Cultural Studies in the Future Tense

Cultural Studies in the Future Tense

Author: Lawrence Grossberg

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2010-11-25

Total Pages: 371

ISBN-13: 0822348306

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Lawrence Grossberg, one of the most influential figures in cultural studies, assesses the mission of cultural studies as a discipline in the past, present and future


Cultural Studies in the Future Tense

Cultural Studies in the Future Tense

Author: Lawrence Grossberg

Publisher: Duke University Press Books

Published: 2010-11-25

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780822348443

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Lawrence Grossberg is one of the leading figures in cultural studies internationally. In Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, he offers a powerful critique of the present state of cultural studies and, more broadly, of the intellectual left, especially in the Anglo-American academy. He develops a vision for the future of cultural studies as conjunctural analysis, a radically contingent and contextual study of the articulations of lived, discursive, and material contexts. Proposing a compelling analysis of the contemporary political problem space as a struggle over modernity, he suggests the possibility of multiple ways of being modern as an analytic and imaginative frame. He elaborates an ontology of the modern as the potentialities of multiple configurations of temporalities and spatialities, differences, territorialities, and powers, and argues that euro-modernity is a specific geohistorical realization of this complex diagram. Challenging the euro-modern fragmentation of the social formation, he discusses the rigorous conceptual and empirical work that cultural studies must do—including rethinking fundamental concepts such as economy, culture, and politics as well as modernity—to reinvent itself as an effective political intellectual project. This book offers a vision of a contemporary cultural studies that embraces complexity, rigorous interdisciplinary practice and experimental collaborations in an effort to better explain the present in the service of the imagination of other futures and the struggles for social transformation.


Marriage in Past, Present and Future Tense

Marriage in Past, Present and Future Tense

Author: Janet Carsten

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2021-09-01

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 1800080387

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Marriage globally is undergoing profound change, provoking widespread public comment and concern. Through the close ethnographic examination of case studies drawn from Africa, Asia, Europe and North America, Marriage in Past, Present and Future Tense places new and changing forms of marriage in comparative perspective as a transforming and also transformative social institution. In conditions of widespread socio-political inequality and instability, how are the personal, the familial and the political co-produced? How do marriages encapsulate the ways in which memories of past lives, present experience and imaginaries of the future are articulated? Exploring the ways that marriage draws together and distinguishes history and biography, ritual and law, economy and politics in intimate family life, this volume examines how familial and personal relations, and the ethical judgements they enfold, inform and configure social transformation. Contexts that have been partly shaped through civil wars, cold war and colonialism – as well as other forms of violent socio-political rupture – offer especially apt opportunities for tracing the interplay between marriage and politics. But rather than taking intimate family life and gendered practice as simply responsive to wider socio-political forces, this work explores how marriage may also create social change. Contributors consider the ways in which marital practice traverses the domains of politics, economics and religion, while marking a key site where the work of linking and distinguishing those domains is undertaken.


Tense Future

Tense Future

Author: Paul K. Saint-Amour

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0190200944

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Tense Future falls into two parts. The first develops a critical account of total war discourse and addresses the resistant potential of acts, including acts of writing, before a future that looks barred or predetermined by war. Part two shifts the focus to long interwar narratives that pit both their scale and their formal turbulence against total war's portrait of the social totality, producing both ripostes and alternatives to that portrait in the practice of literary encyclopedism. The book's introduction grounds both parts in the claim that industrialized warfare, particularly the aerial bombing of cities, intensifies an under-examined form of collective traumatization: a pretraumatic syndrome in which the anticipation of future-conditional violence induces psychic wounds. Situating this claim in relation to other scholarship on "critical futurities," Saint-Amour discusses its ramifications for trauma studies, historical narratives generally, and the historiography of the interwar period in particular. The introduction ends with an account of the weak theory of modernism now structuring the field of modernist studies, and of weak theory's special suitability for opposing total war, that strongest of strong theories.


Designing Culture

Designing Culture

Author: Anne Balsamo

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2011-07-19

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 0822344459

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The cultural theorist and media designer Anne Balsamo calls for transforming learning practices to inspire culturally attuned technological imaginations.


