This article looks past the showy dramas of French Maoism in order to bring into focus its widespread and at times banal photographic practices in the late 1960s and 70s. Tremendous energy was devoted to taking and circulating photos of China within France. These photographs, whose close connection to the real seems at odds with the goals and means of the Cultural Revolution, were nonetheless essential to its enthusiastic reception in the West.

Catherine E. Clark

Representations

From Cameras to Slideshows

This article reads the contemporary monument conflicts connected to the Black Lives Matter movement in France alongside the erection and destruction of fictional monuments in a bestselling utopian novel from three centuries ago: Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’An deux mille quatre cent quarante: Rêve s’il en fût jamais (1771). The article throws light on how contemporary BLM interventions in the cityscape respond to still unresolved issues regarding the meaning of liberté, egalité, and fraternité in relation to colonialism, nationalism, and race; examines the discursive mechanisms behind the history of slavery becoming notoriously unremembered in France; and, in conclusion, considers the unrealized utopian potentiality of Mercier’s novel in relation to the most recent projects to memorialize slavery in Paris.

Anna Jörngården Galili

Black Lives Matter in Paris 1771 and 2021

If I lie and I say that I am lying, am I lying or telling the truth? This ancient riddle, the Liar’s Paradox, is at the heart of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). Because the Liar’s Paradox refers to itself while also negating the truth of its own proposition, it generates an unresolvable logical contradiction. This essay recovers how scholastic logicians and modern mathematicians have grappled with the Liar Riddle, which provides a compact formula for capturing infinity. Drawing on these formalizations, I argue that Utopia uses the abstract techniques of logic and mathematics to inscribe an autonomous artificial system. This abstract formalization comprises utopia’s radical political potential: its ability to convert enclosure into a method of infinite expansion.

Jenny C. Mann

The Liar’s Paradox and the Form of Utopia

The nineteenth-century emergence of foreshadowing as a critical term and pedagogical subject tracks and reinforces the classic understanding of modernity-as-disenchantment, as the domain of foreshadowing moves from providential and historical phenomena to textual practices. However, reading for the foreshadowing in nineteenth-century realist novels such as Middlemarch reveals a more porous boundary between ontological and formal foreshadowing and troubles established views regarding readerly belief and disbelief and the supposed rift between meaning and life.

Daniel Hack

Reading for the Foreshadowing

In uncovering the hidden history of Sigmund Freud’s Mystic Writing-Pad, this essay seeks to illuminate not only why so many have assumed that it was “merely a child’s toy” (and how we might read it differently knowing that it was not) but also why Jacques Derrida devoted so much energy to deconstructing Freud’s fascination with it as an analogy for consciousness. We may even discover something—in ways that are perhaps more than mere analogy—about how our more contemporary devices generate modes of extended cognition as well.

R. John Williams

Surface Writing

Michel Foucault’s return to classical antiquity at the end of his career coincides with a turn away from institutional critique and a return to Kant. This is no coincidence. Foucault’s Introduction to Kant’s “Anthropology” (1961) completely anticipates his approach to ancient subject formations, which reflects Kant’s theory of the liberal, self-enterprising, and enlightened subject as this is outlined in Foucault’s “What Is Enlightenment?” (1984) and elsewhere. Foucault’s final studies surface isolated, private, and autonomous subjects who are at once premodern, proto-Christian, and uncannily modern. Fashioned by ascetic and aesthetic models of self-care, they testify to “a genealogy of the modern subject.”

James I. Porter

Foucault, Kant, and Antiquity

This article examines the historical development of systems thinking to demonstrate the manifold applications of games in modeling new understandings of systems. Chess and go were deliberately reconfigured by competitors, theorists, and tournament organizers over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into systematic totalities. This transformation profoundly influenced subsequent concepts of formal and symbolic systems developed in twentieth-century mathematics, AI research, cognitive science, and economics.

