Suchergebnisse

AbstractIn 2018, scholarship in book/media theory sketched the ways in which books embody time, shape our experience of time, and live in time. In particular, authors examine the book as a material object that resists being placed in a cohesive, progressive history (Whitney Trettien, Deidre Lynch, Michelle Sizemore, John Plotz), and that bends and textures linear temporality through the experience of reading (Christina Lupton). This review also discusses new theoretical discourses surrounding the material book, including new materialism (Jonathan Senchyne), the digital notion of 'interactivity' (The Multigraph Collective), and the concept of rarity (David McKitterick). Recurring through many of the works this year is a call to reconsider our definitions of the book and the archive, as scholars peer into the less well-known, cut-and-paste world of scrapbooks. This chapter is structured under the following headings: 1. The Time of Reading; 2. Books in Time; 3. Books in History; 4. Bookish Agencies.

This essay examines how "decolonization" has become a buzzword, arguing that its trajectory follows that of "intersectionality," another term popularized in media spaces and embraced by white leftist activists both in and outside of the academy. I propose that discursive activism online can be understood through two modes: extractive currency and redistributive currency. Exposing extractive media practices, this essay considers how "decolonization" has become commodified and stripped of its connection to the vital work of Indigenous people, transformed into what I call an "extractive currency" that promotes self-styled white "radical" voices at the expense of Indigenous sovereignty. Decolonial feminist media theory, I suggest, has a crucial role to play in undoing the power of this extractive currency in favor of a redistributive currency by unveiling the role of media in creating it and, instead, centering models of decolonial feminist activism. This exploration of #MMIW, the social media hashtag drawing attention to missing and murdered Indigenous women, demonstrates how media can be used in tactical ways to transform local activism into transnational phenomena while insisting on the need to attend to the ongoing experience of colonial violence, born from Indigenous dispossession and genocide, that threatens the lives of Indigenous women. In this way, I suggest, decolonial feminist media theory has a crucial role to play in reimagining the economies of media activism.

Abstract
The year's work in book/media theory witnessed a return to three fundamental questions about the 'book': 1. What Is a Book? 2. Who Is a Book? 3. Why Books? The first section of this chapter, 'What Is a Book?', presents a group of scholars who view the book as an object that continues to elude or deny the ways in which we have come to understand it. No other thinker makes this clearer than Jacques Derrida, whose high-theory approach to the 'book' was the focus of Juliet Fleming's masterful Book Theory seminar at the Folger Shakespeare Library in November 2019. Taking a more literal approach to deconstructing the book, Book Parts, a multi-author volume edited by Dennis Duncan and Adam Smyth, breaks down the book into its anatomical components. The next section, 'Who Is a Book?', brings together scholars from various literary disciplines—John Durham Peters, Patricia Badir, and Jonathan Senchyne—who collectively demonstrate how the book is always more than just an object to read or handle; it teems with thought, life, minds, and bodies. The final section, 'Why Books?', explores the enduring purpose, meaning, and future of books in society. Leah Price's public-facing work, What We Talk About When We Talk About Books, and Michaela Bronstein's PMLA article on archiving in light of climate change, reckon with the truths about our own changing human condition that only thinking about books can lay bare.

Beginning in 2020, the Crosscurrents section of this journal featured 10 provocative essays on the theme of "Encounters in Western Media Theory." These essays stemmed from scholars' engagements with various canonical texts in media, cultural, and communication studies that took the Anglophone Global North as a taken-for-granted site for making sweeping theoretical claims. In this editorial, we reflect on the critiques and arguments that scholars have developed to move past debates about "internationalizing" and "de-westernizing" the field of media, communication, and cultural studies. Taken together, the essays published in this themed section grapple with the shifting terrain of academic knowledge production and the potential for redefining practices of reading, citation, and teaching.

Abstract

AbstractWhile de-Westernisation is an interesting political intervention in media theory, analytically it offers little. We critique this approach through six inter-related arguments. The first point of critique challenges the putative singularity of the West. The second line of enquiry raises questions about the emergence of new academic disciplines and their intellectual offerings. Our third point is that the call to de-Westernise Media Studies is naïve, ignores history and the long patterns of global interconnectedness that have mutually formed the West/Rest. The fourth argument is that "de-Westernisation" suggests that the theory and methods of Media Studies offer nothing of use outside their original birthplaces, while the fifth argument is the conceptual danger of nativism. The sixth critique centres on the problem of essentialising culture as a determinate object. Examining the contemporary media practices of the Islamic Republic of Iran, we suggest that the true alternative to a repressive theocracy is its internal challenge by women, students and other parts of civil society that offers a critical third way beyond the binary divide.