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In episode 12 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Ajay and Isi tackle Francis Ford Coppolaâs Megalopolis (2024). Kicking off with a review of a few recent pop-cultural engagementsâincluding an assemblage of classic vampire films (Coppolaâs Bram Stokerâs Dracula (1992), among them), Mubiâs restoration of The Fall (2006), Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, and a pair of streaming series about professional wrestlingâthe conversation turns to Coppolaâs reactionary would-be summa about an architect attempting to construct a techno-futuristic utopia on a plot of land in âNew Rome,â an alternate-world New York City as played against Roman and early American history. Along the way, Ajay and Isi discuss Neri Oxmanâs faux-ecological contributions to the filmâs central animating macguffin, the mysterious âmegalon;â the filmâs antipathy for the marginalized masses; its protagonist as synthesis of Caesar, Robert Moses, Walter Gropius, and The Fountainheadâs Howard Roark; accidentally timely narratives of the âgood guyâ billionaire pitted against the âbad-guyâ billionaire; and the ecofascist inclination to marry the romanticization of nature with authoritarian techno-optimism. Among the topics at hand are Coppolaâs disturbing, âsecretly autobiographicalâ efforts to reaffirm himself as auteur, his baffling postmodern pastiche, the classic right-wing themes of patriarchy as a sign of order and non-normative sexual expression as a sign of decline and decadence, the filmâs shocking ugliness, and how Megalopolisâs strange incorporation of current events betrays âa baby boomer [having read] a bunch of airport history books.â
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In episode 82 of the Podcast for Social Research, Patrick Blanchfield and Ajay Singh Chaudhary take up the dismal U.S. election results, what brought us here, what comes next, and more. With the excellent Nara Roberta Silva and Isi Litke unfortunately both out sick but present in spirit and mind Patrick and Ajay reflect on how themes of depletion, exhaustion, and illness offer a perfect point of departure for processing the general morass of our momentâs florid pathologies and generally grim vibes. Their conversation proceeds by unpacking psychoanalytic theories of libidinal economy in terms of trauma response, repression, and âpathic projectionâ alongside a materialist interrogation of the structural, political-economic conditions of misery in a crumbling and violently flailing U.S. empire. How did the two campaigns appeal to the anxieties and antipathies of voters by ratifying or disavowing their feelings, and by offering them competing accounts of whom to blame? What is or isn't negotiable for the U.S. imperial project abroad and for social reproduction at home, and how does that relate to what is or isn't sayable, or even thinkable, in domestic US discourse? How should we understand âTrumpismâ in relation not just to terminological debates over fascism, but in the context of global political trends? How does Trumpâs brand of nativism, theocratic Christianity, and patriarchy mesh with longstanding features of the American project, where does it depart from them, and how does it resonate with other nationalisms abroad? And how do the Biden presidency, the Harris campaign, and initial responses from media and political figures demonstrate the increasing hegemony of such positions among elites? Against a backdrop of genocidal violence, mounting climate crisis, and ever-shrill chauvinism, this episode is the first in a series of confrontations with the starkly bleak conditions of current American politics.
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Manglende episoder?
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In this episode of Faculty Spotlight, hosts Mark DeLucas and Lauren K. Wolfe sit down with Jude Webre, cultural historian and practicing musician, to discuss the life and legacy of Dawn Powell, the urbane, acerbic, and woefully undercelebrated âlady witâ of Greenwich Village in its mid-century heyday. Attracted, as many of her generation were, by the allure of bohemia, its promise of liberation and self-realization, Powell exchanged her native midwest environs for an artistâs life in the city. Known, if not unremittingly beloved, by nearly all the literary lights of 1940s New York CityâEdmund Wilson, Ernest Hemingway, Diana Trilling, Dorothy Parker, John Dos Passos, e.e. Cummings, and Jean Stafford to name just a fewâit is hard to reconcile Powellâs social acumen, bracing wit, and the vitality of her literary output with the obscurity into which her lifeâs work has fallen in the six decades since her burial in a pauperâs grave. What were the manners, mores, and moods of mid-20th-century American bohemia? And how did Powell both share in and depart from them, both capture and censure them? What is it to follow a moral judgment and an aesthetic conviction, be they ever so slightly out of step with prevailing tastes? And what, finally, accounts for lasting literary fame?
The Podcast for Social Research is produced by Ryan Lentini.