Samuel Pizelo

Games and the Rise of Systems Thinking

In Mati Diop’s film Atlantics (France/Senegal/Belgium, 2019), images of people holding, using, and disposing of cell phones knit together scenes of attenuated social reproduction. In this essay, I take those images as the basis for a theory of interfaces. In so doing, I connect some of the principal concerns of media theory to the social operations—of labor, of social reproduction, and of racialized, gendered, and sexuated valuation—that collectively enact the expanded reproduction of capital. From the perspective of those operations, media technologies such as cell phones become intelligible as elements in a determinate form of society: not only interfaces in themselves but also elements in an expansive, emergent, and (apparently) self-regulating network of interfaces.

Seb Franklin

Reproduction at the Interface

This article advances an argument about two “imagined environments”—my term for the frameworks that human groups use to depict and dwell in more-than-human worlds. The first of these imagined environments arose around the US-Mexican Boundary Commission (1849–59): while failing to fulfill its official objective of building physical border monuments, this team of explorers and engineers still made media that helped two settler states conceptualize and control their borderlands. Against this increasingly efficient exploitation of both humans and nonhumans, a second imagined environment persisted in Mescalero Apache pictographs, Chihene Apache performances, and other Apache media. On our precarious planet, this imagined environment can teach us to stop defining ourselves around fixed places and to remain resilient while migrating through shifting spaces.

Carlos Alonso Nugent

Drawing and Disrupting Borders in the Wake of the US-Mexico War

This article reconstructs the relationship between figuration, cognitive mapping, and energy in the work of Fredric Jameson to show how the macroeconomics of oil overdetermines the transition into and out of postmodernity. It then critically reflects on what this might mean in an era defined by economic stagnation, climate catastrophe, high energy prices, and decarbonization, arguing that the crisis of carbon and capital once again makes figuration an urgent political task.

Harry Pitt Scott

Figures of Separation

This essay works to define, historicize, and probe the queer fairy tale subgenre. Recuperating Vladimir Propp’s syntagmatic formalism from a queer angle, I argue that fairy tales’ protean, fantastical qualities afford rapid and imaginative refashioning across languages by LGBTQ+ writers. In Belle Époque tales by Vernon Lee, Oscar Wilde, Laurence Housman, Jean Lorrain, and Renée Vivien, I locate a poignant vision of queer futurity.

Colton Valentine

The Belle Époque Queer Fairy Tale

This paper argues for the absenting presence of an embodied theoretical architecture of materialist harmonious dialectic in Hubert Damisch’s engagement with Chinese art and architecture around the cloud. This connects with recent media studies discourse where environment both conditions and is being with an alternative architecture that is different from a centralized elevated arche. At the same time, the essay positively explores the decolonizing structural potential for displacing Eurocentrism and idealism in the making of theory and art and architecture history by opening up to global collaborative knowledge formation and reconnecting theory with practice.

Ruo Jia

Cloud as an Alternative Architecture

Corrigendum

John Milton’s Paradise Lost is shaped by an implicit theory of life. In Milton’s view, the mark of the living is the capacity to endeavor, the ability to strive in phenomenally available and self-exceeding ways. This essay examines how Milton reworks ancient and early modern ideas about life in order both to develop a concept of endeavor and to represent the activity of endeavoring.

Timothy M. Harrison

“Every Living Thing”

This essay uses Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1596) and George Wither’s A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne (1635) to investigate the contingencies that fictions can harbor and the ethical demands of the cocreative reading practices they host. Wither’s Collection includes an innovative “lotterie” game that involves twenty-four poems that do not correspond to any emblem. I trace the uninstantiated possibilities enabled by the inclusion of these “blank chances” in light of early modern poetry’s developing interest in contingency.

J. K. Barret

Blank Chance and the Undrawn Emblem

The space age has generated a profound uncertainty of experience between technology and utopianism. This essay makes a critical intervention in this uncertainty by examining a historically constructed tension between dwelling at and departing from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Attention to this tension that underwrote the Soviet colonial project of conquering the cosmos and the terrestrial environment exposes the utopian vision of space travel and the ontology of a deflating present as a dialectic that questions the space age as a state of soon-to-be-leaving Earth.

