Search

In this paper I focus on designations of 'our culture and heritage' that defend practices and symbols of religious majorities. I consider the entanglement of nationalist narratives, secularity and the 'us' in the claims of social actors and public discussions about culture and heritage. What is understood as being religious and what is culture/heritage is dependent on the social actors involved, their position in society and the interpretive frameworks available to them. I consider the following questions: How are culture and heritage used in legal and public discourse to justify the continued presence of such symbols and practices in Christian majority countries in the West? What are the religious histories implicated in this process? Who is imagined to be included when crosses and prayers are staked out as 'our culture and heritage'? What is the relationship between culture and heritage and national imaginaries? Ultimately, as religious majorities see their numbers dwindle and power relations shift, the attempt to imbricate religious practices and beliefs in public spaces and rituals is quite possibly a translation of the religious to the secular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental problems, including climate change, exhaustion of natural resources, and persistent degradation of air quality, have escalated in the name of development despite the warnings of scientists and environmentalists. Written when the interconnectedness of the globe is evident in the Coronavirus pandemic and extensive carbon footprints, this paper examines the role of ecocriticism in illuminating the condition of a city such as Hong Kong, which is susceptible to contagion because its success is based on its interconnectedness with the world through the flow of people, resources, finance, and tourism. How does ecocritical discourse help us to see the ways Hong Kong's success has contributed to its vulnerability? What are the tropes that defined the development of Hong Kong in the colonial period and how have they been re-imagined in the post-handover period? Will Hong Kong's post-handover reappropriation of nature encourage other former colonies to adopt a green agenda and lead to the cross-fertilization of ecocritcal, historical, cultural and social discourses? This paper adopts an ecocritical perspective and revisits some of the central natural symbols that have shaped the grand narrative of Hong Kong. It reconsiders the natural tropes— the barren rock — that were used to reinforce colonial superiority, the ways that geography has determined the city's destiny, and the role of the official flower in the creation of the city's identity. Citing developments in the post-handover period (the Save Choi Yuen Village movement, the rise of organic communities, and the tactics of protestors in the summer of 2019), the paper reveals how natural tropes have been liberated from their traditional associations. Hong Kong shows not only the ways in which the human and non-human can work together interdependently but also the processes of identity formation in the period after decolonization and in an age of globalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automation has a long history in cultural production, but the contemporary moment presents a range of new possibilities and demands for the deployment of automated and autonomous systems in the shaping of our cultural and social worlds. The cultural implications of the deployment of automated systems for producing, curating, and distributing a growing range of cultural texts and artifacts extend beyond the realm of content to encompass their pace, rhythm, and scale. Understanding the significance of these shifts remains a central task for cultural studies research that builds on the field's historical engagement with the entwinement of cultural practices, social relations, and power. This theme issue builds on the historical and recent concerns of cultural studies to provide a range of approaches to the cultural significance of automation. Given the scope of the transformations, the coverage of possible topics is indicative rather than exhaustive. The articles in this collection range across the realms of automated news curation, credit scoring, image curation, deep fakes, data science, the gig economy, and content moderation. They engage with possible responses to the real and potential pathologies of automation in the cultural realm – while highlighting the links between culture, politics, and economics. Taken together they develop a range of critical approaches to the sometimes creeping, sometimes galloping automation of cultural production, curation, and distribution. While stressing the moments of historical continuity with earlier forms of bureaucratic and administrative rationality, they simultaneously indicate that we are, in many ways, still in the very early stages of a process that is likely to encompass an expanding range of cultural practices and texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the 2015 film Ex Machina as a cultural text that exemplifies the technologization of gender within algorithmic culture. Analysing different textual elements — the narrative diegesis, the marketing material, and the digital techniques used in the VFX post-production process—I argue that gender is consistently figured as a kind of technology. That is, gender is systematised, codified, and reduced to a programmed set of instructions that can be used by machines to manipulate and deceive. I argue that understanding gender through its figuration with the technological, specifically through code and algorithms, raises pertinent issues concerning surveillance, race, and bias. This is reflected in the film through a problematic representation of racialised figures, particularly techno-Orientalist tropes of labouring Asian bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her 2008 novel The Knitting Circle, American writer Ann Hood identifies knitting as a form of prayer, with every stitch connecting her to her deceased daughter. In 2016, a Rotterdam-based knitting icon, Loes Veenstra, passed away. For many years, Veenstra knitted hundreds of jumpers that were not intended to be worn. She knitted solely to fight her smoking addiction. In 2010, hundreds of Peruvian women knitted together in a square in Ayacucho to commemorate their missing relatives, whose fate had remained unknown since the civil war in the 1980s and 1990s. The scarf they created served as a symbolic grave because these women knew that their relatives would probably never get a real one. The written and spoken testimonies of these women as well as the knitted objects reveal the significance of knitting as a remedy. This creative endeavour practiced in daily life becomes a remedy when it is the only activity that women want or are able to undertake while experiencing grief, trauma or addiction. Knitting is a cure for women who have no other recourse to action within their social or cultural circumstances. These case studies illustrate how being creative (as a woman) in daily life can be beneficial in difficult times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]