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In this shortcast edition of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live at BISR Central, BISRâs Rebecca Ariel Porte, Isi Litke, and Ajay Singh Chaudhary discuss Baz Luhrmannâs sensational 1996 film adaptation of Shakespeareâs Romeo and Juliet (or, in this case, Romeo + Juliet). Beginning with a brief literary and theatrical history of the play, Rebecca provides the conversationâs opening gambit: Shakespeare has never not been pop. The trio then, with a keen eye for detail, observes the many ways in which Luhrmann translates Shakespeareâs own pop-cultural tendencies into a medium and a style apropos of Venice Beach at the close of the millennium. Topics touched on include passions that threaten the social order, textual instability as adaptive possibility, intertextuality as production design strategy, teen drama as genre, teen-age as a time of emotional freedom, My So-Called Life, The O.C., Euphoria, spaghetti Westerns, police procedurals, Fredric Jameson on blank parody and endless pastiche, and much else besides.
The Podcast for Social Research is produced by Ryan Lentini.
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Episode 81 of the Podcast for Social Research is a discussion Haskell Wexler's 1969 classic of cinéma verité Medium Cool, a film whose exploration of violence, spectacle, and the politics and power of media render it as fresh and powerful today as it was on its controversial release. BISR's Rebecca Ariel Porte, Andy Battle, and Mark DeLucas and journalist Natasha Lennard dissect the film's context, formal innovations, and themes, from its integration of narrative and documentary to its treatment of the ethics of journalism in the face of social and political upheaval, violence, and repression. How did Medium Cool emerge out of the specific context of the "New Hollywood"? What exactly was Wexler, cinematographer and first-time director, trying to do? And how does Medium Cool push us to think about media objectivity, and the substance, value, and intentions of "news"? Is media ever genuinely critical, or is it always a kind of "soft power"? How do we tell stories that don't exploit, but instead explain?
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What does literary realism look like in the 21st centuryâand what can it do? In episode 80 of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live at Lizâs Book Bar in Brooklyn, BISR faculty Paige Sweet sat down with fellow faculty and debut novelist Joseph Earl Thomas plus special guests, writers Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and Vinson Cunningham, to talk about what it means, what it takes, and what it feels like to represent social reality in contemporary fiction. In novels that test the boundaries of realism, traditionally conceivedâborrowing techniques from autofiction, speculative fiction, dystopia, satire, and academic non-fictionâThomas (God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer), Adjei-Brenyah (Chain-Gang All-Stars), and Cunningham (Great Expectations) get beneath the detailed depiction of everyday life to discuss, among other things, the world-building that happens in every act of writing; how fiction can serve as a testing ground for theoretical commitments; the carceral nature of our social institutions and their ripple effects through our intimate lives; the violence that goes on under the guise of pleasure; and how to feel and depict life as precious in even the most devastating and dehumanizing conditions. Persons and things touched upon include: the US Constitution, bell hooks, Gayatri Spivak, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Henry James, Solmaz Sharif, Saidiya Hartman, Goodreads, love, looking, âboundaries,â and beauty.
This episode was produced by Ryan Lentini.
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In episode nine of Faculty Spotlight, hosts Lauren K. Wolfe and Mark DeLucas sit down with Jenny Logan, Associate faculty (legal studies) and plaintiff's attorney, at the District Court level, in the case of Johnson v. Grant's Pass, on which the Supreme Court recently ruled. Speaking from London, Jenny discusses the origins of the caseâin which a class of unhoused people sued the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, for imposing criminal penalties on people sleeping in public parksâand explains the reasoning behind the Supreme Court's 6-3 ruling upholding the constitutionality of Grants Pass's anti-homeless statutes. What were the stakes of Johnson v. Grant's Pass; and why, as critics argue, does the Court's ruling effectively enable the criminalization of homelessness? Why have cities responded to homelessness with largely punitive measures? And how can the case of Grant's Pass, whose only shelter is a religious mission, be situated within the wider history of the evangelical-neoliberal alliance to undermine the New Deal social contract and welfare state? What is the future of "poverty governance" in the United States?
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In this shortcast edition of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live at BISR Central, BISRâs Rebecca Ariel Porte and Isi Litke discuss Stephen Frears's 1985 classic of queer cinema, My Beautiful Laundrette. Conversation ranges over the film's Thatcherite backdrop; its depiction of queer, and cross-racial, love; and its inimitable mix of gritty social realism and dreamlike sensuality. What's unique, in the queer cinematic canon, about a film made just before the AIDS crisis emerged in British public consciousnessâthat is, just prior to the inceasing identification of queerness with disease? How does it weave elements of the fairy tale into its story of cross-class, cross-racial love? And how does the film, with its "qualified utopian hope," contrast with later, more pessimistic classics of the New Queer Cinema? Why, in a film set in a laundromat, is it a source of optimism that some things don't stay clean?
