Taking citizenship as a political position, cultural process, and intertwining of both, this edited volume examines the role of visual art and visual culture as sites for the construction and contestation of both state-sanctioned and cultural citizenships from the late 1970s to today. Contributors to this book examine an assortment of visual media—painting, sculpture, photography, performance, the built environment, new media, and social practice—within diverse and international communities, such as the United States, South Africa, Turkey, and New Zealand. Topics addressed include, but are not limited to, citizenship in terms of: nation building, civic practices, border zones, transnationalism, statelessness, and affects of belonging as well as alternate forms of, or resistance to, citizenship.
This book combines mobilities research with feminist and queer studies offering new perspectives on mobility justice. It foregrounds academic, activist, and artistic work revealing state-sponsored strategies for managing the mobility of people as mechanisms for aligning erotic and political desires with capitalist and nationalist interests.
Bambitchell: Bugs & Beasts Before the Law, Appendix A-L (2020) is a publication by Bambitchell, the artist collaboration of Sharlene Bamboat and Alexis Kyle Mitchell, conceived in relationship to their experimental essay film Bugs & Beasts Before the Law (2019) that explores the history and legacy of the animal trials that took place across medieval and early modern Europe and its colonies in the Americas. The film follows events in which nonhuman animals were put on trial in courts, where they were prosecuted for various crimes ranging from trespassing to murder, as well as the related legal practice of deodand, punishing inanimate objects faulted for human fatality. This publication functions as an appendix to Bambitchell's film, taking readers on a journey through the artists' research. It riffs on the appendix from the 1906 book that inspired Bambitchell's project, E. P. Evans's The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, the first chapter of which is the foundational English-language text on the medieval animal trials. Using collage and intertextual layering, Bambitchell probes the definitive authority of Evans's record, creating a counter-archive that unravels the fictive unity of historical narrative. This layered narrative in text and image is about power performed through the body of the other, revealing how authorities and institutions mediate social relations and subjecthood through such processes as the formation of property and the criminalization of sexual difference. Various perversions of justice across time and space reveal that the absurd logic of the animal trials is not an anachronistic anomaly but rather an adaptive force that continues to shape lives unevenly and to define the bounds of freedom. This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition Bambitchell: Bugs & Beasts Before the Law, at the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Fall 2020-Spring 2021. Texts include an introduction by curator of the exhibition Nina Bozicnik; the Bugs & Beasts film script; an excerpt from Greta LaFleur's "Complexion of Sodomy," a chapter in her book The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America (Johns Hopkins Press, 2018); and essays by Sarah Keenan (Mercer Union, 2019) and Marianne Shaneen.
This book examines how citizen art practices perform new kinds of politics, as distinct from normative (status, participatory and cosmopolitan) models. It contends that at a time in which the conditions of citizenship have been radically altered (e.g., by the increased securitization and individuation of bodies and so forth), there is an urgent drive for citizen art to be enacted as a tool for assessing the “hollowed out” conditions of citizenship. Citizen art, it shows, stands apart from other forms of art by performing acts of citizenship that reveal and transgress the limitations of state-centred citizenship regimes, whilst simultaneously enacting genuinely alternative modes of (non-statist) citizenship. This book offers a new formulation of citizen art—one that is interrogated on both critical and material levels, and as such, remodels the foundations on which citizenship is conceived, performed and instituted.
Spirituality is, too often, subsumed under the heading of religion and treated as much the same kind of thing. Yet spirituality extends far beyond the spaces of religion. The spiritual makes geography strange, challenging the relationship between the known and the unknown, between the real and the ideal, and prompting exciting possibilities for charting the ineffable spaces of the divine which lie somehow beyond geography. In setting itself that task, this book pushes the boundaries of geographies of religion to bring into direct focus questions of spirituality. By seeing religion through the lens of practice rather than as a set of beliefs, geographies of religion can be interpreted much more widely, bringing a whole range of other spiritual practices and spaces to light. The book is split into three sections, each contextualised with an editors’ introduction, to explore the spaces of spiritual practice, the spiritual production of space, and spiritual transformations. This book intends to open to up new questions and approaches through the theme of spirituality, pushing the boundaries on current topics and introducing innovative new ideas, including esoteric or radical spiritual practices. This landmark book not only captures a significant moment in geographies of spirituality, but acts as a catalyst for future work.
