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Priyasha Mukhopadhyay develops the concept of the functional archive of empire, consisting of texts ranging from licenses and other bureaucratic documents to manuals and almanacs. She describes how historical readers in colonial South Asia made sense of them, and what this can tell us about their experiences living in the shadow of a vast imperial power. She illustrates this with the example of a manual used by soldiers which despite being widely used, also created complex relationships with its users - soldiers in the field - which often entailed in their not actually reading the book and complaining about being required to read them.
Priyasha Mukhopadhyay is an Assistant Professor of English at Yale University. Her first book, Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire, was published by Princeton University Press in August 2024.
Image: “Plate XII”, Field Service Pocket Book Part II - India, Calcutta: Government of India Central Publication Branch, 1928
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In this episode of High Theory, Faye Raquel Gleisser tells us about Risk. A calculable danger in economics, athletics, sociology, or healthcare, risk has become a socially constructed danger that changes who we are and how we move through the world. Faye asks us to think about how risk management and risk literacy shaped the conceptual and performance work of American artists in the late twentieth century. Who is at risk? Who is safe? And how do we know?
Faye’s book, Risk Work: Making Art and Guerrilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967–1987 (U Chicago Press, 2023) studies how artists in the US starting in the 1960s came to use guerrilla tactics in performance and conceptual art, maneuvering policing, racism, and surveillance.
As US news covered anticolonialist resistance abroad and urban rebellions at home, and as politicians mobilized the perceived threat of “guerrilla warfare” to justify increased police presence nationwide, artists across the country began adopting guerrilla tactics in performance and conceptual art. Risk Work tells the story of how artists’ experimentation with physical and psychological interference from the late 1960s through the late 1980s reveals the complex and enduring relationship between contemporary art, state power, and policing. Drawing on art history and sociology as well as performance, prison, and Black studies, Gleisser argues that artists’ anticipation of state-sanctioned violence invokes the concept of “punitive literacy,” a collectively formed understanding of how to protect oneself and others in a carceral society.
Faye Raquel Gleisser is an associate professor of art history at Indiana University and curator, whose work focuses on three main subject areas: art and tactical intervention; the racial logics of archives; and curatorial ethics and canon formation. By bridging curation, art history, and performance studies, she investigates histories of art that challenge intertwined anti-Black societal structures and patriarchal, white-centering notions of value that have long limited the canon of “American art.” She approaches art as a material manifestation of sociopolitical conditions and artists as theorists of power and social encounter.
In the episode Faye names several artists including Asco, Chris Burden, the Guerrilla Girls, Tehching Hsieh, and Adrian Piper. This image for this episode is a photograph by Harry Gambota Jr. titled First Supper (After a Major Riot), 1974 that documents a performance by the Chicano art group Asco in Los Angeles. See the Artsy page about the photograph for more about the art and the artist.
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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In this episode of High Theory, Esther Gabara talks with us about Non-Literary Fiction, that is, works of fiction that belong to the world of contemporary art, rather than the world of contemporary literature. She focuses on literary and narrative strategies used by Latin American and Indigenous American artists to make “non-objective” forms of visual art under the pressures of neoliberalism. To learn more, check out her book, Non-Literary Fiction: Art of the Americas under Neoliberalism (Chicago University Press, 2022).
In our conversation, Esther gave us a theoretical bibliography of thinkers from Latin America who have shaped her work on non-literary fiction. Prominent among these figures are Ferreira Gullar in Brazil and Juan Acha in Mexico, who were the founding thinkers of the term “Non-Objectualism”-- a term that informs the fiction making practices Esther studies. We found this cool piece on Juan Acha that might be worth reading. She also named the philosopher Rodolfo Kusch and his work with indigenous storytellers. Kusch’s book on Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América was translated into English and published by Duke in 2010. And finally she named the indigenous artist and activist Manuel Quintín Lame, who collaborated with the Columbia artist Antonio Caro. Each of these figures features in her book as a theorist in their own right, in a context where art is a critical practice.