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Practical Criticism is back with its first episode of 2024âon BeyoncĂ©âs Cowboy Carter. In it, Rebecca Ariel Porte plays the opening track of the album, âAmerican Requiem,â for Ajay Singh Chaudhary, who, as usual, doesnât know what the object will be. Their conversation then commences with a question: BeyoncĂ© is far from the first to undertake the ambitious task of deconstructing country musicâs many musical debtsâbut does she actually succeed in doing so? Along the way, they discuss the history of Black country music (and listen to Linda Martell), the convergence of aesthetic and commodity forms (is the album so slick as to slide over into parody?), conflictual aspirations to iconicity and iconoclasm, and the courage of conviction it takes to betray an older version of oneâs own aesthetic commitments.
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In episode 11 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Ajay and Isi examine Alex Garlandâs Civil War (2024). Kicking off with a handful of pop culture news itemsâincluding the Met Gala, the death of Steve Albini, A24âs Stop Making Sense tribute album, and Apple's alarming iPad Pro commercialâthe conversation turns to Garlandâs provocative and uneven drama about a group of photojournalists traveling through a war-torn United States. Ajay and Isi discuss the perils of directors commenting on their own works, the filmâs inadvertent critique of combat photographers, âPortland Maoists,â Garlandâs allusions to significant 20th century photojournalists (Robert Capa, Lee Miller, Gerda Taro, the Bang Bang Club), reactionary aesthetics, and the vernacular of American violence. Central to the conversation are perennial questions about the mediation of war through film and photography; the circulation and reception of images of violence; and how to make a film about war that neither glamorizes nor sentimentalizes it.
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Have 21st century technologiesâfrom smartphones to medical devices to the commonplace use of artificial intelligenceâmade cyborgs of us all? In this episode of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live at BISR Central, BISR faculty Rebecca Ariel Porte sits down with fellow faculty Danya Glabau and co-author Laura Forlano to parse what the latter, in their recent book Cyborg (MIT Press), have termed âcritical cyborg literacyâ: a lens through which to critically examine the constitutive role technology plays in the ways we think, behave, know, and interact. Glabau and Forlano begin with a synthetic overview of the history and affordances of thinking with the figure of the cyborg, after which the three discuss, among other things, the hidden human labor behind apparently automated systems, failure and the glitch, feminist scholarship as collaborative process, and the cyborg as, beyond its technicity, a social, political, and aesthetic project.
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In episode 78 of the Podcast for Social Research, BISR's Jude Webre (who also teaches at Columbia University and NYU), Sami Al-Daghistani (Columbia and the Norwegian School of Theology, Religion, and Society), and Robyn Marasco and Anthony Alessandrini (CUNY) offer faculty perspectives on the Gaza Solidarity Encampments that have arisen on college campuses nationwide and globally. What happened and what is happening on the ground in NYC and internationally? How do faculty understand their position relative to protesting students, on the one hand, and mega-institutions like Columbia University and City University of New York, on the other? What are the discussions that are happening among facultyâincluding faculty with different levels of employment precarity and security? How can we understand the Gaza Solidarity Encampments and the faculty response within the context of the wider crisis in academia? Can the student protests inaugurate, in turn, a new movement for faculty empowerment? What is the meaning of solidarity?
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In episode eight of Faculty Spotlight, hosts Mark DeLucas and Lauren K. Wolfe sit down with Danielle Drori, Associate faculty member (in literature and Judaic studies), Director of Development, and psychoanalyst-in-training. Recently returned from a long-delayed trip to her native Tel-Aviv, Drori discusses the state of Israeli society in the shadow of the war in Gaza, her own vexed relation to her country of birth (including, how it shaped her scholarly interests), and the unexpected resonances of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis in a time of mass destruction. What's humane in Auerbach's historicist method? Is Auerbach's documentation of "civilization" also a lamentation? What sorts of perspectives are afforded by exile?
