Photo courtesy of Paul Chan, Creative Time and Green Naftali Gallery, New York.
Dear friends and colleagues,
We are pleased to announce the publication of CULTURAL POLITICS Volume 5, Issue 3, November 2009, which is a General Issue.Visit Cultural Politics’ Artists’ website: http://culturalpolitics.org
Please feel free to circulate.Best wishes,
The Editors
+++
Cultural Politics
Volume 5, Issue 3
November 2009
CONTENTS
“Turkish Delight” in Vienna: Art, Islam and European Public Culture
Nilüfer Göle on how the European aesthetic realm becomes a battleground of intercultural and intercivilizational conflicts as well as a domain of borrowings and mixings between ‘native’ and ‘Islamic’ values, thereby creating a transnational public sphere.
Class Struggle and Displacement: Slavoj Žižek and Film Theory
Matthew Flisfeder argues against cognitivist film scholars, such as David Bordwell and David Carroll, and for the relevance of Slavoj Zizek in the field of film criticism and theory.
Waiting for Godot in New Orleans [check it out @ http://culturalpolitics.org]
New York based artist Paul Chan discusses and illustrates his staging of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in New Orleans as a series of site-specific performances and creative response to the city’s ongoing dysfunction and its inhabitants’ collective tenaciousness in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
The Recursive Mode: Space, Time and the Hypercommodification of Culture
Robert Hassan argues that ‘evolution’ in the production of mass cultural forms has become stalled in our postmodern, networked, and neoliberalized society, forms that no longer have the space or time to evolve either dialectically in response to capitalism, or organically as newly independent developments.
Wreck, Restoration and the Work of Carrying On: History on Vivan Sundaram’s Boat-Works
Tania Roy examines the installation artwork of Vivan Sundaram, one of India’s foremost contemporary artists, as an aesthetic response to the rapid political and cultural transformations that marked the 1990s by way of experiments with site-specific, inter-medial installations.
Book Reviews
Can Theory Save Us?
Martin Parker considers Mark Featherstone’s Tocqueville’s Virus: Utopia and Dystopia in Western Social and Political Thought, an intellectual history that runs from Aristotle to Zizek
Reevaluating Greatness in the Time of War
Marek Bartelik analyses Aaron J. Cohen’s Imagining the Unimaginable: World War, Modern Art, and the Politics of Public Culture in Russia, 1914-1917, a history of Russian art prior to the October Revolution.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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.