Saulesh Yessenova

The Russian Ecology of Leaving Earth

Maandeeq, or she-camel, is the most recognizable and dominant metaphor for the Somali nation-state, a symbol conceived and institutionalized through classical pastoral poetry. This article examines how Somali poets of the twentieth century made use of another metaphor to consider the anxieties of independence and the founding paradoxes of the Somali state: the metaphor of qabyo. Unlike the binary offered by the stable figure of maandeeq—she’s either dead or alive, stolen or reclaimed, shared or contested—qabyo attends to the incongruent, overlapping, and cyclical forms of ruination and repair that subtend the makings of the Somali state. Moreover, by contesting the determinism of failure narratives and instead focusing on the daily labor required to conduct a life in the ruins of history, qabyo poetics, I argue, advances a sociopolitical theory of the Somali subject as one who must learn to survive ruinous time.

Farah Bakaari

Qabyo

Research Article| May 01 2023 (After)Word Poulomi Saha Poulomi Saha POULOMI SAHA is Associate Professor of English and Co-Director of the Program in Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. Their research and teaching interests span postcolonial studies, ethnic American literature, feminist and queer theory, critical theory, and psychoanalytic critique. Her first book, An Empire of Touch: Women’s Political Labor and the Fabrication of East Bengal (Columbia, 2019), was awarded the 2020 Harry Levin Prize for outstanding first book by the American Comparative Literature Association and the Helen Tartar First Book Award. Saha’s scholarship has appeared in differences, qui parle, Signs, Interventions, The Journal of Modern Literature, Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, and the Journal of American Studies, among other places. They are currently at work on Fascination: America’s “Indian” Cults. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Representations (2023) 162 (1): 144–148. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2023.162.10.144 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Poulomi Saha; (After)Word. Representations 1 May 2023; 162 (1): 144–148. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2023.162.10.144 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRepresentations Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2023 by The Regents of the University of California2023 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Poulomi Saha

(After)Word

Research Article| August 01 2023 Passages of Arms: Postwar Fictions of Espionage Penny Fielding Penny Fielding PENNY FIELDING is Grierson Professor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh and Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Her books include Writing and Orality, Scotland and the Fictions of Geography and (with Andrew Taylor) Literature in Transition: The 1880s. She is General Editor of the New Edinburgh Edition of Robert Louis Stevenson. Codirector of the Edinburgh Network for Studies in Secrecy, she is currently writing a book on fiction and espionage in Scotland from Sir Walter Scott to Muriel Spark. Penny.Fielding@ed.ac.uk Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Penny.Fielding@ed.ac.uk Representations (2023) 163 (1): 34–50. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2023.163.3.34 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Penny Fielding; Passages of Arms: Postwar Fictions of Espionage. Representations 1 August 2023; 163 (1): 34–50. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2023.163.3.34 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRepresentations Search The spy novel—unlike its cousin the detective novel—takes its point of departure from a political context, offering a fictionalized narrative to real-world conflicts between nation states or other political entities. But although they deal in political history, spy novels are not the same as the Lukácsian historical novel, narrated from a self-conscious present that can assess the importance of world-historical changes in the past. Rather, they act as uneasy proxies to history—narratives that have a synecdochic relationship to historical events but must project hypothetical renditions of their secret underside. What happens when this proxy generic form meets proxy history in the form of the regional conflicts of the early Cold War? These wars themselves resist easy classification, because the Cold War was both a product of a postwar peace and an instigator of further wars.1 Its proxy wars—Korea, Vietnam—existed, in Mary Dudziak’s phrasing, in a temporality “in which war... You do not currently have access to this content.

Penny Fielding

Passages of Arms

This essay reads Guadeloupean novelist Simone Schwartz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée miracle (The Bridge of Beyond), positioning the novel as a vital archive for decolonizing the so-called ontological turn. In addition to narrativizing the stakes of disavowing the human, the novel situates gendered embodiment at the heart of these concerns, asking whether a movement toward the nonanthropocentric subject is always a movement away from how gender matters, and, significantly, how gender matters alongside race.