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In episode 77 of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live at Goethe-Institut Chicago, BISR faculty and Chicago Coordinator Audrey NicolaĂŻdes sat down with special guest, art historian Annie Bourneuf, to discuss revolution and counterrevolution, in text and dialectical image. Annie begins with a reexamination of Walter Benjaminâs aesthetic and philosophical project in light of a surprising discovery: Paul Kleeâs famous Angelus Novusâa print in Benjaminâs own collectionâis in fact a piece of collage; Kleeâs image is glued atop a sixteenth-century engraving of a portrait of Martin Luther. What did such an image mean to Klee, in the context of counterrevolutionary Munich in the 1920s? And how does this citation bear on Benjaminâs attachment to the image and the inspiration he drew from it? Then, Audrey walks us through the schisms that put socialist movements in pre- and interwar Europe on their back footâand the world-historical consequences these schisms entailed. What were the fundamental assumptionsâfundamentally in errorâabout the progressive nature of historical processes that Benjaminâs âTheses on the Philosophy of Historyâ is an attempt to redress? Along the way, the two touch on the centrality of concepts like ephemerality and contemporaneity in Benjaminâs work, parody and citation, the revolutionary potential of âhatred for the oppressor,â and more.
This episode of the podcast was produced by Ryan Lentini.
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What does it mean to claim translation as an artform unto itself? In episode 76 of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live at BISR Central while a wicked Norâeaster raged outside, BISR welcomed Ugly Duckling Presse, Barricade journal, and the Leipzig/Vienna-based collective TRANSLETTING for an evening of presentations and panel discussion addressed to the ethics, politics, and embodied practice of literary translation in the 21st century.
With Walter Benjaminâs âTask of the Translatorâ (1923) and Sawako Nakayasuâs Say Translation Is Art (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020) as historical and theoretical bookends, the castâincluding BISRâs Lauren K. Wolfe, Ugly Duckling Presse Manager Marine Cornuet, and the TRANSLETTING collective (check out their bios below)âtalked its way through Nakayasuâs playful politico-poetical wager (say translation is unfaithful, is performance, repetition, failure, process, collaboration, feminism, polyphony, conversation, deviance, decolonial, punk, and improvisation) and, from there, explored the word as a contingent unit of meaning and value by way of Ilse Aichinger's Bad Words, in a translation by poets Uljana Wolf and Christian Hawkey.
The ensuing conversation touched upon all manner of thingsâfrom good words to wrong ones; the pleasures of infidelity; how power is borne in the space between an original and its translations; the meaning-bearing unit of language (a word, a comma, a syllable, syntax, a poem, a book, alternative structures of literature?); markets and reading publics; a translatorâs responsibilityâto whom? to what?; identity and its vicissitudes; and much else besides.
The TRANSLETTING collective includes: Konstantin Schmidtbauer, writer and translator; MĂŒcahit TĂŒrk, writer; JonĂ« Zhitia, writer, translator, and editor; Nadja Etinski, writer, historian, and editor; Leonie PĂŒrmayr, writer and editor; and Anile Tmava, writer, editor, and anthropologist.
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In this edition of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live before of a screening of Michael Hanekeâs 2001 The Piano Teacher, BISR faculty Lauren K. Wolfe, Rebecca Ariel Porte, and Paige Sweet take up impinging mothers, absent fathers, and the variable affordances of literary and cinematic media, as they compare and interpret Hanekeâs film and the eponymous novel by Elfriede Jelinek from which it was adapted. Topics touched on include: the reactionary milieu of 1980s Austria; ways of reading psychological depth from cinematic surface; recognition and misrecognition (by way of Aristotle and Lauren Berlant); pedagogy and its incidental lessons; musical Romanticism and sexual pathology; dissonance and the (dashed hope for) a return to tonic; Freud and polymorphous perversity; Schubertâs Winterreise, Schubert as seduction strategy, Adorno on Schubert, and much else besides.