Esther Gabara is a professor of Romance Studies at Duke University, where she works with modern and contemporary art, literature, and critical theory from the Americas. Her teaching in the departments of Romance Studies and Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University covers visual studies, modernism, photography, Pop Art and popular culture, feminism, public art, and coloniality in contemporary art. Her prior publications include the bilingual exhibition catalogue, Pop América, 1965-1975 (Nasher Museum of Art/Duke University Press, 2018), for an exhibition she curated at the Nasher Museum of Art, and Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil (Duke University Press, 2008).
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High Theory returns with a series of haunting concepts, places, and figures from our former guests. We asked folks to call in with something spookworthy (neologism!) from their fields – real or imagined specters, scary ideas, anything that could haunt, disorient, unsettle, horrify. And we got a full seance worth of ghosts. Listen if you dare!
This episode features (in order of appearance)
Abhishek Avtans on the Churail. He kindly gave us a transcript (we hope to have more transcripts soon!). You can hear more from Abhishek in his episode on Apabhraṃśa.
Angelina Eimannsberger on the Reader. You can hear more from Angelina in her episode on JVN.
Travis Chi Wing Lau on Mad Studies. You can hear more from Travis in his episode on Experimental Life.
Mackenzie Cooley on the Scientific Revolution. You can hear more from Mackenzie in her episode on the Animal.
Farah Bakaari on the Nation State. You can hear more from Farah in her episode on the Trace.
Emma Heany on Communism and Empire. You can hear more from Emma in her episode on Sexual Difference.
Sheila Liming on Nowhere and Forever. Sheila reads an excerpt from her article in progress on the contemporary gothic, under the working title, "Out of Time: Anti-Immediacy in Mark Jenkin's Enys Men.” You can hear more from Sheila in her episode on the Party.
Sritama Chatterjee on Nature and Wilderness. You can hear more from Sritama in her episode on Off-Shore Aesthetics.
John Linstrom on Liberty Hyde Bailey’s Haunted Houses. You can hear more from John in his episodes on Nature Study and Ecosphere.
The image for this episode features creepy red creatures on a dark green field. It was made by Saronik Bosu.
Boo!
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In this episode of High Theory, Rasheed Tazudeen tells us about the inhuman. The inhuman offers a way of moving beyond the legacies of humanism and across categories and scales of being. Thinking with the inhuman world, from spools of thread to microplastics, helps us try and think otherwise about the complex assemblages that shape our lives.
If you want to learn more, check out Rasheed’s new book, Modernism’s Inhuman Worlds (Cornell UP, 2024). The book explores the centrality of ecological precarity, species indeterminacy, planetary change, and the specter of extinction to modernist and contemporary metamodernist literatures. Modernist ecologies emerge in response to the enigma of how to imagine inhuman being—including soils, forests, oceans, and the earth itself—through languages and epistemologies that have only ever been humanist. Rasheed asks how (meta)modernist aesthetics might help us to imagine (with) inhuman worlds, including the worlds still to be made on the other side of mass extinction.
Rasheed Tazudeen is a lecturer in English at Yale University. His work is focused broadly on the intersections between ecology, race, and sound in 19th- and 20th-century literature and music. He is currently at work on a second project tentatively titled The Musicked Earth: Towards a Decolonial Sound Ecology, focused on the resonances between Black/Afro-Caribbean and Indigenous theories of sound, music, festival, and ecology through the work of Sylvia Wynter, Édouard Glissant, Leanne Simpson, and Alice Coltrane.
This week’s image was made by Saronik Bosu in 2024. It represents a humanoid creature in fetal position, merging with the inhuman world.
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In this episode of High Theory, Mackenzie Cooley talks about animals. The animal lies at the center of science and the human, from imperial conquest and Enlightenment thought to the creatures on our dinner plates and beside us at the table. The practices of animal breeding and the politics of making life are, in Mackenzie’s account, key to understanding the history of race as a concept and term that emerged in the Early Modern World.
For more animal encounters, check out her book The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance (Chicago UP, 2022). In it, Italian horses and Mexican dogs provide examples of controlled breeding before eugenics, helping us see how human difference was understood in the colonial encounter, and illuminate undertheorized notions of generation and its discontents in the more-than-human world.
Tag dog and Bartolomé the cat sometimes participate in the making of High Theory, but the podcast is not necessarily pitched to non-human ears. If you want radio for animals, listen to Bad Animals on WFMU.
