Marc Herman and Jeremy P. Brown, eds. Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism: Studies in Law, Philosophy, Pietism, and Kabbalah (Volume 86, Brill, 2022) Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism explores the discursive formation of the commandments as a generative matrix of Jewish thought and life in the posttalmudic period. Each study sheds […]
Cheryl Cowdy, Canadian Suburban: Reimagining Space and Place in Postwar English Canadian Fiction (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2022) Though a large proportion of Canadians live in suburban communities, the Canadian cultural imaginary is filled with other landscapes. The wilderness, the prairie, cityscapes, and small towns are the settings by which we define our nation, rather than the […]
Anuppiriya Sriskandarajah, ed. Rethinking Young People's Lives Through Space and Place Vol: 26 (Emerald Publishing Limited, 2020) How do children and youth create, negotiate, change spaces and places, and assert their rights to space? Taking a socio-spatial approach, this international collection based on empirical research examines how space relates to and informs the social construction […]
Susan Ingram, Siting Futurity: The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna (punctumbooks, 2021) Siting Futurity: The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna shows how cultural practitioners in and around Vienna draw on their historical knowledge of locality to create rousing productions designed to get audiences to […]
Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes (Knopf/FSG/Daunt, 2023) Ordinary Notes—is a series of 248 written notes (that attend to the meanings of the words ordinary and note). And what ‘ordinary’ might mean in a Black life in this moment in the world. These are notes on black living. These are the things we think while encountering the daily, […]
Alison Halsall and Jonathan Warren, eds. The LGBTQ+ Comics Studies Reader (UPM, 2022) The LGBTQ+ Comics Studies Reader explores the exemplary trove of LGBTQ+ comics that coalesced in the underground and alternative comix scenes of the mid-1960s and in the decades after. Through insightful essays and interviews with leading comics figures, volume contributors illuminate the critical […]
David Cecchetto, Listening in the Afterlife of Data: Aesthetics, Pragmatics, and Incommunication (Duke University Press, 2022) In Listening in the Afterlife of Data, David Cecchetto theorizes sound, communication, and data by analyzing them in the contexts of the practical workings of specific technologies, situations, and artworks. In a time he calls the afterlife of data—the […]
David Cecchetto, ed. My Computer Was a Computer—Catalyst: M. Beatrice Fazi (Noxious Sector Press, 2022) When M. Beatrice Fazi claims that "computation is computation," we know this is so precisely because computation is never simply contained within the skin of computers, but is instead singularly generative. That generativity—in the fullest sense of the term, and perhaps […]
Jean-Thomas Tremblay, Breathing Aesthetics (Duke UP, 2022) In Breathing Aesthetics Jean-Thomas Tremblay argues that difficult breathing indexes the uneven distribution of risk in a contemporary era marked by the increasing contamination, weaponization, and monetization of air. Tremblay shows how biopolitical and necropolitical forces tied to the continuation of extractive capitalism, imperialism, and structural racism are […]
Jean-Thomas Tremblay, Avant-Gardes in Crisis Art and Politics in the Long 1970s (SUNY Press, 2021) Avant-Gardes in Crisis claims that the avant-gardes of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are in crisis, in that artmaking both responds to political, economic, and social crises and reveals a crisis of confidence regarding resistance's very possibility. Specifically, […]