Lauren Nelson

Gendered Mattering

Lists of Roman Catholic priests form the documentary infrastructure of clerical sexual abuse. Based on an ethnography of one such list—a document compiled deep inside a Central American prison by a convicted cleric—this essay argues that such lists are, formally speaking, impractical. Impracticality names the way in which some lists may appear to be flat and referential but in fact are more concerned with evoking affects. It is an ambiguity that Church leaders manipulate to conjure the feeling (but not the fact) of transparency.

Kevin Lewis O’Neill

On the Impracticality of Lists

Montage diversity divides even as it unites the people it represents, making it a telling register of possibilities for social inclusion in American visual culture. Montage effects in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and Pepsi-Cola’s 1969 campaign “You’ve Got a Lot to Live” demonstrate the problems that arise in the combination of social diversity and filmic montage, and, because one was the work of avant-garde film artist Slavko Vorkapich and the other of his son Ed Vorkapich, compose a critical genealogy of montage diversity and its implications for social inclusion.

Jesse Matz

Montage Diversity

Introduction| August 01 2023 Introduction Yoon Sun Lee, Yoon Sun Lee YOON SUN LEE’s most recent book is The Natural Laws of Plot: How Things Happen in Realist Novels (Philadelphia, 2023). She is the Anne Pierce Rogers Professor of English at Wellesley College and the author of Nationalism and Irony: Burke, Scott, Carlyle (Oxford, 2004) and Modern Minority: Asian American Literature and Everyday Life (Oxford, 2013). Her essays have appeared in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, MLQ, and other journals and collections. She is the incoming president of the International Society for the Study of Narrative. ylee@wellesley.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Kent Puckett Kent Puckett KENT PUCKETT is Ida May and William J. Eggers Jr. Chair in English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel, Narrative Theory: A Critical Introduction, War Pictures: Cinema, Violence, and Style in Britain, 1939–1945, and The Electoral Imagination: Literature, Legitimacy, and Other Rigged Systems. kpuckett@berkeley.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar ylee@wellesley.edu kpuckett@berkeley.edu Representations (2023) 163 (1): 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2023.163.1.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Yoon Sun Lee, Kent Puckett; Introduction. Representations 1 August 2023; 163 (1): 1–13. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2023.163.1.1 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRepresentations Search Although there have always been wars by proxy, conflicts that depend on or are fueled by the lasting or temporary alignment of the tactical or strategic interests of two or more states, a proxy war is—as a term of art, a discrete policy instrument, and a motivating metaphor—a relatively novel concept.1 A reaction to the increased stakes of mechanized warfare and, more to the point, the potentially world-killing devastation of the atomic bomb, the proxy war emerged during the Cold War as a way for major military powers to pursue strategic ends through military means while remaining on the “good” side of the threshold separating the political use of force from the endgame of nuclear annihilation. Andrew Mumford writes that “the global reach of the Cold War soon demonstrated, in the mid-twentieth century, that engagement in proxy wars was a convenient means by which the superpower states could exert... You do not currently have access to this content.

Yoon Sun Lee

Kent Puckett

Introduction

Vaughn Rasberry

Counterproxy

How do we build the working conditions we need to really do our jobs? By really do I mean being able to create the new forms of knowledge that society will need to get through the next thirty years, and being able to work with our students with a scope and intensity we desire and they deserve. Only a small minority of us now have proper working conditions. We need them for the whole profession and not just for the privileged few.

Christopher Newfield

Criticism After This Crisis

This essay argues that the dynamic between flat emotions and transformative flesh in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child engages the strategies and failures of racial liberalism. I define racial liberalism as the US’s rights-based approach to racial justice across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that frames racism as a private, psychological drama of emotions. By veering away from strong emotions and the liberal subject and toward affect and materiality, Morrison shifts blame away from individual victims and perpetrators and instead highlights the harm of larger, administratively “neutral” systems like the law and the prison industrial complex.

