Black Temporality in Times of Crisis

Black Temporality in Times of Crisis
Author: Badia Ahad
Publisher:
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2022-02-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9781478017523

Contributors to this special issue use crisis as a framework to explore historical and present-day Black temporalities. Considering how moments of emergency shift and redefine one's relationship to time and temporality--particularly in the material, psychic, and emotional lives of Black people--the authors examine the resulting paradoxical aspects of time. They argue that crisis demands response while revealing no clear course of action and holds its victims in states of suspension and expectation. The authors use 2020 as a point of departure, in which "pandemic time" emerged as an experience of time's seemingly simultaneous expansion and compression: the slow time of monotony, the racing time of anxiety, and the cyclical time of mourning. The essays cover racial capitalism as it exists through stolen land (dispossession of Native sovereignty), stolen life (African enslavement), and stolen time; the temporal differences between the lived experience of Black flesh and the Black body; and the significance of time to the production of Black ontology and the field of Black studies. Contributors. Badia Ahad, Margo Natalie Crawford, Eve Dunbar, Julius B. Fleming, Tao Leigh Goffe, Habiba Ibrahim, Shaun Myers, Kaneesha Cherelle Parsard, Sarah Stefana Smith, Frederick C. Staidum Jr.

Cervantine Blackness

Cervantine Blackness
Author: Nicholas R. Jones
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2024-10-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0271099070

There is no shortage of Black characters in Miguel de Cervantes’s works, yet there has been a profound silence about the Spanish author’s compelling literary construction and cultural codification of Black Africans and sub-Saharan Africa. In Cervantine Blackness, Nicholas R. Jones reconsiders in what sense Black subjects possess an inherent value within Cervantes’s cultural purview and literary corpus. In this unflinching critique, Jones charts important new methodological and theoretical terrain, problematizing the ways emphasis on agency has stifled and truncated the study of Black Africans and their descendants in early modern Spanish cultural and literary production. Through the lens of what he calls “Cervantine Blackness,” Jones challenges the reader to think about the blind faith that has been lent to the idea of agency—and its analogues “presence” and “resistance”—as a primary motivation for examining the lives of Black people during this period. Offering a well-crafted and sharp critique, through a systematic deconstruction of deeply rooted prejudices, Jones establishes a solid foundation for the development of a new genre of literary and cultural criticism. A searing work of literary criticism and political debate, Cervantine Blackness speaks to specialists and nonspecialists alike—anyone with a serious interest in Cervantes’s work who takes seriously a critical reckoning with the cultural, historical, and literary legacies of agency, antiblackness, and refusal within the Iberian Peninsula and the global reaches of its empire.

Black Age

Black Age
Author: Habiba Ibrahim
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2021-09-14
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1479810894

"Black Age argues that age tracks the struggle between the abuses of black exclusion from western humanism, and the reclamation of non-normative black life"--

Time, Temporality and Violence in International Relations

Time, Temporality and Violence in International Relations
Author: Anna M. Agathangelou
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2016-03-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1134670907

Time transforms the way we see world politics and insinuates itself into the ways we act. In this groundbreaking volume, Agathangelou and Killian bring together scholars from a range of disciplines to tackle time and temporality in international relations. The authors – critical theorists, artists, and poets – theorize and speak from the vantage point of the anticolonial, postcolonial, and decolonial event. They investigate an array of experiences and structures of violence – oppression, neocolonization, slavery, war, poverty and exploitation – focusing on the tensions produced by histories of slavery and colonization and disrupting dominant modes of how we understand present times. This edited volume takes IR in a new direction, defatalizing the ways in which we think about dominant narratives of violence, ‘peace’ and ‘liberation’, and renewing what it means to decolonize today’s world. It challenges us to confront violence and suffering and articulates another way to think the world, arguing for an understanding of the ‘present’ as a vulnerable space through which radically different temporal experiences appear. And it calls for a disruption of the "everyday politics of expediency" in the guise of neoliberalism and security. This volume reorients the ethical and political assumptions that affectively, imaginatively, and practically captivate us, simultaneously unsettling the familiar, but dubious, promises of a modernity that decimates political life. Re-animating an international political, the authors evoke people’s struggles and movements that are neither about redemption nor erasure, but a suspension of time for radical new beginnings.

Crisis Under Critique

Crisis Under Critique
Author: Didier Fassin
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 711
Release: 2022-04-13
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0231555482

The word “crisis” denotes a break, a discontinuity, a rupture—a moment after which the normal order can continue no longer. Yet our political vocabulary today is suffused with the rhetoric of crisis, to the point that supposed abnormalities have been normalized. How can the notion of crisis be rethought in order to take stock of—and challenge—our understanding of the many predicaments in which we find ourselves? Instead of diagnosing emergencies, Didier Fassin, Axel Honneth, and an assembly of leading thinkers examine how people experience, interpret, and contribute to the making of and the response to critical situations. Contributors inquire into the social production of crisis, evaluating a wide range of cases on five continents through the lenses of philosophy, sociology, anthropology, political science, history, and economics. Considering social movements, intellectual engagements, affected communities, and reflexive perspectives, the book foregrounds the perspectives of those most closely involved, bringing out the immediacy of crisis. Featuring analysis from below as well as above, from the inside as well as the outside, Crisis Under Critique is a singular intervention that utterly recasts one of today’s most crucial—yet most ambiguous—concepts.

