Resilience & Melancholy

Author: Robin James
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 1782794611
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
When most people think that “little girls should be seen and not heard,” a noisy, riotous scream can be revolutionary. But that’s not the case anymore. (Cis/Het/White) Girls aren’t supposed to be virginal, passive objects, but Poly-Styrene-like sirens who scream back in spectacularly noisy and transgressive ways as they “Lean In.” Resilience is the new, neoliberal feminine ideal: real women overcome all the objectification and silencing that impeded their foremothers. Resilience discourse incites noisy damage, like screams, so that it can be recycled for a profit. It turns the crises posed by avant-garde noise, feminist critique, and black aesthetics into opportunities for strengthening the vitality of multi-racial white supremacist patriarchy (MRWaSP). Reading contemporary pop music – Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Calvin Harris – with and against political philosophers like Michel Foucault, feminists like Patricia Hill Collins, and media theorists like Steven Shaviro, /Resilience & Melancholy/ shows how resilience discourse manifests in both pop music and in feminist politics. In particular, it argues that resilient femininity is a post-feminist strategy for producing post-race white supremacy. Resilience discourse allows women to “Lean In” to MRWaSP privilege because their overcoming and leaning-in actively produce blackness as exception, as pathology, as death. The book also considers alternatives to resilience found in the work of Beyonce, Rihanna, and Atari Teenage Riot. Updating Freud, James calls these pathological, diseased iterations of resilience “melancholy.” Melancholy makes resilience unprofitable, that is, incapable of generating enough surplus value to keep MRWaSP capitalism healthy. Investing in the things that resilience discourse renders exceptional, melancholic siren songs like Rihanna’s “Diamonds” steer us off course, away from resilient “life” and into the death.

Resilience & Melancholy

Author: Robin James
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781782795988
Category : Feminism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Neoliberalism co-opts noisy riots like feminism and hardcore music--can melancholic siren songs fight back?

The Sonic Episteme

Author: Robin James
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478007370
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 164

Book Description
In The Sonic Episteme Robin James examines how twenty-first-century conceptions of sound as acoustic resonance shape notions of the social world, personhood, and materiality in ways that support white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Drawing on fields ranging from philosophy and sound studies to black feminist studies and musicology, James shows how what she calls the sonic episteme—a set of sound-based rules that qualitatively structure social practices in much the same way that neoliberalism uses statistics—employs a politics of exception to maintain hegemonic neoliberal and biopolitical projects. Where James sees the normcore averageness of Taylor Swift and Spandau Ballet as contributing to the sonic episteme's marginalization of nonnormative conceptions of gender, race, and personhood, the black feminist political ontologies she identifies in Beyoncé's and Rihanna's music challenge such marginalization. In using sound to theorize political ontology, subjectivity, and power, James argues for the further articulation of sonic practices that avoid contributing to the systemic relations of domination that biopolitical neoliberalism creates and polices.

Post-Punk, Politics and Pleasure in Britain

Author: David Wilkinson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137497807
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Book Description
As the Sex Pistols were breaking up, Britain was entering a new era. Punk’s filth and fury had burned brightly and briefly; soon a new underground offered a more sustained and constructive challenge. As future-focused, independently released singles appeared in the wake of the Sex Pistols, there were high hopes in magazines like NME and the DIY fanzine media spawned by punk. Post-Punk, Politics and Pleasure in Britain explores how post-punk’s politics developed into the 1980s. Illustrating that the movement’s monochrome gloom was illuminated by residual flickers of countercultural utopianism, it situates post-punk in the ideological crossfire of a key political struggle of the era: a battle over pleasure and freedom between emerging Thatcherism and libertarian, feminist and countercultural movements dating back to the post-war New Left. Case studies on bands including Gang of Four, The Fall and the Slits and labels like Rough Trade move sensitively between close reading, historical context and analysis of who made post-punk and how it was produced and mediated. The book examines, too, how the struggles of post-punk resonate down to the present.

The Conjectural Body

Author: Robin James
Publisher: Out Sources: Philosophy-Culture-Politics
ISBN: 9780739139028
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The Conjectural Body combines continental philosophy with musicology, popular music studies, and feminist, critical race, and postcolonial theories to offer a unique perspective on issues of gender, race, and the philosophy of music. It is one of the few books in philosophy to take popular music seriously, and is one of the few books in continental feminism to privilege music over the visual.

Hawkwind: Days of the Underground

Author: Joe Banks
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1913689123
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 530

Book Description
An account of the English rock band Hawkwind shows them to be one of the most innovative and culturally significant bands of the 1970s. Fifty years on from when it first formed, the English rock band Hawkwind continues to inspire devotion from fans around the world. Its influence reaches across the spectrum of alternative music, from psychedelia, prog, and punk, through industrial, electronica, and stoner rock. Hawkwind has been variously, if erroneously, positioned as the heir to both Pink Floyd and the Velvet Underground, and as Britain's answer to the Grateful Dead and Krautrock. It has defined a genre—space rock—while operating on a frequency that's uniquely its own. Hawkwind offered a form of radical escapism and an alternative account of a strange new world for a generation of young people growing up on a planet that seemed to be teetering on the brink of destruction, under threat from economic meltdown, industrial unrest, and political polarization. While other commentators confidently asserted that the countercultural experiment of the 1960s was over, Hawkwind took the underground to the provinces and beyond. In Days of the Underground, Joe Banks repositions Hawkwind as one of the most innovative and culturally significant bands of the 1970s. It's not an easy task. As with many bands of this era, a lazy narrative has built up around Hawkwind that doesn't do justice to the breadth of its ambition and achievements. Banks gives the lie to the popular perception of Hawkwind as one long lysergic soap opera; with Days of the Underground, he shows us just how revolutionary Hawkwind was.