Mackenzie Cooley is Assistant Professor of History, Director of Latin American Studies at Hamilton College. She is an intellectual historian who studies the uses, abuses, and understandings of the natural world in early modern science and medicine. And she has two Newfoundland dogs.
The image accompanying this episode is a painting of a Newfoundland Dog by Charles Henry Schwanfelder (1812), from the collection of Temple Newsam House, Leeds Museums and Galleries.
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We often misuse the word melodrama with abandon, especially to characterize other people’s behaviors, but Greg Vargo defines it for us once and for all. Emerging in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the predominant Western theatrical form, it is a genre of crisis. To that end, it employed hyperbolic language, extreme situations, extraordinary coincidences, stark oppositions and so on. Greg talks about his own ongoing work on melodramas about race, their histories of performance, and the storied career of the African American actor Ira Aldridge.
Greg Vargo is Associate Professor at the Department of English, New York University. His research focuses on the literary and cultural milieu of nineteenth-century British protest movements and the interplay between politics, periodical culture, the novel and theater. His first book, An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel (Cambridge UP, 2018), won the 2019 North American Victorian Studies Association’s award for best book of the year in Victorian Studies. He has recently edited Chartist Drama (Manchester UP, 2020), a collection of four plays written or performed by members of the working-class movement for social and political rights known as Chartism. A new project focuses on anti-imperialism in nineteenth-century popular culture (across such media as penny novels and stage melodrama) as well as in radical politics.
Image: © 2024 Saronik Bosu
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In this episode of High Theory, Jonathan Kramnick talks about Close Reading. Contrary to the name, it is less a form of slow or focused reading than an immersive practice of writing. The classic methodology of New Criticism has become, in Kramnick’s estimation, the shared foundation of literary studies in the university.
Our conversation was inspired by Jonathan’s new book, Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies (Chicago, 2023). In the book he aims to “present a view of literary criticism as it is practiced across the academy in order to defend its standing as a contribution to knowledge” (vii). His defense of this foundational critical method joins a slate of recent metacritical books on the discipline of literary study, and the state of the humanities today.
Jonathan Kramnick is the Maynard Mack Professor of English at Yale University. His research and teaching are in eighteenth-century literature and philosophy, foundations of literary theory and criticism, and interdisciplinary approaches to the arts. His prior publications include Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness (Chicago, 2018), Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson (Stanford, 2010), and Making the English Canon: Print Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700-1770 (Cambridge, 1999). His current book project on Alexander Pope, William Cowper, and the poetics of designed environments is titled Earthworks: Two Before Romanticism. He is also director of the Lewis Walpole Library and the editor (with Steven Pincus) of the Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History for Yale University Press.
The image accompanying this episode was drawn by Saronik Bosu in 2024.
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In this episode of High Theory, Matt Seybold tells us about Criticism, the glue that holds the bricks of culture together. Cultural critics are a necessary component of the intellectual ecosystem, who have the power to analyze both the material conditions and the myths that make up our world.Matt is the host of the American Vandal Podcast at the Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College. In his recent podcast series, Criticism, LTD, Matt investigated the state of criticism in the academy and the public sphere. There is a nifty substack newsletter with the transcripts from Criticism, LTD, if you’re keen. Kim and Saronik were among the many podcasters, public intellectuals, and critics that Matt interviewed for the series, and we’re excited to have him back on High Theory to tell us about his investigations.In the episode he offers a recuperative reading of Mark Twain’s acerbic take on critics in his late notebooks: “The critic’s symbol should be the tumble-bug; he deposits his egg in somebody else’s dung, otherwise he could not hatch it.” (see p. 392 of this Harper & Brothers, 1935 edition of Twain’s Collected Works, on archive.org). He references Jacques Derrida’s book, Limited Inc (Northwestern UP, 1988), which contains the *famous* essay “Signature, Event, Context” and a critical debate about Apartheid. And he also discusses Jed Esty’s Future of Decline: Anglo-American Culture at Its Limits (Stanford UP, 2022) and our episode with Jed on the Rhetoric of Decline. You can also take a listen back to Matt’s earlier episode with us on Economics.Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, as well as Resident Scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies. He is the executive producer and host of the American Vandal Podcast, and founding editor of MarkTwainStudies.org. He is co-editor (with Michelle Chihara) of of the Routledge Companion to Literature & Economics (2018)and (with Gordon Hutner) a 2019 special issue of American Literary History on “Economics & Literary Studies in The New Gilded Age.” Recent articles can be found in the Mark Twain Annual, American Studies, Reception, and Los Angeles Review of Books. He tweets (or exes?) @MEASeybold.The image for this episode was made by Saronik Bosu in 2024.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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In this special episode of High Theory, Ramsés Martínez Barquero and Abigail Cowan interview their graduate student colleagues about teaching. They turn our attention to graduate study as one of the foundational aspects in building academic knowledge, and show us graduate instructors encountering the classroom as a learning environment for teachers and students. Abigail and Ramses recorded interviews with eight fellow graduate students in a story circle they held at the PennState Humanities Institute as part of their Public Humanities Fellowship program. The episode weaves together stories of anxiety and humor, pushing against self doubt, and finding community while pursuing graduate studies.