Melanie Abeygunawardana

Yes, Pain, But What Else?

In recent years, literary critics grappling with the misfit writer Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s sprawling oeuvre have recovered a “modernist” who deploys formal tropes like the fragment or sketch to capture the city’s fugitive qualities. In this essay, I show that Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s little-read Mon bonnet de nuit (My night bonnet) transposes formal indeterminacy to the writing of the everyday, the thinking of thought, and the representation of cosmic space. Mercier’s growing commitment to geocentrism counterbalances Friedrich Schlegel’s call for a “Copernican” poetics, while his writerly hyperproductivity gives rise to a style of indifference and zaniness that offers insight into the creation of “literary value” at the critical juncture when patrons gave way to publishers as mediators of production in European literary history.

Travis Wilds

“Blushing before the Muses”

This article proposes “coalition” as an organizing dynamic for opposition politics that influenced an emergent conception of religious toleration in the English Civil Wars. Through readings of John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), and in comparisons with his immediate forbears and contemporaries, the article distinguishes this conception of toleration from later liberal formulations. In closing, it argues that the formal dynamics of coalition also characterize the marital relationship of Adam and Eve after the fall in Milton’s epic Paradise Lost (1667, 1674).

Tom Clayton

Milton’s Coalitions

This essay intervenes in the contemporary debate surrounding the Bildungsroman and its roots in German Idealism through a new reading of the idea of “life” in two major modern texts: G. W. F. Hegel’s Lectures on Fine Art and the famous “Research” chapter of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. I establish three key points: 1) Hegel pioneers a bio-aesthetics that grasps the work of art as a distinctly social and historical, reflective manifestation of organic life; 2) Mann’s novel achieves a kind of self-conscious knowledge of the Bildungsroman in particular as such a manifestation; and 3) Karl Marx’s analysis of the alienation of humanity from its “species-being” under capitalism accounts for the opposition between nature and culture, animality and rationality, that drives Mann’s modernist experiment with genre: his innovation of what I call “the novel of deformation.”

Jensen Suther

Novel, Organism, Form

This essay revisits Sylvia Wynter’s 1971 essay “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation” in relation to a quandary: the history of provision grounds not only as a resource but also as an initiation into property relations during and after West Indian slavery. In this light, the plot becomes a space of instruction in how to become a free subject through exchange. The essay draws out the plot’s histories of dispossession, enclosure, and dispute. Ultimately, it offers another term, siphon, as the condition of the overlapping conjunctures of West Indian emancipation and the postcolonial.

Kaneesha Cherelle Parsard

Siphon, or What Was the Plot? Revisiting Sylvia Wynter’s “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation”

This essay attempts to think anticolonialism as theory. It does so by first embracing the role of metaphor in the contemporary discourse on decolonization. Then, turning to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, it models a way of re-reading the promise of anticolonial freedom attuned to the alternative conceptions of decolonization that persist in the wake of past struggles. Reading with Fanon and, subsequently, with Achille Mbembe in his revision of the former’s political vision, the essay traces the temporalities that converge under the sign of decolonization in search of what hidden potentials remain at hand.

Nijah Cunningham

Heliology

This essay concentrates on the figural knots that both refuse and suture readings across Raquel Salas Rivera’s Preguntas frecuentes and X/Ex/Exis. Tracing self-translations, the essay reads how Salas Rivera steals back from English and binary gender in the poetic and translation decisions to withhold, or hold onto, loss as itself incommensurable or untranslatable. His poetics situates Latinx at the hinge and limit of two colonial languages, requiring us to contend with ongoing problems of reference and translation. Through material tropes, Salas Rivera’s poetry registers entanglements and displacements of colonial grammars, transgender terms, and the material remains of empire.

