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This article locates itself in the aftermath of the 2016 coup attempt in Turkey to study the cultural production of reactionary sentiment. Placing Wendy Brown's concept of "wounded attachment" in conversation with materialist and anticolonial theorizations of indignation in Turkey and beyond, the article explores the production of a reactionary mood that traverses affective, economic, technological, and cultural dynamics. In order to do so, it focuses on an intriguing example of wounded attachment in the post-2016 period: the sense of concern and anxiety that has formed around public performances of the ezan (the Islamic call to prayer). The article argues that feelings of indignation, victimhood, and revenge are crucial to Turkish politics, as their production lies at the intersection of specific memories of injury and the material foundations of contemporary capitalism in Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that, by looking to the generalization of a certain kind of artistic or creative character in paradigms of work, there is a view onto a different kind of relationship between culture and militant action and fugitivity. Here, the term destituent art is proposed to sketch out a form of cultural production that does or might lay waste not only to institutional targets of critique but also to the structurally immanent belief in institutional reform that underlies the aesthetics of that critique. It is an invitation to reconsider some key myths that structure art discourse (even if they appear as objects of critique) and an appeal to read that discursivity as not just productive but potentially destituent. To do so, the author reads operaismo's rereading of Marx against Marxism alongside theorizations of destituent insurrection through the subject of the artist. Some recent social movements in New York City targeting art institutions are analyzed to consider this connection. Like Colectivo Situaciones' discussion of destituent insurrection as a grammar that unifies surplus populations through their expressions of refusal (the riot, the strike, the commune) that are simultaneously modes of reorganizing forms of life, a destituent art would not signal a turn to a productive pessimism—that all creative work is already subsumed—but that the cultivation of destituent power actualizes and is actualized by the aesthetic production of places of action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Refusing both sex workers' state-produced vulnerability to violence and the state's monopoly on protection, sex worker radicals articulate community defense as a practice of care. Grounded in interviews with thinkers of the sex worker Left and in sex workers' cultural production, this article explores sex worker community defense with an eye to its relationship to past struggles and contributions to future ones. Chief among those is the abolitionist struggle for a world beyond prisons and policing. Sex worker abolitionists identify a tension between a vision of transformative justice that rejects violence and the understanding that transformation might not come without injury to those who do violence on behalf of the state. Sex worker abolitionists seek resources for navigating this tactical ambivalence in Black radical, decolonial, and queer and feminist traditions. Many wonder if building new worlds will require a transitional program of militant community defense, even retribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the drive toward homogeneous and pure visual languages was at the foundation of early twentieth-century utopian modernist art systems, the Dadaist and Surrealist reaction to this utopianism took the form of extreme and often violent hybridity. Marcel Duchamp's 1913 "readymade" of a bicycle wheel placed atop a kitchen stool is a paradigmatic manifestation of the linguistic hybridity characteristic of post-utopian twentieth-century art. In the 1920s Francis Picabia made paintings constructed of separate and discrete layers of images, which, when viewed together, produced an unsettling visual "monster." Picabia's practice of superimposition was a significant forerunner of prevailing contemporary practices in postmodern painting. In his essay "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," philosopher Fredric Jameson (1991) identifies pastiche as one of the main characteristics of cultural production in the age of postmodernism. Pastiche is defined as a work of art consisting of motifs borrowed from one or more sources, an incongruous hodgepodge of materials, forms, and images. In this age of pastiche, what are the options open to artists—to endlessly quote, imitate, or parody existing images and styles, or to construct a new and significant system of meaning? To discuss the centrality of the principle of hybridity in postmodern art—and in my own artistic practice of the past fifty years—I summoned Theolonius Marx, a fiction of my imagination who helped me handle the dilemmas of conceptual art in the 1970s. In this "conversation," Theolonius and I ponder how hybridity has placed a challenge to utopian modernist concepts, and what the conditions are for it to thrive today as a relevant and sustainable medium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the visual cultural production of three twentieth-century Black Caribbean Central American women painters: June Beer and Judith Kain, both from the Miskitu Coast, and Iris Abrahams, from San Andrés and Providencia. Specifically, it contextualizes these artists' landscape portraiture against the historical backdrops of colonialism, territorial dispossession, and autonomous struggle in the isthmus. Understanding the political and the cultural as inextricably intertwined, this essay reads their place-based visual art as a critical form of anticolonial critique and social organizing in a region that remains marginalized in the historiography and scholarship on Latin America and the Caribbean and radical Black diasporic politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Xiao Hai left home at age fifteen as one of roughly three hundred million domestic migrant workers whose labor has contributed to China's rise since the 1980s. He was a factory worker in a string of cities for a good dozen years: think assembly line, overtime, exploitation, alienation. To counter the pressures of this life, he wrote poetry. In 2016 he settled in Picun, a village on the outskirts of Beijing made famous by an NGO called the Migrant Workers Home. The Home aims to advance migrant workers' social identification through cultural education. To this end, the migrant worker community works with academic and cultural professionals, media professionals, and members of the state's cultural apparatus. This interaction takes shape in a "shared space" (in Dai Jinhua's words) of cultural production and experience that blurs distinctions of official and unofficial culture and their easy association with political power and resistance, respectively. As a member of the Picun Literature Group who expertly navigates this space, Xiao Hai has become a representative of the Picun "brand," building a mediagenic public persona in the process. Who is Xiao Hai? What does his writing say? What other actors and factors shape his persona? What can we learn from all this about the nexus of precarious labor and cultural production? The stories of Picun, Xiao Hai, and migrant worker literature subvert simple oppositions of grassroots versus state discourse and unofficial versus official culture. Instead, they foreground the complexity of relations between the individual, community, and the state in China today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article opens with the 2015 Rhodes Must Fall protests at the University of Cape Town, when a student poured feces on a statue of Cecil Rhodes. This moment exemplifies the ambivalent relationship between symbolic politics and demands for institutional transformation in postapartheid South Africa. The essay considers two sites of tension: the appropriation of this antiapartheid, decolonial rhetoric outside of South Africa (as in the Rhodes Must Fall campaigns at the University of Oxford) and the borrowing of US discourses of racial identity in South African universities. In both cases, specific social and political contexts and their attendant challenges tend to disappear. In South African universities, this has the effect of occluding class, class inequality, and class struggle. To address the South African context, the essay suggests that the writing of Antonio Gramsci, whose work spans literature as cultural production and practical political mobilization, might provide a more useful politics of reading and writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Taking China to the World: The Cultural Production of Modernity" by Theodore Huters is a highly anticipated book that explores Chinese literature, culture, and thought during the late Qing and early Republic period. The author argues that this period was marked by uncertainty and fluidity in defining modernity. The book examines various cultural voices and case studies from 1895 to 1920, highlighting the contested nature of modernity during this time. It also delves into topics such as the transformation of Chinese prose, language reform, translation, and popular literature. The book concludes with a reflection on the ongoing tension between the desire for reform and the fear of chaos in Chinese society. Overall, this book offers a nuanced and thought-provoking analysis of modernity in China. [Extracted from the article]

