grounds for theorizing contemporary Black art and life.Contributors. Hilton Als, Nicholas Boggs, Indie A. Choudhury, Shawn Anthony Christian, Rachel Cohen, Amy J. Elias, Monika Gehlawat, David Leeming, D. Quentin Miller, Fred Moten, Walton M. Muyumba, Robert O’Meally, Ed Pavlić, Levi Prombaum, Robert Reid-Pharr, Tyler T. Schmidt, Abbe Schriber, Jered Sprecher, Stephen C. Wicks, Magdalena Zaborowska
Speculative Markets: Drug Circuits and Derivative Life in Nigeria
by Kristin PetersonIn this unprecedented account of the dynamics of Nigeria's pharmaceutical markets, Kristin Peterson connects multinational drug company policies, oil concerns, Nigerian political and economic transitions, the circulation of pharmaceuticals in the Global South, Wall Street machinations, and the needs and aspirations of individual Nigerians. Studying the pharmaceutical market in Lagos, Nigeria, she places local market social norms and credit and pricing practices in the broader context of regional, transnational, and global financial capital. Peterson explains how a significant and formerly profitable African pharmaceutical market collapsed in the face of U.S. monetary policies and neoliberal economic reforms, and she illuminates the relation between that collapse and the American turn to speculative capital during the 1980s. In the process, she reveals the mutual constitution of financial speculation in the drug industry and the structural adjustment plans that the IMF imposed on African nations. Her book is a sobering ethnographic analysis of the effects of speculation and "development" as they reverberate across markets and continents, and play out in everyday interpersonal transactions of the Lagos pharmaceutical market.