Christina León

Knots in the Throat

This essay approaches Richard Wright’s naturalist novel Native Son (1940) as a statistically informed project that explores probability and potentiality not as theoretical concepts but as material and historical phenomena instantiated by the emerging statistical governance of the New Deal state. I demonstrate the ways Bigger is rendered as information throughout the novel to show that Wright’s work anticipates how the state was increasingly relying on nonvisual, informatic processes of perception, foreshadowing the racialized data of the digital age.

Devin William Daniels

Everybody’s Statistical Record

Frantz Fanon’s powerful conception of racial anticolonialism occurs in the shadow of his vexed treatment of homosexuality. This essay considers the traffic between Fanon’s anticoloniality and the recalcitrance of queer transnational writers to argue that sexuality obtains a political force in their fiction through specific citational practices. It explores how fabulation and farce enable a citational queer of color aesthetics that circulates around, unsettles, and adapts Fanon’s historical signatures. The essay ultimately traces a sphere of influence between literature and political culture that makes sexual politics the ground zero for statist decolonization and yet also always a sign of more radical possibility.

Mrinalini Chakravorty

Anticolonialism’s “Homosexual Territory”

Research Article| August 01 2023 Proxy War and Sequel Logic: Anglophone Genres in Interimperial Asia Jed Esty Jed Esty JED ESTY is the Vartan Gregorian Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of A Shrinking Island (2004), Unseasonable Youth (2012), and The Future of Decline (2022); he is currently working on a new project entitled Cold War Victorians: The Genre System of the Angloworld. esty@sas.upenn.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar esty@sas.upenn.edu Representations (2023) 163 (1): 116–133. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2023.163.7.116 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jed Esty; Proxy War and Sequel Logic: Anglophone Genres in Interimperial Asia. Representations 1 August 2023; 163 (1): 116–133. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2023.163.7.116 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRepresentations Search The “empire writes back” was a conceptual standby of postcolonial studies in the 1980s and 90s. One of its curricular staples was a unit on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness read alongside its Global South rewritings (Michaela Bronstein, Byron Caminero-Santangelo, Ankhi Mukherjee).1 What can we make now of “writing back” as an aesthetic proxy for anti-imperial politics, and of Conrad adaptations as a subcanon of global Anglophone cultural history? Is the heyday of counterdiscursive storytelling over, and, if not, when does the project of writing back—to Conrad, for example—ever stop? Or, to put the question in terms more directly responsive to this special issue of Representations: what is the relation between the proxy wars waged at the frontiers of the Western imperial system and the revision wars that did so much to shape what the literary disciplines once enshrined as anticolonial storytelling? To answer these questions, we might... You do not currently have access to this content.

Jed Esty

Proxy War and Sequel Logic

The boundaries of an Anglican parish were ritualistically set by the bodies of people who belonged to it, and by the eighteenth century its edges could be imagined as looping outward to encompass indispensable parishioners wherever they moved in the world. Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne (1789) brings nonhuman life into this relational model. In extending belonging to his favorite birds, which from his perspective may or may not be migratory, White uses religious concepts to perform a creative remapping of local space.

Dustin D. Stewart

Birds in the Loop

These conversations between Teju Cole and Louis Klee explore form and ethics in Cole’s photography and writing. They begin with a close engagement with the central thematic concerns and motifs in Cole’s 2017 photo-essay book Blind Spot and then move to his recent book of essays, Black Paper (2021). Throughout, the focus is on questions of how photography and writing relate, and how politics and ethics are implicated in literary and artistic form.

Louis Klee

Ethics and Associativeness

This paper considers the possibilities and limits of anticolonial resistance alongside the transmedial artworks of Tuareg poet and artist Mahmoudan Hawad, setting what he calls his “furigraphies” in a radioactive historical and geographical context that presently extends from Taourirt Tan Afela (Algeria) to Arlit (Niger) because of indelible—and currently unfolding—French nuclear imperialism that includes both nuclear bomb and uranium extraction infrastructures.

