FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts
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Becoming-Black Bloc, Becoming-Anartist: the art of prolonging and remodulating counter-cultural lines of flight
Get PDFThe text describes the practice of the Anartist, which consists of interventions that subvert the urban space with an antagonist and countercultural spin inspired by the Black Bloc. The evil aura and the symbolic violence of the Black Blocks, a sort of magical Black Mana, are folded into a subversive aesthetic expressiveness that opens a line of escape in the urban space and provokes a viral infection in the Integrated Spectacle of Capitalism. The Anartist, a masked transpersona that can be embodied by anybody, extends the counter-spectacle of the Black Bloc destructive actions in disruptive line of flights that actualize their telluric subversion in site-specific situations of the urban space. The Anartist is a sort of simulacrum that decentralizes, remodulates and intensifies the counter-cultural mythology of Black Blocks. The practice of the Anartist, which can be defined as Disturbanism, unworks the money-form of the space, unleashing an event that is out of capitalist design but which arises from within itself as a virus that causes a negative diarrhea of dissensus. In fact, the Anarchist Disturbanist intervention can be considered as the unappropriated other that cannot be expelled outside by a totalitarian system that has no outside and returns as a viral scatological hauntology. The Anartist produces chaos, symbols and experiences through Black shit, ghosts and antagonist viruses to operate witchcraft rituals, which not only cannot be subsumed by the Capitalist Spectacle but continue to infect it in an eternal return producing a counter-culture and a counter-spell
From Gaze to Witness: Masculinity and Loss in George Shaw’s Paintings of Tile Hill
Get PDFThis paper explores the gaze as witness in George Shaw’s painting of Tile Hill. Considering Shaw’s process of making in the series ‘Scenes of the Passion’ (1990-2017) the paper addresses the relationship of site, memory and gaze in a negotiation of masculinity and loss in these images
Chihiro Boards a Train: Perceptual Modulation in the Films of Studio Ghibli
Get PDFThis paper examines the ability of Studio Ghibli animated films to perceptually modulate their audiences. Working from Hayao Miyazaki’s suggestion that if a filmmaker wants to stay true to empathy they need only quieten things down, this paper seeks a technical explanation for this process. It will examine how the interplay of simple character designs and the sliding sensation of the animation stand induce a certain cognitive state. Through this process, the onlooker is more likely to imbue a two-dimensional character with a multidimensional, metaphysical presence
Writing the Artist’s Gaze: Ethics and Ekphrasis in Early Twentieth Century Historical Fiction
Get PDFThis article examines portrayals of visual artists in novels by Pat Barker and A.S. Byatt, focusing on artists’ appeal to writers, and the associated ethical and artistic challenges. It proposes that artist characters can offer creative ways of probing not only particular periods of history, but the creative process itself
Taboo in the Next Room: Lesbian Suicide in Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour
Get PDFThis article argues that Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour (1934) conflates two taboos: lesbianism and suicide. In so doing, the play creates a space of irresolution that suggests an inherent instability in the process of the taboo.
He Said/She Said: Truth-Telling and #MeToo
Get PDF"He Said/She Said: Truth-Telling and #MeToo" analyses how the conversation about sexual violence changed when millions of women worldwide raised their voices to say “Me Too.” It historicizes the #MeToo movement within feminist activism in communities of colour around sexual assault advocacy and in relation to Anita Hill\u27s testimony in 1991 that Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her. The #MeToo moment offers a clear representation of the scale of sexual violence and presents a vivid example of the power of testimony to conjure a scene of witness through the power of truth-telling. Leigh Gilmore argues that truth-telling is dynamic and that survivor speech in the form of #MeToo has disrupted the routine minimization of women\u27s accounts of harm into the "He said/She said" pattern
David Foster Wallace and Repressive Taboos: Clenette Henderson, yrstruly and the identity politics of representation
Get PDFDavid Foster Wallace’s use of disenfranchised voices in Infinite Jest (1996) receives little critical attention. Clenette Henderson and yrstruly’s narratives raise issues of taboo subjects: child sexual abuse, drug-addiction, and prostitution. A close reading of their voices aims to break over twenty years of critical silence by exposing such taboos.
“...to poison and corrupt her soul”: Shelley’s Poetic Designs of Incest in The Cenci
Get PDFThis paper examines Percy Bysshe Shelley’s designs of the father-daughter incest in his tragedy The Cenci. It proposes that Shelley’s deviation from his historical source, concerning Count Cenci’s atrocities and Beatrice’s characterizations, insinuates the idea of incest as the embodiment of a dark poetics that features identity annihilation and assimilation.
Are the Homeless Taboo? – A Theoretical Perspective
Get PDFDiscussing works by Patrick Declerck, Ghassan Hage, and Giorgio Agamben, this paper asks whether society sets the homeless apart and treats them the way it does not by accident, but deliberately, because they serve, as outcasts, a particular function. This article does not attempt to analyse a given local or national situation; it is, instead, a thought experiment which develops a hypothesis by drawing on ideas put forward by authors such as Michel Foucault, Claude Lévi- Strauss and Achille Mbembe. It posits that the homeless are the result of an unacknowledged yet structural discriminating process whereby society deprives some people from their humanity in order to define itself, its members and its values.
Bodies Out of Place: Poe, Premature Burial, and The Uncanny
Get PDF“Bodies Out of Place” discusses some of the ways Edgar Allan Poe confronted the taboos or boundaries associated with dying bodies. In tales such as “The Premature Burial,” “Ligeia,” and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” Poe blurred the boundaries between life and death not only to show how strange they are but also to suggest how little human beings understand about the problem of death. Poe complicates this matter by suggesting that, even though some bodies may show all appearances of death, they remain very much alive. Even more frightening, Poe also suggests that some dead bodies may even somehow force their way back to life. Ultimately, Poe’s bodies resist easy classification because they are neither completely alive nor completely dead.