Dancing in Spite of Myself

Dancing in Spite of Myself

Author: Lawrence Grossberg

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780822319177

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In Dancing in Spite of Myself, Lawrence Grossberg--well known as a pioneering figure in cultural studies--has collected essays written over the past twenty years that have also established him as one of the leading theorists of popular culture and, specifically, of rock music. Grossberg offers an original and sophisticated view of the growing power of popular culture and its increasing inseparability from contemporary structures of economic and political power and from our everyday lives. In the course of conducting this exploration into the meaning of "popularity," he investigates the nature of fandom, the social effects of rock music and youth culture, and the possibilities for understanding the history of popular texts and practices. Describing what he calls "the postmodernity of everyday life," Grossberg offers important insights into the relation of pop music to issues of postmodernity and inton the growing power of the new cultural conservatism and its relationship to "the popular." Exploring the limits of existing theories of hegemony in cultural studies, Grossberg reveals the ways in which popular culture is being mobilized in the service of economic and political struggles. In articulating his own critical practice, Grossberg surveys and challenges some of the major assumptions of popular culture studies, including notions of domination and resistance, mainstream and marginality, and authenticity and incorporation. Dancing in Spite of Myself provides an introduction to contemporary theories of popular culture and a clear statement of relationships among theories of the nature of rock music, postmodernity, and conservative hegemony.


The Late Age of Print

The Late Age of Print

Author: Ted Striphas

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0231148151

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Here, the author assesses our modern book culture by focusing on five key elements including the explosion of retail bookstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders, and the formation of the Oprah Book Club.


Cultural Science

Cultural Science

Author: John Hartley

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2014-09-25

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 1849666040

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Cultural Science introduces a new way of thinking about culture. Adopting an evolutionary and systems approach, the authors argue that culture is the population-wide source of newness and innovation; it faces the future, not the past. Its chief characteristic is the formation of groups or 'demes' (organised and productive subpopulation; 'demos'). Demes are the means for creating, distributing and growing knowledge. However, such groups are competitive and knowledge-systems are adversarial. Starting from a rereading of Darwinian evolutionary theory, the book utilises multidisciplinary resources: Raymond Williams's 'culture is ordinary' approach; evolutionary science (e.g. Mark Pagel and Herbert Gintis); semiotics (Yuri Lotman); and economic theory (from Schumpeter to McCloskey). Successive chapters argue that: -Culture and knowledge need to be understood from an externalist ('linked brains') perspective, rather than through the lens of individual behaviour; -Demes are created by culture, especially storytelling, which in turn constitutes both politics and economics; -The clash of systems - including demes - is productive of newness, meaningfulness and successful reproduction of culture; -Contemporary urban culture and citizenship can best be explained by investigating how culture is used, and how newness and innovation emerge from unstable and contested boundaries between different meaning systems; -The evolution of culture is a process of technologically enabled 'demic concentration' of knowledge, across overlapping meaning-systems or semiospheres; a process where the number of demes accessible to any individual has increased at an accelerating rate, resulting in new problems of scale and coordination for cultural science to address. The book argues for interdisciplinary 'consilience', linking evolutionary and complexity theory in the natural sciences, economics and anthropology in the social sciences, and cultural, communication and media studies in the humanities and creative arts. It describes what is needed for a new 'modern synthesis' for the cultural sciences. It combines analytical and historical methods, to provide a framework for a general reconceptualisation of the theory of culture – one that is focused not on its political or customary aspects but rather its evolutionary significance as a generator of newness and innovation.


Tense and Aspect in the Languages of Europe

Tense and Aspect in the Languages of Europe

Author: Östen Dahl

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2008-08-22

Total Pages: 865

ISBN-13: 311019709X

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The series is a platform for contributions of all kinds to this rapidly developing field. General problems are studied from the perspective of individual languages, language families, language groups, or language samples. Conclusions are the result of a deepened study of empirical data. Special emphasis is given to little-known languages, whose analysis may shed new light on long-standing problems in general linguistics.