Jill Jarvis

Forget Decolonizing

Research Article| August 01 2023 Sight Unseen: Proxy War, Proxy Adoption Kelly M. Rich Kelly M. Rich KELLY M. RICH is Associate Professor of English at Harvard University. Her research focuses on the long afterlives of war and their impress on the cultural imagination. She is the author of States of Repair: The Promise of Welfare in the Postwar British and Anglophone Novel (Oxford, 2023) and coeditor with Nicole M. Rizzuto and Susan Zieger of The Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure: Race, Affect, Environment (Northwestern, 2022). Her scholarship has appeared in venues including ELH, Modern Fiction Studies, Contemporary Literature, and Law, Culture, and the Humanities. She is currently at work on a second book project, Children of Conflict: Transnational Adoption and Literary Form. rich@fas.harvard.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar rich@fas.harvard.edu Representations (2023) 163 (1): 51–78. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2023.163.4.51 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Kelly M. Rich; Sight Unseen: Proxy War, Proxy Adoption. Representations 1 August 2023; 163 (1): 51–78. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2023.163.4.51 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRepresentations Search T. R. Fehrenbach’s classic history of the Korean War, This Kind of War (1962), famously calls the conflict “not a test of power—because neither antagonist used full powers—but a test of wills.”1 Originally subtitled A Study in Unpreparedness, it describes a US that learned the hard way what it took to fight a limited proxy war abroad. The first chapter, “Seoul, Saturday Night,” recounts the eve of the Korean War in anticipatory detail, with the pathos of retrospective knowledge. Surveying the American colony and its embassy bars, the narrator observes:Over tax-free liquor, the colony laughed over Foster’s [John Foster Dulles] visit, and over the official who had been caught keeping North Korea’s Number One female spy. This man had even bought the woman a short-wave radio, and it was said the ROK’s would shoot her.In spite of American influence, the ROK’s were still extremely brutal to... You do not currently have access to this content.

Kelly M. Rich

Sight Unseen

Karl Ashoka Britto

Stories Told and Untold

In this essay I address the emotive charge of James Welling’s photographic abstractions from the early 1980s, described by the artist as “images about the act of feeling.” Welling’s endeavor to stage this “act,” I argue, places his work within a wider effort by peers like Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, and David Salle to reassess what it meant for art to be “expressive.” At a moment when modernist models of this concept had lost their credibility and “expressionism” as a genre had come to appear politically toxic, such an inquiry took on new urgency, raising questions that remain central to ongoing debates about the relationship between art, affect, and the social.

Alexander Bigman

Acts of Feeling

We Value Schooling as Much as Asians Do?,'' Chicago School of Economics professor

Paul Nadal

How Neoliberalism Remade the Model Minority Myth

Research Article| May 01 2023 Anticolonialism as Theory Yogita Goyal Yogita Goyal YOGITA GOYAL is Professor of African American Studies and English at UCLA and the author of Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature (2010) and Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery (2019), which won the René Wellek Prize from ACLA, the Perkins Prize from the International Society for the Study of Narrative, and Honorable Mention for the James Russell Lowell Prize from MLA. Past President of ASAP, she has published widely on African diaspora, postcolonial, and US literature and is working on The Genres of Anticolonialism, a study of mid-twentieth-century anticolonial thought and its current revival. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Representations (2023) 162 (1): 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2023.162.1.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Yogita Goyal; Anticolonialism as Theory. Representations 1 May 2023; 162 (1): 1–10. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2023.162.1.1 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRepresentations Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2023 by The Regents of the University of California2023 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Yogita Goyal

Anticolonialism as Theory

By way of a formal experiment in speculative entanglement, this essay hopes to set in motion an account of nonviolence as a disposition vested in principles of relationship rather than renunciation. It also counters what the cultural anthropologist Thomas Trautmann has described as the “theory-deadness” of non-Western antiquities—a double effect, we might argue, of their disciplinary incarceration by possessive orientalist modes of expertise and policing by various insurgent cultural nationalisms.

