Author：Peter W. Schulze

Abstract: This essay traces the tensions between national imaginaries and transnational global media flows of tango, samba, and ranchera film musicals, taking into account their cross-media and intercultural configurations as well as interconnections between these three “transgenres.” From a comparative perspective and by means of a “histoire croisée,” or crisscrossing history, it touches upon developments in early Latin American sound film, Hollywood’s Spanishlanguage films and its Pan-Americanism, Spain’s cinematic Hispanoamericanismo, and Pan-Latin American film productions. The essay makes a case for the multifaceted trans/national cultural economy of the tango, samba, and ranchera film musical productions during their main phase, in the 1930s and 40s.

Vol. 5 No. 2 Dec. 2021      Time：2022-01-10 View Citation

Author：Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira, André Masseno

Abstract: This essay seeks to articulate a detailed reading through two anatomical selections – the mouth and tongue—in Brazilian art from the end of the 1960s. The reading is part of a shift in the matrix of Oswald de Andrade’s “Anthropophagic Manifesto,” originally published in the Revista de Antropofagia in 1928, whose interpretations spread in Brazil during the second half of the 20th century. This study mobilises elements of the manifesto and its resonance in the works of artists such as Anna Maria Maiolino, Lygia Pape, Paulo Bruscky, and Lenora de Barros.

Vol. 5 No. 2 Dec. 2021      Time：2022-01-10 View Citation

Author：Hongxin Jiang

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has created an unprecedented crisis all over the world, while it also marks the coming of a new era of opportunities and challenges, especially for higher education. Universities should be more inclusive and innovative in communication and cooperation, promoting opportunities for collaborations in all aspects and reshaping international education.

Vol. 5 No. 2 Dec. 2021      Time：2022-01-10 View Citation

Author：

Abstract: Vol. 5, no. 2 2021 Notes on Contributors

Vol. 5 No. 2 Dec. 2021      Time：2022-01-10 View Citation

Author：Claudia Franken

Abstract: Arno Schmidt’s tripartite Leviathan (1949; written 1946—1948) is one of the few German narratives composed immediately after World War II. Different from the then newly-propagated Trümmerliteratur (literature among the ruins) or the literature of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coping with the past), Schmidt’s writing condensed and “dehydrated” narrative events, weaving antiquity and his personal experience into one in order to lay bare historical lines of continuity. Relating to Pytheas of Marsilia, to an ethics based on praxis and to modern physics, he undertakes a demanding topography of “hell descents” within which he also put into doubt political and academic demands upon a cultural legacy that was, to him, ...

vol. 5 No. 1 June 2021      Time：2021-09-22 View Citation

Author：Christine Blaettler

Abstract: Clouds are often appealed to when an objection is raised to the rationalist knowledge paradigm of the clear and distinct, as formulated by René Descartes. In such cases, clouds serve to establish an anti-classically oriented, non-hierarchical and non-determinative, chaostheoretically informed counter-paradigm. Itself informed by this tendency, this essay proposes to examine clouds as an epistemological challenge, capable of exposing specific tensions in science, philosophy, and art alike. These fields negotiate questions of perception and representation, hence aesthetic problems, on the basis of which this contribution formulates an “aesthetics from below.” Such an aesthetics does not proceed from aesthetic theories, nor is it based on fuzzy concepts; rather, ...

vol. 5 No. 1 June 2021      Time：2021-09-22 View Citation

Author：Amy Abugo Ongiri

Abstract: This essay will explore the ways in which African American visual culture has attempted to negotiate criminalization and the current situation of what Richard Iton rightfully characterizes as “hyperincarceration.” It will explore the ways in which contemporary African American visual culture is engaged in negotiating between the literal material realities and consequences of mass incarceration and aesthetic constructions of violence. While mass incarceration is increasingly becoming understood as “the New Jim Crow” for African American political organizing ...

vol. 5 No. 1 June 2021      Time：2021-09-22 View Citation

Author：James McCorkle

Abstract: C. S. Giscombe’s Giscombe Road and Nikky Finney’s Rice are arguably book-length poems that construct an environmental consciousness through the lens of Black identity. Of importance in each is the use of material culture—maps, encyclopedia entries, schematic illustrations, and photographs—to construct the texts. Finney’s work tends to use photographs as supplements to her work, that is as illustrations which are intended to humanize against the grain of anti-Blackness; however, the materials in Giscombe’s collection are parts of a whole, not supplements, but quoted texts albeit utilizing a different visual modality. While there is a distinction between their use of material culture, Finney and Giscombe nonetheless create ecographies— autobiographies that situate and map oneself in a history of ecologies.

vol. 5 No. 1 June 2021      Time：2021-09-22 View Citation

Author：Thao Ho

Abstract: Black writers adapted jazz music to “say the unsayable” or employed the “jazz aesthetic,” which includes improvisation, citation, and variation as a stylistic device to distance their literature from European forms of narration. These elements can also be found in M. NourbeSe Philip’s poetry collection She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (1988) which rigorously challenges the way language and words are perceived. Philip denounces the Western ideology of non-ambiguity, dichotomies, ...

vol. 5 No. 1 June 2021      Time：2021-09-22 View Citation

Author：Ben Libman

Abstract: Whether what we call the avant-garde in literature ended sometime in the last century or, conversely, persists to this day is an open question. But rather than coming down on one side or another of the issue, this essay concerns itself with what the avant-garde looks like when, in Bourdieusian terms, it feels its very position to be at stake in the field’s struggle for domination, both internally and externally, with the field of power. Either by historical coincidence or, more intriguingly, by something as nefarious as influence, ...

vol. 5 No. 1 June 2021      Time：2021-09-22 View Citation