The work is an impressive account of Shan history and Shanland's present conditions; through comparative and relational lenses, it sees ethnonationalism as a process that shapes and is shaped by relationships both within and beyond national boundaries. [Extracted from the article]

In the 1990s, South Korean literature underwent a crisis of relevance due to the changing materiality of cultural production as shaped by globalization, neoliberalism, and technological saturation. Nevertheless, the postmillennial decades have witnessed an efflorescence of new styles and voices in the literary field. Abroad, South Korean literature in translation has achieved unprecedented success in Anglophone publishing. At home, #MeToo has converged with structural critiques against the literary institution, animated by online social movements and new paradigms for understanding relationships between politics, affect, and everyday life. This article begins by exploring these phenomena through the framework of "literary materiality," understood as a set of contradictions about tangible and intangible properties distributed across intransitivity of signs, book-as-thing, codes and networks, material conditions of writerly life, and entities that confer and mediate literary value. The article goes on to examine the case of Yun Ihyŏng, whose oeuvre and activism have mobilized against the culture of literary commodification operating immanently in and across these forms. This article argues that her attempt to claim moral autonomy from the South Korean literary system is a promising vector in the ongoing struggle to dis-alienate literary culture in the age of neoliberal globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on homosexuality had been recently decriminalized and amateur photography and visual culture were changing and as supplies and equipment for photography. It mentions amateur photography enabled its use for sexual pleasure and connection, while censorship and import embargoes made illicit art production of homemade pornography. It also mentions scores of images for ability to speak to widely relevant themes of cultural production, creative expression and level of privacy.