Leela Gandhi

On Sitting

Grounded in the material conditions of the African metropolis, this essay decenters the imaginary of the postcolonial state and investigates the affective tenor of the city. What does it mean to navigate anticolonial promise through the prism of postcolonial disappointment in Kenya’s capital? An everyday politics of hustling and nonalignment questions the project of transformation in Nairobi, drawing attention to situated engagements with skepticism and belief, and theorizing from marginal territories.

Shakirah E. Hudani

Gates to the City

The image of Hamlet holding and beholding the skull in the graveyard scene of Hamlet is an icon of tragic endings that exceeds the moralizing dimensions of the standard memento mori or remembrance of death. This essay explores the significance of the image in the history of Shakespearean adaptation in the context of the art, science, and ethical philosophy of the American frontier. The focus of the essay is Herd on the Move, the most ambitious painting by artist and naturalist William Jacob Hays (1830–75). The large canvas presents the exodus of bison on the frontier to points further west and features a bison in the posture of Hamlet gazing in tragic shock and recognition at a bison skull to the side of the herd. The essay analyzes this painting to trace the theme of the extinction of species as it is embedded in the “translation of empire” and Manifest Destiny. I account for the combined resources of several histories—art, theater, nineteenth-century history and philosophy—to elucidate the ways in which Hays, as an artist and scientist, aimed to retrain the eyes of East Coast clientele so that they might see the ecological and ethical consequences of the White man’s perspective on the push west to native species, especially the bison and the Indigenous peoples with whom their existence was intimately entwined.

Heather James

The Graveyard and the Frontier

Exploring literary forms through radical materialist lenses can animate notions of subjectivity beyond agential autonomy; however, the radical materialist joke is a form that disappoints this transgressive promise in the long eighteenth century by recurring to previously established logics of individuation and, specifically, patrilineal inheritance, in order to ensure humor that resonates. Jokes through and about Lucretius, which are also arch commentaries on women’s inadequate educations, from Aphra Behn, Anne Ingram, and Mary Robinson, reveal a rift between the joke as a potentially democratizing, radical material form and the joke as a boundary-setting exercise.

Carmen Faye Mathes

Lucretius Taken Lightly

Zeynep Gambetti

Queering Performativity

This essay dwells on atmosphere as a mediating, climatic environment to consider climate as the nexus of mind, medium, and society. An inquiry into atmosphere, I argue, opens up climate from an objective entity into a constellation of aesthetic, infrastructural, and epistemological operations. I situate this richer notion of climate in China during the Second World War and its immediate aftermath by focusing on “doubt” as a unique atmosphere caught in the transnational traffic in media practices, psychological war, and genre film. Through an intimate conversation between aesthetics and technology, hermeneutics and media ecology, this essay conducts an experimental climatology to consider climate not simply as a physical milieu but as a method. Such a climatology—bringing together infrastructural analysis, aesthetic design, and sociopolitical projects—will allow us to engage “global climate change” and “affective climate change” as interconnected and integrated projects of sustainability.

Weihong Bao

Hermeneutics of Doubt

This essay aims to understand the relationship between feeling and attention in gendered experiences of evaluative perception. Juxtaposing Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” with ancient and early modern descriptions of laughter, humor, and comedy, I develop a new reading of the poem in which unserious or gratuitous attention is identified with gender subordination. Marvell’s poem confuses the hierarchy of significance on which comic misogyny depends. I conclude by identifying some of the cultural-historical reasons that the scene of heteroerotic encounter makes sense as a point of departure for Marvell’s experiment in levity.

短名	Representations. (Berkeley).
Journal Impact	0.98
国际分区	CULTURAL STUDIES(Q2)
期刊索引	SCI Q3中科院 4 区

ISSN	0734-6018, 1533-855X
h-index	39
国内分区	社会学(4区)社会学文化研究(4区)

涉及主题	历史哲学艺术政治学法学地理文学类社会学计算机科学物理语言学认识论心理学考古美学
出版信息	出版商: University of California Press，出版周期: ，期刊类型: journal
基本数据	创刊年份: 1983，原创研究文献占比: 100.00%，自引率:11.10%， Gold OA占比: 1.23%