Imaginations (Journal)
Not a member yet
359 research outputs found
Sort by
IN POSSESSION OF A STOLEN WEAPON: FROM JOHN GAY’S MACHEATH TO RUBÉN BLADES’ PEDRO NAVAJA
Get PDFThis article analyses the cult salsa song “Pedro Navaja” by Panamanian artist Rubén Blades and the relevance of narrating such a genre peculiar to dancing, an analysis in accordance with adaptation theory outlined by Linda Hutcheon, and a Brechtian semiotic methodology which combinesGestus with theories of the sign. “Pedro Navaja” is arguably a re-writing of “Mack the Knife” – or Die Moritat von Mackie Messer – one which contains, as a sort of mise-en-abyme, elements not only of Kurt Weill’s song, but of both John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera and Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. This study focuses on the fertile adaptation history of the highwayman Macheath since Gay’s work, on close-readings of “Pedro Navaja” – a narrativized cerebral salsa song – and on the ethics of adapting a character, story or genre. Finally, when the character Pedro Navaja is adapted from Blades’ song by a cineaste and playwright, Blades, furious with what others have done with ‘his’ character, decides to resuscitate his eponymous hero killed off at the end of the original song in order to regain the authority of his creation. From theoretical questions including how to read an adaptation or what constitutes an adaptation, this article focuses on the diachronic recurrences of a specific character-type, on the significance of juxtaposing particular historical junctures and on the violence of adaptation and authorship
TRAUMA NARRATIVES, MIXED MEDIA, AND THE MEDITATION ON THE INVISIBLE
Get PDFThis essay examines the relationship between the history of trauma narratives and the development of media representations. Starting in the late 19th century, modernist cultures were increasingly forced to represent and reflect upon the traumatic experience of destruction and war. In this process of reflection, the ‘invisibility’ or unrepresentability of traumatic incidents became a recurring theme. Taking up W.J.T. Mitchell’s suggestion that all media are “mixed media,” I argue that the technological, semiotic, and narrative hybridity of mixed media has a special relationship to this theme. More specifically, I want to show that the explicit or overt presentation of mixed media has historically been invoked as a trope of reflexivity and a way of expressing the difficulties of representing traumatic experience. I will begin my investigation with literary and visual examples from American modernism and conclude with more recent instances of mixed media hybrids combining analogue and digital media
REFRAMING THE CANADIAN OIL SANDS
Get PDF“Reframing the Canadian Oil Sands” is a collaborative exchange between photographer Andriko Lozowy and cultural geographer Merle Patchett that engages photography and photographic theory to evoke a more critical and politically meaningful visual engagement with the world’s largest capital oil project. Since the appearance of Edward Burtynsky’s aerial and abstracted photographic-mappings of the region, capturing the scale of the Oil Sands from ‘on high’ has become the dominant visual imaginary. As a result, the dominant visual culture of Fort McMurray oil production is one of nullification or an erasure of representation. For the past five years Lozowy has been engaged in a photographic project—entitled Where is Fort McMurray?—which aims to explore and workwith this sense of erasure by attempting to capture the shifting (and shifted) landscapes of the Alberta Oil Sands from the roadside. For this special issue ofImaginationson “Sighting Oil”, Patchett and Lozowy have curated a set of Lozowy’s photographs to present an alternative, on-the-ground, view of Oil Sands production sites. Through both Lozowy’s images and Patchett’s framing curatorial essay, they explore the disruptive potential of the image and the capacity of photography to both neutralize and energize political engagement with the Canadian Oil Sands.
RELATIONSHIPS OF OWNERSHIP: ART AND THEFT IN BOB DYLAN’S 1960S TRILOGY
Get PDFBob Dylan’s corpus is one continually engaged with appropriation and pilfering. This paper will look, predominantly, at three songs from his 1960s’ trilogy – ‘She Belongs To Me’ from Bringing It All Back Home (1965), ‘Visions of Johanna’ from Blonde on Blonde(1966), and ‘Desolation Row’ from Highway 61 Revisited (1965) – arguing that, in these songs, Dylan problematizes the interrelationship between art, theft, and ownership. I argue that, similar to the urban artist Banksy, Dylan challenges, toys with, and appropriates cultural images in order to continually question the concept of proprietorship whilst rescuing cultural images from esoterica and attempting to put them back into the public domain
UNCONVENTIONAL OIL AND THE GIFT OF THE UNDULATING PEAK
Get PDFIn the first part of this essay, I consider why the discussion over the likelihood of imminent “peak oil” has faded from public view in the last few years. I suggest that, due to the decline in demand (due to the recession) and the development of “unconventional” natural gas and oil sources, the “cost” of fuels has passed from the obvious rise in price to that of another dimension: the rise of hidden, “external” costs—a recession triggered by too-high prices, pollution, climate change, and so on. I argue, moreover, that this externalized cost forever defies precise measurement. This is clear, for example, in the case of the “unconventional” production of gas in the “tar sands” region of Alberta. How can one measure the cost of drifting underground plumes of arsenic that may not show up for hundreds of years? All of this makes a precise calculation of “sustainability” just about impossible, while at the same time not absolving us—all of those living in the current fossil-fuel civilization—from attempting to calculate it. In the final part of the essay, I suggest that our subjectivity—as consumers, as free agents—is itself an after-effect of the agency of oil: we as subjects are interpellated by oil. Thus one response to the unknowability of externalities—tied to the impossibility of the “closed economy” of sustainability calculation—may be a different model of agency, in which calculation is replaced, or supplemented, by the act of gift-giving. Most important, perhaps, would be the giving of the gift of oil “addiction” not to any recipient (or agent), but to a necessarily repeated forgetting
EVERYTHING’S GONE GREEN: THE ENVIRONMENT OF BP’S NARRATIVE
Get PDFThis essay looks at a particularly galling phenomenon for environmentalism, the “green” globalism of an oil conglomerate. Rather than simply dismiss such gestures as corporate cynicism, the paper suggests that one might usefully pay attention to the narrative modes at stake in these initiatives which here connect the exploitation of modernity to a parabolic logic. BP’s going green is seen as an extension rather than as a contravention of its social being and shows why, even after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, BP’s desire to move “beyond petroleum” means more rather than less oil exploitation.
THE NEW TOPOGRAPHICS, DARK ECOLOGY, AND THE ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE OF NATIONS: CONSIDERING AGENCY IN THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF EDWARD BURTYNSKY AND MITCH EPSTEIN FROM A POST-ANARCHIST PERSPECTIVE
Get PDFEdward Burtynsky’s aesthetic and the New Topographic aesthetic from which it derives, I argue, should not be seen as apolitical but rather as traces of an empire in ruins and a sociality to come; that is, by employing a post-anarchist analysis, I demonstrate how Burtynsky’s photographs in his recent collection Oil, and Mitch Epstein’s images from American Power, produce an aesthetic of what Yves Abrioux calls “intensive landscaping,” or “landscaping as style, as the promise of a social spacing yet to come” (264). What Burtynsky and Epstein accomplish in their photographs related to energy in particular is “to invent relations, rather than assert ideological or cultural control” (ibid.); the place of energy extraction and transport becomes not a self-contained striation of ecological degradation, but a “place of passage,” to use Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology, a depiction of wildness and civilization in contact, assembled and reformulating the landscape into something other. The aesthetic under consideration has much in common with Timothy Morton’s “dark ecology” and Stephanie LeManager’s “feeling ecological,” theories that attempt to understand the affective connections between the infrastructure of oil capitalism and ecology (“Petro-Melancholia” 27)