The author discusses the impact of the Bakken Formation petroleum industry in North Dakota on cultural production. He discusses the impact of oil production in North Dakota as one aspect of anthropocene action, cultural production such as documentary films and art inspired by the petroleum industry, and the role of aesthetics in the creation of this art.

This essay analyzes how dance, gender, and state power function together as a significant node of critique in recent cultural production that addresses authoritarianism in Syria. Identifying the symbolic trope of dabke, a popular dance ubiquitous in Syrian life, selected films, literature, and choreography, this essay argues that the discussed works dislodge dabke from its feminized association with authenticity, folk culture, and nationhood to instead represent dabke as a form of hegemonic masculinity that perpetuates sovereignty, patriarchy, and autocracy. Through the rendering of embodied acts of dabke performance, hegemonic and resilient modes of masculinity are equated with spectacles of violence attached to the state, repressive tactics by the police state, and performative complicity with the regime. This essay argues that sovereign and autocratic forms of power are not universal abstractions but are embedded in the gendered structures of the society in which such power is performed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores contemporary debates regarding the representation of Indigenous resistance in the field of settler colonial studies by putting the work of Australian theorist PatrickWolfe into conversation with the political allegories articulated in two contemporary Western films. Its first section, tracing what Wolfe called his "pharmacological indebtedness" to Gayatri Spivak, considers the methodological problems for settler colonial studies that have emerged fromWolfe's critique of the settler intellectual's representation of Indigenous resistance. The second section suggests an alternative direction for transnational settler colonial studies by undertaking a comparative reading of two films--Hell or High Water (2016) written by US settler filmmaker Taylor Sheridan, and Goldstone (2016) written and directed by IndigenousAustralian (Gamilaroi) director Ivan Sen. Both films collapse the detective genre with settler colonialism's most recognizable representational genre: the Western. In so doing, they articulate narratives about the ongoing crimes of settler colonialism that offer novel perspectives on the question of what is knowable--and by whom--under settler colonialism's structure of violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In much of the recent scholarship on economics and literature, the depth of insight is inversely proportional to the status claimed for literature as such. For example, Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro's Cents and Sensibility argues that economists need to read literary works for their great moral wisdom, and they fault literary scholars for ignoring this appeal and for failing to understand basic economics. But as this survey of recent publications demonstrates, the conjunction of these critiques is odd: literary critics have been skeptical of claims about genuine value precisely because they have attended so closely to the markets structuring cultural production. What ultimately stands out in recent scholarship on economics and literature is its turn away from complex accounts of the nature of literary form and its turn toward considerations of the representation of economic life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that the pencil, which became increasingly available in the United States during the antebellum decades, allowed writers to break from scriptural conventions and explore alternative selves because it afforded them the ability to write quickly, continuously, and on the move. Through readings of the manuscripts of John Washington, Margaret Fuller, and Walt Whitman, this article demonstrates how the pencil facilitated such exploration by configuring language, instrument, and corporeal gesture in ways that suited the modernizing nation. The essay draws its method from a theoretical model known in Germany as the Schreibszene (writing scene), which demonstrates how archival scholars can explore the specific affordances of writing media and the scriptural experiments that may emerge from their use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on cultural production from a significantly larger realm of print culture where the literary was frequently subsumed by a large body of material that facilitated cultural, textual, and visual literacy and culture formation. It mentions media economy includes a hitherto largely uncharted literary material culture and extensive preoccupation with literature and its mediation. It also mentions use of illustrations as part of literary ephemera and access-granting media.