Ramsés Martínez Barquero is a M.A/PhD student in the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.
Abigail Cowan is a graduate student for the Department of English and a teaching assistant for English and Comparative Literature.
Kristina Bowers is a PhD student at Penn State University studying Rhetoric and Composition and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
Vani Gupta is a doctoral student in the HDFS Department at Penn State University.
Ash Mayes is a master's student in the English department.
Ana Sofía Semo is a second-year graduate student in the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, and now she teaches Spanish 2 in the Spanish Basic Language Program.
María José Andrade Gabiño is a Ph.D. student in the Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese Department.
Alex Mika is a second-year PhD student in the Penn State English Department studying Shakespeare's cultural legacy via literary, cinematic, and dramatic adaptations of his works.
The image for this episode was made by Saronik Bosu in 2024.
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In this episode of High Theory, Pardis Dabashi tells us about plot. A plot consists of a change with stakes that establish norms. This seemingly simple structure shapes novels, films, politics, and our world, from easy seductions of comfort to difficult promises of liberation.
In the episode, Pardis references Thomas Edison’s 1903 film, Electrocuting an Elephant, which is super sad, and kind of terrifying, but an economical explanation of plot. She also discusses Max Ophüls’s 1953 film, The Earrings of Madame de... as an example of a film with a potentially liberatory plot. We recommend you watch the latter, not the former. Other texts referenced in this episode include Mary Anne Doane’s The Emergence of Cinematic Time (Harvard, 2002) and Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (Duke, 2011) and Female Complaint (Duke, 2008).
The occasion for our conversation was Pardis’s new book, Losing the Plot: Film and Feeling in the Modern Novel (U Chicago Press, 2023). If you’d like to get yourself a copy there’s a 30% discount on the University of Chicago Press website with the promo code UCPNEW. It’s a book about film and literary modernism, including the work of Nella Larsen, Djuna Barnes, and William Faulkner. The cover is really beautiful, and it’s definitely worth a read if you’re interested in either of the genres it addresses.
Pardis Dabashi is an Assistant Professor of Literatures in English and Film Studies at Bryn Mawr College, where she is also Affiliated Faculty in the Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and North African Studies Program (MECANA). She has published everywhere, and is friends with everyone! She teaches courses in twentieth-century literature, film studies, Middle East studies, and theory. She was also one of the first guests on High Theory! You can listen to her 2020 episode on The Autonomous Work of Art if you’re feeling a flashback.
The image for this episode is a publicity still from George Cukor’s 1936 MGM film Camille, showing Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor in a tense embrace. Digital image from Wikimedia Commons.
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In this episode, John Linstrom tells us about Nature-Study, an educational movement that began in the rural classrooms of American Progressive Era. It takes students and learners of all kinds out of the classroom, away from the textbook, and into the world, to observe and learn. It offers us a mode of attunement to the world that we might use to heal the divide between rural and urban, and kindle the kind of social change we need to get the world off fossil fuels.