The Far Right Today

Author: Cas Mudde
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 150953685X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 129

Book Description
The far right is back with a vengeance. After several decades at the political margins, far-right politics has again taken center stage. Three of the world’s largest democracies – Brazil, India, and the United States – now have a radical right leader, while far-right parties continue to increase their profile and support within Europe. In this timely book, leading global expert on political extremism Cas Mudde provides a concise overview of the fourth wave of postwar far-right politics, exploring its history, ideology, organization, causes, and consequences, as well as the responses available to civil society, party, and state actors to challenge its ideas and influence. What defines this current far-right renaissance, Mudde argues, is its mainstreaming and normalization within the contemporary political landscape. Challenging orthodox thinking on the relationship between conventional and far-right politics, Mudde offers a complex and insightful picture of one of the key political challenges of our time.

Dead Man Working

Author: Carl Cederstrom
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 1780991576
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 83

Book Description
Capitalism has become strange. Ironically, while the ‘age of work’ seems to have come to an end, working has assumed a total presence – a ‘worker’s society’ in the worst sense of the term – where everyone finds themselves obsessed with it. So what does the worker tell us today? "I feel drained, empty… dead." This book tells the story of the dead man working. It follows this figure through the daily tedium of the office, to the humiliating mandatory team building exercise, to awkward encounters with the funky boss who pretends to hate capitalism and tells you to be authentic. In this society, the experience of work is not of dying...but neither of living. It is one of a living death. And yet, the dead man working is nevertheless compelled to wear the exterior signs of life, to throw a pretty smile, feign enthusiasm and make a half-baked joke. When the corporation has colonized life itself, even our dreams, the question of escape becomes ever more pressing, ever more desperate… ,

Sacred and Profane Beauty

Author: Gerardus Leeuw
Publisher: AAR Texts and Translations
ISBN: 9780195223804
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 398

Book Description
Gerardus van der Leeuw was one of the first to attempt a rapprochement between theology and the arts, and his influence continues to be felt in what is now a burgeoning field. Sacred and Profane is the fullest expression of his pursuit of a theological aesthetics, surveying religion's relationship to all the arts -- dance, drama, literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, and music. This edition makes this seminal work, first published in Dutch in 1932, newly available. A new foreword by Diane Apostolos-Cappadona analyzes the continuing relevance of van der Leeuw's thought. Van der Leeuw's impassioned and brilliant investigation of the relationship between the holy and the beautiful is founded upon the conviction that for too long the religious have failed to seriously contemplate the beautiful, associating it as they do with the kingdom of sensuality and impermanence. Similarly it has been alien to literati and aesthetes to reflect upon the holy, for they choose to consider this physical world to be permanent, and therefore to be glorified through beauty alone. In truth, as van der Leeuw undertakes to show in Sacred and Profane Beauty, the holy has never been absent from the arts, and the arts have never been unresponsive to the holy. Whether one considers the Homeric epics, the dancing Sivas and Vedic poems, the sacred wall paintings of ancient Egypt, the primitive mask, or the range of sacred arts developed out of Latin and Byzantine Christianity, primordial creation in the arts was always directed toward the symbolization and interpretation of the holy. The fact that in our day this original connection is obscured and the artistic impulse is more generally regarded as wholly individualistic and autonomous does not contradict van der Leeuw's thesis; indeed, the breakdown of the unity of the holy and the arts is central to his thesis. Van der Leeuw was the rare thinker who combined profundity of insight, grace of style, and a willingness to take daring intellectual chances. In Sacred and Profane, he describes each of the arts in its original unity with the religious and then analyzes its historical disjunction and alienation. After a penetrating investigation of the structural elements within the arts which illumines a crucial dimension of the religious experience, van der Leeuw points toward the reemergence of an appropriate theological aesthetics on which a reunification of the arts could be founded.

What Then Must We Do?

Author: Gar Alperovitz
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
ISBN: 1603584919
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Book Description
"Never before have so many Americans been more frustrated with our economic system, more fearful that it is failing, or more open to fresh ideas about a new one. The seeds of a new economy--and, if we act upon it, a new system--are forming. What is that next system? It's not corporate capitalism, not state socialism, but something else--something entirely American. In What Then Must We Do?, Gar Alperovitz speaks directly to the reader about why the time is right for a revolutionary new economy movement, what it means to democratize the ownership of wealth, what it will take to build a new system to replace the decaying one--and how to strengthen our communities through cooperatives, worker-owned companies, neighborhood corporations, small and medium-size independent businesses, and publicly owned enterprises. For the growing group of Americans pacing at the edge of confidence in the old system, or already among its detractors, What Then Must We Do? offers an evolutionary, common-sense solution for moving from despair and anger to strategy and action."--Publisher's website.