This essay contends that Caribbean conceptualizations of relation, understood through the theorizing and political organizing of women of color feminists, offer decolonial possibilities that enable radical remappings of the Afro-Atlantic. The essay argues that the political and intellectual contributions of theories of relationality and decolonial feminisms by women of color should be understood as theoretical and methodological tools for approaching some of the most peripheralized Afro-diasporic works. To that end, it examines the histories and the interconnected literary imaginaries that exist across the Afro-Latinx Caribbean (Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic), Equatorial Guinea (the only Spanish-speaking nation-state in Sub-Saharan Africa), and their diasporic cultural productions in the United States and Spain. The essay ultimately argues that women of color and decolonial feminist discourses and ethics help us understand literary and cultural productions as insurgent practices that are central to tracking and reformulating notions of decoloniality and Afro-diasporic studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented which discusses the article "9/11: Changing the Subject" by David Simpson in the previous issue of the journal, with particular focus given to the concept of the nationalistic "subject" conceptualized after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the potential of literary texts to aid understanding and response to contemporary events. The epic poem "The Odyssey" by Homer is offered as an example of a text which illuminates responses to war and revenge, and the concept of cultural production as a means of comprehending events is explored.

As part of the New Directions of the Latina/o South forum, this essay centers southern Latina/o cultural productions to examine practices of representation through Kap G's rap texts. As the first popular Mexican American rapper from Atlanta, Georgia, Kap G lyrically and visually works to represent a southern Mexicanidad through his songs, music videos, and interviews. His work illustrates a second-generation identification with migrant struggles around issues of (im)migration, (il)legality, and labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay develops an anthropological genealogy of the créolité literary project. Examining works by Édouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, the author studies how the créolistes read ethnography and the social sciences into a revitalized creole literary history, generating a vision of creole fiction as ethnographic fiction. More specifically, he demonstrates how the human sciences perform three interrelated tasks in the history the créolistes create of their own literary production: first, they serve as disciplinary frameworks for creole fiction; second, they index and reflect empiricist desires in literature, gesturing toward a fictional form that would connect with the Real in ways that earlier modes of Caribbean writing could not; and, finally, they become figural modes in fictional texts, informing the créolistes' senses of narrative and characterology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's insights on the emergence of the trend involving the Black/white binary in the discussion of race relations in the U.S. Topics discussed include the note of author Sharon Holland in her book "The Erotic Life of Racism," the utilization of whiteness as a standard for the identification of cultural production, beauty, and citizenship, and the limited place of Black studies in the academic enterprise.

An essay is presented which explores several writings with the black music abound, tracking a range of social, political and economic regarding the narratives that inform music, music making, and musicians. It mentions that tensions between the materiality of black music and anticolonial politics underpinning black cultural production. It also mentions that difference between anticolonial politics, the memory of slavery and racial violence as emerge in Sylvia Wynter's "Black Metamorphosis."

This essay explores the use of viscerally charged language around digestive dysfunction in AIDS cultural productions of the late 1980s and early 1990s. I coin the phrase "the digestive politics and poetics of AIDS" to describe the use of metaphors that linked the digestive dysfunctions associated with HIV/AIDS to a political aversion, or disgust, for the state of American politics at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Specifically, I develop a close reading of Tony Kushner's Angels in America that examines how the play's linguistic and performative engagement with alimentary processes (ingestion, defecation, and excretion) worked to rearticulate public culture's disgust with the bodies of people with AIDS to a disgust with government neglect. I argue that the play's affective investment in the gut as a site for intuiting one's response to American political life resonated with an array of contemporaneous queer artistic responses to the AIDS crisis, including works by David Wojnarowicz, Gary Fisher, and Chuck Nanney, ultimately helping forge a powerful discursive formation intended to have political results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article, the author discusses the concept of cultural capital in a society where a class rather than certain individuals or subgroups alone dominates the processes of cultural production. He cites the book "Critique of Judgment," by Immanuel Kant, in which he examines the dynamics of appreciation and judgment. The works of such individuals as John Guillory, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, and Percy Bysshe Shelley on the subject are also cited.

The article offers the author's insights regarding the novel "The Rainmaker's Mistake," by Erna Brodber and Caribbean studies in relation with afrofuturism. The author says that the afrofuturism enables Brodber to sketch the psychological terrain of Carribean cosmology. She mentions the theories of aesthetics of Sylvia Wynter and theories of appropriate model of Kamau Brathwaite which is used for the study of Caribbean culture and cultural production.