Our conversation is centered around the new scholarly edition John edited of Liberty Hyde Bailey’s The Nature-Study Idea (Cornell University Press, 2023), which just came out. It’s the first book in the new The Liberty Hyde Bailey Library, a series for Cornell University Press reintroducing the ecological and critical-agrarian writings of L. H. Bailey (1858-1954). John was one of our first guests on High Theory back in 2020 – so if you want to listen back, you can check out the episode on Ecosphere. John told me when were were preparing to record that there was some debate about the dash in “Nature-Study” back in the day, but that he was on the side of the dashers, because the women teachers who led the movement favored the dash.
John is a Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Climate and Inequality at the Climate Museum in NYC. He is also the author of a book of poems called To Leave for Our Own Country coming out with Black Lawrence Press in April 2024. He believes in poetry's power to foster communities for change, human and more-than-human stories and visions of climate justice He received his PhD in Literature from New York University and his MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University. John, Kim, and Saronik spent a lot of time together as grad students at 244 Greene St. in NYC. John and Kim used to run a working group on agriculture and literature, called Farm to Text. John lives in Queens, where gleans deep joy from holding his baby daughter, singing choral music, and eating large quantities of pesto.
The image for this episode was made by Saronik Bosu, especially for his friend John, in 2023.
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In this episode of High Theory, Katherine Turk tells us about Sisterhood, a familial metaphor used to evoke gendered solidarity in women’s movement of the mid-sixties and seventies, and a utopian ideal of equality within the human family. It’s a universalizing but aspirational concept that helped feminists build a political coalition.
Our conversation is based upon Katherine’s new book about the National Organization of Women: The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization That Transformed America (FSG, 2023). This mainstream feminist organization is often neglected in histories of the period, dismissed as a liberal organization dedicated to incremental change. But NOW was an expansive organization that changed over time, shifted the conversation and legal structures in the US, and left an important historical record that we can learn from in social justice work today.
Katherine Turk is an associate professor of History and an adjunct associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at UNC Chapel Hill. Her research and teaching focus on women, sex, gender, law, labor, and modern social movements. Her first book Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace (Politics and Culture in Modern America Series, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) studies the history of Title VII of the 1964 US Civil Rights Act, which outlawed workplace discrimination on the basis of such personal attributes as sex, race, and religion.
The image for this week was made by Saronik Bosu. It shows Aileen Hernandez, Mary Jean Collins, and Patricia Hill Burnett, leaders of NOW who are the primary subjects of Katherine’s book.
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In this episode of High Theory, Angela Hume tells us about Self Help, not the neoliberal strategy of self-actualization through consumer choices, but the radical political movement of gynecological self-help, that flourished in the late twentieth century and created a set of portable political tactics based in anarchist feminist philosophy.
In the episode, she references Alondra Nelson’s book Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (Minnesota UP, 2013); Michelle Murphy’s Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Health, and Technoscience (Duke UP, 2012); and several health activist organizations, including the Women’s Choice Clinic in Oakland, CA; AidAccess which provides mail order medication assisted abortion; and MYA Network, a group of clinicians seeking to expand abortion access in primary care settings.
Angela suggested we include three links that everyone should have at their fingertips, PlanC (plancpills.org) which helps people access abortion pills, AidAccess (aidaccess.org) the pill fulfillment service described above, and I Need an A (ineedana.com), a clinic locator.
In our longer conversation, she also named the Keep Our Clinics campaign, a fundraising effort to support independent abortion clinics, to which pre-sales of her book contributed. We’re sorry we didn’t get this up early enough for you to participate in the pre-sale! But now the book is out in the world, you can even read a review of it in The Guardian.
Our conversation is based Angela’s new book, Deep Care: The Radical Activists Who Provided Abortions, Defied the Law, and Fought to Keep Clinics Open(link is external) (AK Press, 2023). A work of public scholarship and a history of medicine, the book tells a story of Bay Area abortion defense—from feminist clinical practice, to underground abortion provision, to street politics and clinic defense—from the 1970s to 2000s. You can read an excerpt from the book in the Post45 contemporaries collection “Abortion Now, Abortion Forever,” which was the starting point for our conversation on High Theory.