Digital technologies have transformed how, where, and when we communicate, love, learn, produce, and consume. Digital Lives in the Global City examines the entanglements of urban life as digital infrastructures connect us across vast distances while also merging work with personal time and space, increasing the power of financial institutions, and enhancing state and corporate surveillance capacities. This nuanced exploration engages with a wide range of issues: the conditions of migrant work in Singapore, the question of digital debt in Toronto, the rise and fall of illegal buildings in Mumbai, and targeted policing in New York. In the process, it reveals the profound connections between digital technologies and the social life of global cities.
The contemporary practitioners featured in the book are those who took part in Border Cultures, a research-based platform for artists and cultural producers to explore and examine the concept of the 'border' through different lenses, which took place in three part consecutively from 2013 to 2015 at the Art Gallery of Windsor, Canada: Border Cultures: Part One (homes, land) in 2013; Border Cultures: Part Two (work, labour) in 2014; and Border Cultures: Part Three (security, surveillance) in 2015. The objective of the series was to mobilise and connect ongoing critical dialogues concerning 'boundaries', with multiple and diverse explorations from different parts of Canada and the world. Border Cultures continues these narratives, collating essays from Dr Lee Rodney and Bonnie Devine, a curatorial essay from Srimoyee Mitra, and multiple artists' reflections on the themes of the exhibition series.
Named the #1 Bestselling Non-Fiction Title by the Calgary Herald To camp means to occupy a place and/or time provisionally or under special circumstances. To camp can also mean to queer. And for many children and young adults, summer camp is a formative experience mixed with homosocial structure and homoerotic longing. In Queer as Camp, editors Kenneth B. Kidd and Derritt Mason curate a collection of essays and critical memoirs exploring the intersections of “queer” and “camp,” focusing especially on camp as an alternative and potentially nonnormative place and/or time. Exploring questions of identity, desire, and social formation, Queer as Camp delves into the diverse and queer-enabling dimensions of particular camp/sites, from traditional iterations of camp to camp-like ventures, literary and filmic texts about camp across a range of genres (fantasy, horror, realistic fiction, graphic novels), as well as the notorious appropriation of Indigenous life and the consequences of “playing Indian.” These accessible, engaging essays examine, variously, camp as a queer place and/or the experiences of queers at camp, including Vermont’s Indian Brook, a single-sex girls’ camp that has struggled with the inclusion of nonbinary and transgender campers and staff; the role of Jewish summer camp as a complicated site of sexuality, social bonding, and citizen-making as well as a potentially if not routinely queer-affirming place. They also attend to cinematic and literary representations of camp, such as the Eisner award-winning comic series Lumberjanes, which revitalizes and revises the century-old Girl Scout story; Disney’s Paul Bunyan, a short film that plays up male homosociality and cross-species bonding while inviting queer identification in the process; Sleepaway Camp, a horror film that exposes and deconstructs anxieties about the gendered body; and Wes Anderson’s critically acclaimed Moonrise Kingdom, which evokes dreams of escape, transformation, and other ways of being in the world. Highly interdisciplinary in scope, Queer as Camp reflects on camp and Camp with candor, insight, and often humor. Contributors: Kyle Eveleth, D. Gilson, Charlie Hailey, Ana M. Jimenez-Moreno, Kathryn R. Kent, Mark Lipton, Kerry Mallan, Chris McGee, Roderick McGillis, Tammy Mielke, Alexis Mitchell, Flavia Musinsky, Daniel Mallory Ortberg, Annebella Pollen, Andrew J. Trevarrow, Paul Venzo, Joshua Whitehead
This book combines mobilities research with feminist and queer studies offering new perspectives on mobility justice. It foregrounds academic, activist, and artistic work revealing state-sponsored strategies for managing the mobility of people as mechanisms for aligning erotic and political desires with capitalist and nationalist interests.
After Sound considers contemporary art practices that reconceive music beyond the limitation of sound. This book is called After Sound because music and sound are, in Barrett's account, different entities. While musicology and sound art theory alike typically equate music with pure instrumental sound, or absolute music, Barrett posits music as an expanded field of artistic practice encompassing a range of different media and symbolic relationships. The works discussed in After Sound thus use performance, text scores, musical automata, video, social practice, and installation while they articulate a novel aesthetic space for a radically engaged musical practice. Coining the term "critical music," this book examines a diverse collection of art projects which intervene into specific political and philosophical conflicts by exploring music's unique historical forms. Through a series of intimate studies of artworks surveyed from the visual and performing arts of the past ten years-Pussy Riot, Ultra-red, Hong-Kai Wang, Peter Ablinger, Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, and others-After Sound offers a significant revision to the way we think about music. The book as a whole offers a way out of one of the most vexing deadlocks of contemporary cultural criticism: the choice between a sound art effectively divorced from the formal-historical coordinates of musical practice and the hermetic music that dominates new music circles today.
