Global Inequalities Beyond Occidentalism

Based on theoretical developments in research on world-systems analysis, transnational migration, postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, whilst considering continuities of inequality patterns in the context of colonial and postcolonial realities, Global Inequalities Beyond Occidentalism proposes an original framework for the study of the long-term reproduction of inequalities under global capitalism. With attention to the critical assessment of both Marxist and Weberian perspectives, this book examines the wider implications of transferring classical approaches to inequality to a twenty-first-century context, calling for a reconceptualisation of inequality that is both theoretically informed and methodologically consistent, and able to cater for the implications of shifts from national and Western structures to global structures.

Engaging with approaches to the study of class, gender, racial and ethnic inequalities at the global level, this innovative work adopts a relational perspective in the study of social inequalities that is able to reveal how historical interdependencies between world regions have translated as processes of inequality production and reproduction. As such, it will be of interest to scholars of sociology, political and social theory and anthropology concerned with questions of globalisation and inequality.

Manuela Boatcă. Global Inequalities Beyond Occidentalism. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015.

Postcolonial Piracy: Media Distribution and Cultural Production in the Global South

Across the global South, new media technologies have brought about new forms of cultural production, distribution and reception. The spread of cassette recorders in the 1970s; the introduction of analogue and digital video formats in the 80s and 90s; the pervasive availability of recycled computer hardware; the global dissemination of the internet and mobile phones in the new millennium: all these have revolutionised the access of previously marginalised populations to the cultural flows of global modernity.

Yet this access also engenders a pirate occupation of the modern: it ducks and deranges the globalised designs of property, capitalism and personhood set by the North. Positioning itself against Eurocentric critiques by corporate lobbies, libertarian readings or classical Marxist interventions, this volume offers a profound postcolonial revaluation of the social, epistemic and aesthetic workings of piracy. It projects how postcolonial piracy persistently negotiates different trajectories of property and self at the crossroads of the global and the local.

Postcolonial Piracy: Media Distribution and Cultural Production in the Global South, edited by Lars Eckstein and Anja Schwarz. London: Bloomsbury Academic 2014.

The book is available for download.

Zombies, Zombies, Zombies

This issue of the Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften is a compilation of articles from different academic disciplines reaching from political sciences and anthropology to literature and media studies in German language. The issue traces the zombie’s historical continuities from the colonial Caribbean to the North American invasion of Haiti in 1915 and beyond – to its neo-colonial implications and also to it’s re-appropriations in West Africa. It discusses the first Caribbean zombi-text from the 17^th century, the relation between zombification and the Code Noir and discusses global zombie-capitalism from a Caribbean perspective.

The debate focuses on the (im)possibilities of „epistemic disobedience“.

The introduction in German can be downloaded here.

“Zombies”, hg. v. Gudrun Rath, Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften 1/2014, Bielefeld: Transcript.

Lateinamerikanische Kulturtheorien

„Lateinamerikanische Kulturtheorien“ is a selection of theoretical texts from and about Latin America, most of them for the first time available in German translation. From the perspective of estudios culturales, these texts offer new perspectives on the global interrelations between symbolic and material spheres.

Amongst the authors are Oswald de Andrade, Fernando Ortiz, Ángel Rama, Antonio Cornejo Polar, Néstor García Canclini, Beatriz Sarlo, Carlos Monsiváis, Édouard Glissant, Sylvia Wynter and Rita Segato.

The introduction and some of the articles (in German) can be downloaded here.

Lateinamerikanische Kulturtheorien, ed. Gudrun Rath and Isabel Exner, Konstanz University Press 2015.

The World According to Philip K. Dick

As the first essay collection dedicated to Philip K. Dick in over two decades, this volume breaks new ground in science fiction scholarship and brings innovative critical perspectives to the study of one of America’s most influential authors. With contributions by major voices in literary and cultural studies, the book thoroughly situates Dick in the history of the twentieth century and includes sections on cultural theory, adaptation studies, as well as the first in-depth discussion of his last major work, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, only published in 2011.