Angela Hume is a feminist historian, critic, and poet, who teaches at UC Berkeley. Her creative and expository writing classes address environmental and health justice, working-class and multiethnic American literatures, feminist and queer storytelling, and more. Beyond Deep Care, Angela is co-editor of Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field(link is external) (U of Iowa P, 2018). Her full-length books of poetry include Middle Time(link is external) (Omnidawn, 2016) and Interventions for Women (Omnidawn, 2021).
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In this episode of High Theory, Geoffrey Sanborn tells us about Plagiarism. A concept emerged with the idea of originality, plagiarism challenges some of our most deeply held notions of individualism and status. Hatred of plagiarism is so baked into our culture that it evokes a gut response of disgust, which prevents us from actually analyzing it as a form of social behavior.
In the episode, Geoff talks about websites that promise to “humanize” chatGPT content, like the AI Text Converter and the Plagiarism Remover. He talks about postcolonial theory, as a tool that might help us analyze plagiarism, and invokes Homi Bhabha’s idea of “colonial mimicry,” which appears in his 1984 article “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” He also talks about the actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith, and references David Graeber’s book Debt, which we ran an episode on way back in 2020. It was in the early days of High Theory, so apologies for the audio quality, but we think you’ll like it.
Geoff is a Samuel Williston Professor of English and department chair at Amherst College. He has published many books about nineteenth century American literature, most recently Plagiarama! William Wells Brown and the Aesthetics of Attractions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), which was the inspiration for this conversation. It’s a really great book! You should read it.
The image for this episode was made by Saronik Bosu in 2023.
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Anat Rosenberg, Kristof Smeyers, and Astrid Van den Bossche discuss the fresh historiographies of capitalism offered by studies of enchantment and magical thinking. They talk about their research network for scholars interested in the historical role of enchantment as a tool, structure, or foundation for the organization and the development of modern markets, economic institutions, and economic relationships.
Anat Rosenberg is a senior lecturer at the Harry Radzyner Law School, Reichman University, Israel. Her work concerns the cultural legal history of capitalism, liberalism and consumption in Britain, and methodologies of law and the humanities. She is author of Liberalizing Contracts: Nineteenth Century Promises Through Literature, Law and History (Routledge, 2017), and The Rise of Mass Advertising: Law, Enchantment and the Cultural Boundaries of British Modernity (Oxford UP, 2022).
Kristof Smeyers is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ruusbroec Institute, University of Antwerp. His research interests are magic, the supernatural and the occult, and their connections to the histories of religion, science and folklore, as well as their historiography and their archive history.
Astrid Van den Bossche is Lecturer in Digital Marketing and Communications at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. She is particularly interested in scepticism and humour as forms of engagement with promotional culture, and the application of computational methods in historical studies.
Image: Public Domain Image of Great Market Hall, Budapest
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In this episode of High Theory, Neil Safier talks with us about the Plantationocene, a geological epoch that traces the effects of climate change to the historical systems of human and nonhuman environmental exploitation known as plantation agriculture. It is another name for the world we currently inhabit.
In the episode, Neil describes how Donna Harraway and Anna Tsing invented the term Plantationocene in response to another recent term Anthropocene. Sources to check out include Donna Haraway’s essay, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationcene, Chthulucene: Making Kin” Environmental Humanities 6 no. 1 (2015): 159-165. doi: 10.1215/22011919-3615934, and Paul Crutzen, “The ‘Anthropocene’” Earth Systems Science in the Anthropocene ed. Eckhart Ehlers and Thomas Krafft (Springer, 2006) pp. 13-18. He references B.F. Skinner’s novel Walden Two (MacMillan, 1962) at the end of our conversation.
Neil Safier is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Brown University where he currently serves as Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies of the Watson Institute for International Affairs. He studies the history of science, agriculture, and other forms of knowledge-making in the late-eighteenth-century Atlantic world, focusing on the plantation cultures of the Caribbean and Brazil. He was recently the director of the John Carter Brown Library, at Brown University, and many years ago, when he was more optimistic about the current global epoch, he managed grants for the Sierra Club Foundation in San Francisco, California. He is the author of Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (U Chicago, 2008) and is cooking up two new projects, on the historical connections between natural science and plantation agriculture in the Amazon River basin and the global history of collecting.