The article discusses the use of a foundation, the Fondazione Teatro Valle Bene Comune, to legalize the occupation of the Teatro Valle (Valle Theater) in Rome, Italy as part of a social movement promoting the political and legal recognition of common goods. According to the authors, the statue which forms the foundation protects the space and its occupiers from police invasion and provides an important step towards an institutionalized form of commons organization and governance. Details on the public value of cultural institutions are presented. Other topics include the Italian Constitution, cultural production, and neoliberalism.

An essay is presented on Filipino American culture and Filipinos in America and Asia as corporeal and discursive subjects. It explores transnational art projects as forms of social exchange and the implications of Filipino American visual culture and cultural arts workers who return to the Philippines. It discusses the production and maintenance in the American exhibitionary complex and the link between historical and contemporary art exhibitions and Filipino America.

The article focuses on LGBT people of color in the motion picture industry. The research investigates the political possibilities of cultural production through grassroots film festival planning, organizing, and exhibiting around multiple axes of identity. Particular attention is given to insights taken from the author's direction of the Fusion Film Festival's "Ignite the Fuse: Queer People of Color in Film, TV, and Video Conference." The author conversed with over 30 people involved with Fusion.

This essay concerns epochal anxiety and masculine identity in the context of the 1997 finance crisis. It elaborates on how a moribund masculinity in Korean cinema can offer a point of contestation in transnational cultural production. It asks how the representation of the moribund masculinity of Korean cinema figures in opposition to the economy of virtuality, as a means to sustain expenditure with reserve.

This article discusses the commercialization of emotions expressed in Asian American cultural productions. The profusion of mixed-race productions in the culture industry is an evident of the fascination with and consumption of multiraciality. There has been a phenomenal increase in the number of cultural productions about mixed-race people. These include films and novels, like Ruth Ozeki's "My Years of Meats." The very concept of multiraciality expresses anxieties about life in the post colonial, imperial and war era. An emphatic way for mixed-heritage Asians to claim both filial and affiliative origins is the negative emotions of shame, anger and melancholy.

The article focuses on the life and works of transnationalist Celia Cruz in Guantánamo, Cuba. Cruz acknowledges that the U.S. has served her less as a nation than as a transnation, one that has permitted her Cuban identity to expand in ways it may not have if she had remained in Cuba. She appears on Wyclef Jean's 1997 compact disc (CD), to introduce listeners to a track entitled "Guantanamera" which is the unofficial national anthem of all Cubans. Cruz is invited to perform the track at the first Summit of the Americas held in Miami, Florida in 1993.

This article focuses on several Jamaican exhibitions which bring Jamaican visual culture to broader awareness. International exhibitions that shape the art market and cultural production abroad; Factors that insure repeat appearances of many national pavilions in Venice, Italy; Features of the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica.

Provides information on a study concerning the ethnographic treatments of the cultural productivity of Asian men and women around issues of sexuality. Analysis of how gay underground periodicals create symbols of desire, identity and community in Indonesia; Contribution of the transnational television to the reconfiguration of notions of Indian womanhood; Definition of ideal femininity in the erotic videos in the Hmong diaspora.

This essay theorizes the cultivation, suppression, and cooptation of new forms of Asian tropicality in the material and cultural productions of contemporary Singapore. Originating in Anglo-American imperial discourse of the eighteenth century, tropicality suggests the social construction of the "tropics" as a space in opposition to European and North American temperate environments. Reading the material space of the massive eco-development Gardens by the Bay and a series of contemporary literary texts by Kevin Kwan, Sandi Tan, and Ng Yi-Sheng, the author argues that these texts produce and reflect a contemporary cultural moment that is predicated on climate control and environmental engineering and haunted by the legacies of coloniality and developmental politics. The theorization of new Asian tropicalities provides a new critical lens with which to consider the relationships and connections between these constructions of nature and the material and cultural texts of twenty-first-century Singapore—a model of urban ecology that has an outsized influence on other Asian cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports on cultural production published within the issue on topics including public space, public access to information and human rights organizations' use of satellite imaging.