Dick’s academic reputation and general popularity continue to grow. A steady flow of films based on his novels and short stories, and several biographies and critical monographs over the last decade, testify to his global appeal. As the publication of three volumes of selected novels in the prestigious Library of America series and a 900-page hardback edition of his Exegesis show, Dick is now considered a canonical author in US literature. The essays commissioned for this volume examine novel aspects of Dick’s oeuvre and revise our understanding of a writer who is now seen as a major literary and intellectual figure and often taken as representative of science fiction at large. At the same time, the conceptual and methodological arguments put forward by the authors—from Mark Bould’s analysis of ‘slipstream cinema’ and Laurence Rickels’ theorization of psychopathy to Marcus Boon’s ontology of the withdrawn object—will be of interest to a wide audience in literary and cultural studies.

More information here.

Feministische Studien: The Queerness of Things Not Queer

Interrogating “the queerness of things not queer” the 2nd issue of Feministische Studien 2012 (edited by Gabriele Dietze, Beatrice Michaelis and Elahe Haschemi Yekani) engages the new materialist feminism from a queer perspective in order to frame affects and materialities as possible starting points for queer/feminist interventions.

With contributions by Ute Kalender, Nana Adusei-Poku, Simon Strick, Lukas Engelmann, Christiane König, Lena Eckert and Maja Linke as well as an Interview of Renate Lorenz, Johanna Schaffer and Andrea Thal.

All contributions are in German. The introduction and some of the articles can be downloaded here.

Queer Futures

Following debates surrounding the anti-social turn in queer theory in recent years, there has been a renewed interest in the role of activism, the limits of the political, and the question of normativity and ethics. The volume Queer Futures Reconsidering Ethics, Activism, and the Political (edited by Elahe Haschemi Yekani, Eveline Kilian and Beatrice Michaelis) engages with these concerns, exploring issues of complicity and agency with a central focus on the material and economic as well as philosophical dimensions of sexual politics. Presenting some of the latest research in queer theory, this book draws together diverse perspectives to shed light on possible ‘queer futures’ when different affective, temporal, and local contexts are brought into play. As such, it will appeal to scholars of cultural, political, literary, and social theory, as well as those with interests in gender and sexuality, activism, and queer theory.

The volume was published in 2013 by Ashgate. More information here.

Indigenous Cultural Studies

History, Power, Text: Cultural Studies and Indigenous Studies is a collection of essays on Indigenous themes published between 1996 and 2013 in the Australian journal known first as UTS Review and now as Cultural Studies Review. From the introduction:

“[T]his collection has been conceived and assembled as an exercise in institution building beyond ‘the Institution’. We call this institution, tentatively, ‘Indigenous cultural studies’ and see it as a disciplinary space that is built iteratively through events, single articles and books. We do not seek to prescribe or delimit this project but rather to give it density and energise those working in the overlapping fields represented here.
Indigenous cultural studies is our name for the intersection of cultural studies and Indigenous studies, a crossing often expressed as, but certainly not limited to, cultural studies with Indigenous topics, Indigenous scholars doing cultural studies or Indigenous studies of culture and everyday life. Just as John Hartley describes cultural studies as ‘a crossroads or bazaar for the exchange of ideas from many directions’, Indigenous cultural studies is the exchange—in the sense of both a transactional site and a transactional act—that occurs at the meeting point of these diverse undertakings.
It is the site where the scholars republished here might form and defend inquiries, and modes of inquiry, and where their‘discipline’ is not primarily grounded in method or topic, but in their mutual textual presence. This collection seeks to (re) build this particular bazaar by identifying the conditions and fact of its existence and by revisiting some of the ideas and directions that have shaped the meeting of cultural studies and Indigenous studies.” (Eve Vincent, Timothy Neale & Crystal McKinnon, 2014, 11-12).

 The volume is published by UTS ePress and can be downloaded here.