The image for this week comes from Neil’s research on the history of plantation agriculture. This drawing of a plantation from Hispaniola (Saint-Domingue) was reproduced in José Mariano da Conceição Velozo's Fazendeiro do Brazil Tome III Part II (Lisbon, 1799), in the volume dedicated to coffee production.
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In this episode of High Theory, Erin Pineda talks about decolonizing praxis. Black American activists in the 1950s and 1960s used strategies of civil disobedience and nonviolent direct action as part of a broader anticolonial movement, and reading their story in an international context can help us rethink the narrative of the US civil rights movement enshrined in American political theory.
In the episode Erin references Jack Halberstam’s concept of “low theory” which derives from the work of Stuart Hall, and appears in the book, The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP 2011). She also references several mainstream liberal political philosophers who set the terms of the debate about “civil disobedience” in the US academy in the 1970s, John Rawls Theory of Justice (Harvard UP, 1971), Hugo Bedau, “On Civil Disobedience” (Journal of Philosophy 58, no. 21 (1961): 653-665) and Carl Cohen, Civil Disobedience: Conscience, Tactics, and the Law (Columbia University Press, 1971). Pineda writes against this tradition. The American activists she studies developed a different set of theoretical commitments to civil disobedience that are a bit less polite, and have a bit more potential for actual revolution.
Erin Pineda is the Phyllis Cohen Rappaport ’68 New Century Term Professor of Government at Smith College. She teaches courses in the history of political thought, democratic theory, race and politics, social movements and American political thought. Her research interests include the politics of protest and social movements, Black political thought, race and politics, radical democracy and 20th-century American political development. If you want to learn more about the topics she discusses in this episode, read her book! It’s called Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford UP, 2021).
The image for this episode is a famous photograph of Black student Elizabeth Eckford being jeered by white student Hazel Bryan as she attempts to enter Little Rock Central High School, taken by Will Counts on 4 September 1957, one of the more famous images of school desegregation from the US Civil Rights Movement. This digital version came from wikimedia commons.
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In this episode of High Theory, Matthew Kirschenbaum talks about txt, or text. Not texting, or textbooks, but text as a form of data that is feeding large language models. Will the world end in fire, flood, or text?
In the full interview, Matthew recommended Tim Maughan’s novel Infinite Detail (Macmillan, 2019) as an excellent example of writing about the end of the internet, and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (Knopf, 2014) as a positive example of a post-internet apocalypse. In the episode he references a paper by Beder et al., “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” FAccT '21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (March 2021): 610–623. And several apocalyptic scenarios, including the dead internet theory and the gray goo hypothesis.
Matthew Kirschenbaum is Distinguished University Professor of English and Digital Studies at the University of Maryland and Director of the Graduate Certificate in Digital Studies. His books include Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing (Harvard UP 2016) and Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (MIT Press, 2008). With Kari Kraus, he co-founded and co-directs BookLab, a makerspace, studio, library, and press devoted to what is surely our discipline's most iconic artifact, the codex book. See mkirschenbaum.net or follow him on Twitter (or X?) as @mkirschenbaum for more.
Because we are hoping to encourage the text apocalypse, we made today’s image using generative AI. Specifically Saronik made it using the prompt “Text” in Canva’s AI interface.
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In this episode of High Theory, Margaret Galvan talks about the queer politics of Visibility. In her work the activist practices of representation take concrete form in comic books, photographs, and even drawings on lecture slides!
In the episode, she discusses the photography of Nan Goldin and queer comic books in the 1980s. She quotes Adrienne Rich’s 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” She also references This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color, and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera. At the end of the episode she references the Lesbian Avengers, who have amazing images.
Margaret Galvan is an assistant professor of English at the University of Florida. Her research examines how visual culture operates within the print media of feminist and queer social movements of the 1970s-1990s. Her brand new book In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s, is out this fall from University of Minnesota Press‘s Manifold Scholarship Series. You should go check it out!
Because the amazing images Margaret talks about were drawn recently, they’re still in copyright. Our image this week is from Gladys Parker’s comic Mopsy which ran from 1937 to 1966. Parker was a successful female artist in a world of mainstream US comic books dominated by men.
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