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What does culture look like in a âsustainableâ world? In episode of 10 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Ajay, Isi, and guest Rebecca Ariel Porte examine the problems with âgreenâ technology and consumptionâwhich, it turns out, do little, nothing, or less than nothing to sustain the environmentâand talk about the kinds of cultural forms, from literature to architecture to games, that are not only sustainable in terms of ecology and society but also aesthetically compelling and beautiful. How does genuine ecological sustainability depend on social sustainability for artists and engineers and other creative workers, and promote far richer aesthetic expressions? Why is so much âGreenâ-branded workâin everything from the built world to fine artâanything but? What forms of aesthetic creation not usually thought of as ecological, are actually sustainable in every dimension? How does our current unsustainable social and ecological society constrict imagination and creative effloresce? And how would even a modestly more sustainable world, actually enable and support such creative flourishing? Looking to both current and historical examples, Isi, Rebecca, and Ajay review art installations like Walter De Mariaâs The New York Earth Room and the MOMAâs Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism; architecture from the âPR-architectureâ of projects like âOceanixâ to the actual sustainability found in works like VĂ” Tr?ng Ngh?aâs âFarming Kindergartenâ; unexhausted forms in music (from Bach to Stravinsky, pop music to the vast world of jazz) and in verse, such as the ghazals of poet Anthony Madrid; film, tv, and even videogames, whether low-powered and low-tech (as with recent critical and commercial successes like Hades (Supergiant) or Stardew Valley (Concerned Ape)) or high-powered and high-tech (and highly popular), like Zelda, Elden Ring, and more. How is productionâfrom emissions to mineral inputs, exploitative assembly and âcrunchââkey to understanding aesthetic exhaustions? How does unsustainable ecological design and an ever accelerating model of production stifle creativity and promote ever narrower, more costly, and less interesting work? How does a model like streamingâand other modes of supposedly âdematerializedâ distributionâactually obscure ecological damage while simultaneously making aesthetic production more difficult for artists and aesthetic consumption less compelling for everyone? What is the âtrickle up miseryâ of âdefensive architectureâ? In the face of a capitalist ethos that always insists on creativity as bound to a logic of âbigger, faster, better, more,â the conversation explores the ways in which working, creating, designing, and engineering within limits has produced some of the most exciting aesthetic forms and experiences, and how the necessity of ecological and social limits can act as the âenabling constraintsâ of a far more compelling aesthetic life than the all-too-real dystopia of today.
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In episode 74 of the Podcast for Social Research, BISR faculty Ajay Singh Chaudhary sits down with writer and artist Molly Crabapple to discuss his new book, The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World (Repeater). Live-recorded at P&T Knitwear in New York City, the conversation encompasses, among other things: the ubiquity of exhaustion (and how feelings of exhaustion might form the basis for new international solidarities); right-wing approaches to climate mitigation (and why, in the realm of climate policy, the Right has a "leg up"); "growth," "degrowth," and how the status quo actually thwarts abundance; the limits (or, illusions) of climate technocracy (and the kinds of climate technologies that can work); and international social movement responses climate catastropheâand the lessons they might provide for U.S. activists.
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In episode 73 of the Podcast for Social Research, recorded live following a screening of Daniel Goldhaberâs cinematic adaptation of Andreas Malmâs polemic against pacifism How to Blow Up a Pipeline, BISR faculty Isi Litke, RH Lossin, and Ajay Singh Chaudhary explore the aesthetic, historical, and thorny practical terrain of violence as activist strategy and political tool in the face of climate crisis. With Goldhaberâs film as a jumping off point, they askâand answerâquestions like: how can cinema represent the complex harms wrought by climate devastation, in all their manifold temporalities, from freak accidents to slow disease to historical expropriations? How are solidarities built across ideological divides? What unites anti-colonial movements across the Global South with the struggles of subaltern groups in the Global North? And what underpins the belief in non-violence as the righteous mechanism for political changeâand why is this wrong? Along the way, they touch on everything from the heist film (wherein the question is not whether one ought but whether one can pull it off), how comrades are not friends, workplace violence, radical flanks, Fanonâs âstretched Marxism,â and much else besides. Plus a sneak preview from Ajayâs new book, The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World, out this February from Repeater Books!
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In episode 72 of the Podcast for Social Research, Nara Roberta Silva, Rebecca Ariel Porte, Lauren K. Wolfe, Mark DeLucas, and Ajay Singh Chaudhary look back at their 2023 in cultural objects, or their 2023 experiences of objects washed up on present shores from other times, observing as they do how year-end compendia reveal surprising throughlines. A tally, in brief, of their preoccupations include: the itinerant dance party Laylit celebrating Arab/SWANA music, Argentina, 1985 (and why historical contingency is such a problem for theory), paper architecture, Isabella Hammadâs Enter Ghost and global Shakespeares, Naomi Kleinâs DoppelgĂ€nger and demonic doubles, Ruth Beckermannâs Mutzenbacher (and cis-male hetero-sexuality as at once the most and least visible), Anita Brooknerâs novels of mid-life resignation (a revival for aging millennials?), the origins of Fauvism, actually interesting YouTube trends, vinyl records and deliberate listening, and what there is to look forward to in 2024.
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