Greek Tragedy in a Global Crisis

Greek Tragedy in a Global Crisis
Author: Mario Telò
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2023-05-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350348147

What does it mean to read Greek tragedy in a pandemic, a global crisis? How can Greek tragedy address urgent contemporary troubles? One of the outstanding and most widely read theorists in the discipline, Mario Telò, brings together a deep understanding of Greek tragedy and its most famous icons with contemporary times. In close readings of plays such as Alcestis, Antigone, Bacchae, Hecuba, Oedipus the King, Prometheus Bound, and Trojan Women, our experience is precariously refracted back in the formal worlds of plays named after and, to an extent, epitomized by tragic characters. Structured around four thematic clusters – Air Time Faces, Communities, Ruins, and Insurrections – this book presents timely interventions in critical theory and in the debates that matter to us as disaster becomes routine in the time-out-of-joint of a (post-)pandemic world. Violently encompassing all pre-existing and future crises (relational, political and ecological), the pandemic coincides with the queer unhistoricism of tragedy, and its collapsing of present, past, and future readerships.

An Eternal Pitch

An Eternal Pitch
Author: Braxton D. Shelley
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2023-10-31
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0520387155

An Eternal Pitch examines the homiletic life and afterlife of Bishop G. E. Patterson, the dynamic spiritual leader of the Church of God in Christ from 2000 to 2007. Although Patterson died in 2007, his voice remains a staple of radio and television broadcast, and his sermons have taken on a life of their own online, where myriad YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok users enact innovative forms of religious broadcasting. Their preoccupation with Patterson’s “Afterliveness” punctuates the significance of Patterson’s preoccupation with musical repetition: across the decades of Patterson’s ministry, a set of musical gestures recur as sonic channels, bringing an individual sermon into contact with scripture’s eternal transmission.

The Scent of Time

The Scent of Time
Author: Byung-Chul Han
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 120
Release: 2017-09-25
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1509516085

In his philosophical reflections on the art of lingering, acclaimed cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han argues that the value we attach today to the vita activa is producing a crisis in our sense of time. Our attachment to the vita activa creates an imperative to work which degrades the human being into a labouring animal, an animal laborans. At the same time, the hyperactivity which characterizes our daily routines robs human beings of the capacity to linger and the faculty of contemplation. It therefore becomes impossible to experience time as fulfilling. Drawing on a range of thinkers including Heidegger, Nietzsche and Arendt, Han argues that we can overcome this temporal crisis only by revitalizing the vita contemplativa and relearning the art of lingering. For what distinguishes humans from other animals is the capacity for reflection and contemplation, and when life regains this capacity, this art of lingering, it gains in time and space, in duration and vastness.

Black Girl Autopoetics

Black Girl Autopoetics
Author: Ashleigh Greene Wade
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 117
Release: 2023-12-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478027738

In Black Girl Autopoetics Ashleigh Greene Wade explores how Black girls create representations of themselves in digital culture with the speed and flexibility enabled by smartphones. She analyzes the double bind Black girls face when creating content online: on one hand, their online activity makes them hypervisible, putting them at risk for cyberbullying, harassment, and other forms of violence; on the other hand, Black girls are rarely given credit for their digital inventiveness, rendering them invisible. Wade maps Black girls’ everyday digital practices, showing what their digital content reveals about their everyday experiences and how their digital production contributes to a broader archive of Black life. She coins the term Black girl autopoetics to describe how Black girls’ self-making creatively reinvents cultural products, spaces, and discourse in digital space. Using ethnographic research into the digital cultural production of adolescent Black girls throughout the United States, Wade draws a complex picture of how Black girls navigate contemporary reality, urging us to listen to Black girls’ experience and learn from their techniques of survival.

Resistant Form: Aristophanes and the Comedy of Crisis

Resistant Form: Aristophanes and the Comedy of Crisis
Author: Mario Telò
Publisher: punctum books
Total Pages: 419
Release:
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1685710883

Can attending to poetic form help us imagine a radical politics and bridge the gap between pressing contemporary political concerns and an ancient literature that often seems steeped in dynamics of oppression? The corpus of the fifth-century Athenian playwright Aristophanes includes some of the funniest yet most disturbing comedies of Western literature. His work’s anarchic experimentation with language invites a radically “oversensitive” hyperformalism, a formalistic overanalysis that disrupts, disables, or even abolishes a range of normativities (government, labor, reproduction, gender). Exceeding not just historicist contextualism, but also conventional notions of laughter and the logic of the joke, Resistant Form: Aristophanes and the Comedy of Crisis uses Aristophanes to fully embrace, in the practice of close or “too-close” reading, the etymological and conceptual nexus of crisis, critique, and literary criticism. These exuberant readings of Birds, Frogs, Lysistrata, and Women at the Thesmophoria, together with the first attempt ever to grapple with the comic style of critical theorists Gilles Deleuze, Achille Mbembe, and Jack Halberstam, connect Aristophanes with contemporary discourses of biopolitics, necrocitizenship, care, labor, and transness, and at the same time disclose a quasi- or para-Aristophanic mode in the written textures of critical theory. Here is a radically new approach to the literary criticism of the pre-modern – one that materializes the circuit of crisis and critique through a restless inhabitation of the becomings and unbecomings of comic form.