FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts
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The dissident is dead. Long live the dissident – Boris Akunin and popular literature as counterculture under Putinism
Get PDFThis paper explores the reappearance of the dissident in Russian contemporary literature followingPutin’s rise to power, focussing in particular on how the country’s formerly highbrow dissident counterculture is now moving closer to the realm of popular culture. Tracing the link between the intelligentsia, literature, and dissent all the way up to the supposed death of all three phenomena in the post-collapse years, this article argues that a dissident revival is not only ongoing but directly linked to Putin’s manipulation of historical consciousness and the nostalgia discourse in Russia. Using Boris Akunin, one of Russia’s most popular contemporary writers, as an example, this paper demonstrates how his activity as an author and a public figure has changed in reaction to Putin’s totalitarian turn in politics, resulting in an increasingly pointed counter-narrative to theKremlin’s hegemonic discourse on history. Through sketching Akunin’s artistic principles as a writer and addressing the importance of the nostalgia discourse for post-Soviet Russia’s identity struggles, this article discusses how Akunin’s exploration of the intersection between popular culture and highbrow literature may be indicative of a modernisation of the entire Russian intelligentsia tradition, pointing towards the future of literary dissent in Russia
Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo.’ Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide. London: Verso, 2015. 224 pp. ISBN: 9781781685785. £10.99.
Get PDFBerardi’s Heroes (2015) analyses the intricate relationship between capitalism and mental health by exploring the proliferation of mass murder and suicide in the twentieth-first century. This book is not essential to achieve a better understanding of Berardi’s theoretical edifice as a philosopher. Instead, Heroes offers a great application of his theoretical concepts on contemporary events, exhibiting how philosophy can be applied to contingent historical issues such as the ones dealt with in the book
Whose Story is it? Narrative Humility in Medicine and Literature
Get PDFI am on a panel. It is at a college, a conference, or a literary festival. It happens on almost every panel I am on; particularly when we are discussing representation and diversity in children’s literature – the importance for young people to see protagonists, families and story lines representing their own identities and their own lives. Someone – usually white, and/or straight, and/or cis-gendered -- raises their hand in the audience and tells us about a story they feel compelled to write, a story they love, a story about a protagonist unlike themselves. “Can I tell this story?” they ask, “Is it alright?
Gregg Bordowitz: Criticising Representation in Order to Represent People With AIDS
Get PDFGregg Bordowitz’s literary and artistic output is seminal to postmodern art theory, institutional critique, and post-AIDS queer theory. This paper demonstrates both the need for appropriate self-representation for People With AIDS, and the insidious culture of disavowal and dehumanisation of PWAs that artists like Bordowitz confronted and discredited
The Real Deal: Hip-hop Mixtape Artwork and Black Masculinity
Get PDFDespite hip-hop’s status as a means of resistance to myriad systems of institutionalized racism, oppression, and poverty, its rise in mainstream popularity has caused a dramatic increase in its corporate monetization. This causes a transfer of control from the artist to the record label, at times jeopardizing hip-hop’s fundamental principles of rebellion, resistance, and risk. An alternative mode of expression, however – the mixtape – puts power back into the hands of hip-hop artists, becoming a crucial vessel for unmitigated artistic expression and meaning. One of the most significant and immediately striking aspects of the mixtape is the cover art. By honing in on the visual aspects of five select mixtapes, it becomes evident that the images presented on their covers advance male hip-hop artists’ freedom of expression of black masculinity. These images, though at times problematic in their own way, become a crucial source of meaning not only in the realm of hip-hop, but in the genre’s relationship with broader societal perceptions of the black male. 
Never-Ending Gender/Sexual Cannibalism? Transformation of Female Idolisation in Japan
Get PDFInspired by an innovative class named “The (underground) Idol as a Transcendent Existence,” this paper concentrates on the psychological and economic relationship between young female human idols, the aidoru, and their devoted male fans, the idol otaku. The first section of the paper uncovers the exploitation of female human idols by their male fans. While the concept of “idol as image” imposed by idol producers fosters the fetishisation and objectification of female human bodies, the consuming act exhibited by the male gaze indicates a metaphorical form of gender/sexual cannibalism. The second part of the paper focuses on the impact of the birth of digital female idols on the issue of female exploitation. With the development of computer and artificial intelligence technologies, female virtual idols have been replacing female human idols, as they offer more space and freedom of manipulation. With computer technologies, each idol otaku can construct a more intimate relationship than is possible with female human idols through designing feminine characteristics of female virtual idols according to his personal needs and fantasies. However, from a feminist perspective, this transformation of female idolisation or more specifically, the digitalisation of female human bodies, could ultimately lead toward a world of feminist dystopia due to the further manipulation of female selves and bodies by their male producers and consumers
Wilkie Collins and Oscar Wilde: Challenging Intersections Between the Male and Female Gaze in Victorian Popular Literature
Get PDFWilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) are novels significant for their distinct awareness of the socio-political power of the gaze. In this essay, I will reveal how these authors use the male and female gaze in similar and contrasting ways. In particular, I shall explore the ways they denounce the patriarchal Victorian system, which renders the act of gazing a power that is both objectifying and degrading. Gazing enacts itself to varying degrees through the social hierarchy, indicating whom can objectify whom, and can enact upon what they choose to see. This hierarchy of Victorian English society is so varied by class, wealth, gender, and race that the gaze in these texts does not always operate in the same way. These complicated intricacies of the gaze are what make these novels require such in-depth analysis, because of the multiple ways in which the gaze can work according to individual scenarios. Both authors portray these complicated intricacies by using both the male and female gaze in the text. While academic critique usually separates these two gazes due to their gender, the novels of Collins and Wilde reveal how important it is to study them together, because while the gaze affects people individually, it is essentially a collective interaction. Collins and Wilde take separate approaches in depicting the gaze: the former testing the capability of the reader to look beyond the coercive statements of the first-person narrator, and the latter an omnipresent third-person narrator. Together, these different approaches increase reader understanding of the mechanical workings of the gaze and therefore complements a comparative analysis of the two novels
Toys and Radical Politics: The Marxist Import of Toy Story That Time Forgot
Get PDFThrough the analysis of a capitalist text, and by reflecting on the discourse of Marx and Althusser, this paper attempts to demonstrate why Marxism remains a potent politics of dissent. It suggests that Marxist philosophies can come to function in an ultimately reparative manner through their promotion of countercultural ideologies
Counter Cultures
Get PDFThis article examines the development of countercultures from the Black Panther movement in the 1960s to the present day
Between Hashtagging and Hashtrending: Counterculture, Dissent and Aesthetic Politics
Get PDFThe year 2016 was marked by a number of major events, some fleeting, others still ongoing, but almost all underscoring the need for thinking about a very different way of being in the world; in other words, producing radically different kinds of subjectivity. These events – which included Brexit and the election of real estate mogul and reality TV celebrity, Donald Trump, as the president of the U.S. – can be seen as part of the ongoing rise of right-wing populism that has marked world politics for at least the past decade. The continuing European migrant and refugee crises, too, have been harnessed by politicians to create voter fear around personal security in terms of jobs and safety, and national security in terms of terrorism. Accordingly, these kinds of political strategies create a victim-perpetrator binary