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Tag Archives: 2007 Issue 2
Kiel Hume, Four Micro-Interventions into Neoliberal Globalization
I. Spectacle and Theory’s Images In 1936 Walter Benjamin published his widely read essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. In it he ponders the new kinds of images available to the world, taking a curiously optimistic stance on the issue of film. He sees the world and politics becoming increasingly [...]
Sarah Blacker, Corporeal Capital: Theorizing the Division of Body Parts under Global Capitalism
While in the academy…‘the body’ is generally treated as a text or a trope or as a metaphor that is ‘good to think’ with, in the larger society and in the global economy ‘the body’ is generally viewed and treated as an object, albeit a highly fetishized one, and as a ‘commodity’ that can be [...]
Erin Balser, Capital Accumulation, Sustainability and Hamilton, Ontario: How Technology and Capitalism can Misappropriate the Idea of Sustainability
One response to the environmental crisis–to climate change, natural resource depletion, species extinction, deforestation and a myriad of other ecological problems–is the idea of ‘sustainability’. Sustainability is often defined as inter- and intra- generational equity in the social, environmental, economic, moral and political spheres of society (Meadows 7). Ideologically, sustainability is a communal concept. However, [...]
Jennifer Seib-Adese, Creatively Misguided: Richard Florida’s Work and the City of Toronto
Tolerance is a concept with a long history in the United States (U.S.), as Wendy Brown offers in Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. From its U.S. debut as a term whose purpose was to offer sanctuary from those facing religious persecution, to its present consideration by theorists such as Brown [...]
Jennifer Pybus, Affect and Subjectivity: A Case Study of Neopets.com
One of the most popular websites targeting the tween (kids between 8-12) demographic is a virtual pet game called Neopets.com. In June 2005, Viacom purchased the site for $160 million, an acquisition they hoped would become a lucrative new revenue stream. In part, this would come from Neopet’s unique and groundbreaking marketing strategy known as [...]
Alex Means, Toxic Sovereignty: Biopolitics and Cote d'Ivoire
Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.-Michel Foucault Death has been sown in a voluntary or involuntary manner – justice will decide.-President Laurent Gbagbo of the Ivory [...]
Renate Kahlke, Understanding Genocide?: Western Cinematic Depictions of Rwanda and Bosnia
<![CDATA[ We must forge an unshakeable oath with all civilized people that never again will the world stand silent, never again will the world fail to act in time to prevent this terrible crime of genocide--Jimmy Carter. Following the Nazi extermination of Jews before and during the Second World War, the US and other Western [...]
Janet Lyon, Review of Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation
Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). The long history of cosmopolitanism is a history of disputes–sometimes academic, sometimes bloody and catastrophic–over competing imperatives and seemingly irreconcilable values. What else could come of a normative project that depends upon universalist conceptions (however modified or self-aware) of human [...]
Wanda Vrasti, The Politics, Economics and Ethics of Independent Travel: Rewriting the Ethnography of the Travel Trope