Performativity and the Representation of Memory: Resignification, Appropriation, and Embodiment


Book Description

The age of digital culture has not only brought significant transformations in how we perceive memory, history, and heritage, but it has also raised pressing questions about authenticity and ownership of memory. The role of digital technologies in shaping collective identities is a topic of intense scrutiny. Moreover, contemporary societies grapple with complex issues in the politics of memory, especially with the proliferation of diverse narratives and the manipulation of public spaces. The book's content is therefore highly relevant, offering critical reflection and scholarly analysis to these societal challenges. Performativity and the Representation of Memory: Resignification, Appropriation, and Embodiment offers a comprehensive exploration of these issues, examining how contemporary practices of re-enactment intersect with digital contexts to shape our understanding of memory and heritage. The book analyzes the processes of memory creation and transmission in digital environments, providing a nuanced understanding of how memory is constructed, shared, and contested in the digital age. It also explores the role of arts-based research and participatory practices in documenting and preserving collective memories, offering insights into new forms of memory sharing and identity formation.







Bodies That Matter


Book Description

In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler further develops her distinctive theory of gender by examining the workings of power at the most "material" dimensions of sex and sexuality. Deepening the inquiries she began in Gender Trouble, Butler offers an original reformulation of the materiality of bodies, examining how the power of heterosexual hegemony forms the "matter" of bodies, sex, and gender. Butler argues that power operates to constrain "sex" from the start, delimiting what counts as a viable sex. She offers a clarification of the notion of "performativity" introduced in Gender Trouble and explores the meaning of a citational politics. The text includes readings of Plato, Irigaray, Lacan, and Freud on the formation of materiality and bodily boundaries; "Paris is Burning," Nella Larsen's "Passing," and short stories by Willa Cather; along with a reconsideration of "performativity" and politics in feminist, queer, and radical democratic theory.




Perspectives on Design and Digital Communication


Book Description

This book shares new research findings and practical lessons learned that will foster advances in digital design, communication design, web, multimedia and motion design, graphic design and branding, and other related areas. It gathers the best papers presented at the 3rd International Conference on Digital Design and Communication, DIGICOM 2019, held on November 15–16, 2019, in Barcelos, Portugal. The respective contributions highlight new theoretical perspectives and practical research directions in design and communication, aimed at promoting their use in a global, digital world. The book offers a timely guide and a source of inspiration for designers of all kinds (Graphic, Digital, Web, UI & UX Design and Social Media), for researchers, advertisers, artists, entrepreneurs, and brand or corporate communication managers, and for teachers and advanced students.




Research Anthology on Challenges for Women in Leadership Roles


Book Description

The role of women in the workplace has rapidly advanced and changed within the previous decade, leading to a current position in which women are taking over leadership roles and being offered these positions more than ever before. However, a gap still exists with the representation of women in the workforce especially in power positions and roles of authority in organizations. While the representation of women in leadership roles is impressive and exciting for the future, women still face many challenges when taking over these positions of power and face many issues related to gender inclusivity. There is also still gender bias and discrimination against women who have been given the opportunity to become authority figures. It is essential to acknowledge and discuss these critical issues and challenges that women in leadership roles must handle to better understand the current climate of gender roles across various industries and types of leadership. The Research Anthology on Challenges for Women in Leadership Roles discusses the role of women in positions of authority across diverse industries and businesses. By reviewing the biases, struggles, discrimination, and overall challenges of being a woman in a powerful role, women leaders can be better understood for their role in a male-dominated world. This includes topics of concern such as equal treatment, proper implementation of women’s policies, social justice activism, discrimination, and sexual harassment in the workplace, and the importance of diversity and empowerment of women in leadership positions with chapters pertaining specifically to African-American, Hispanic, Asian, and Middle Eastern women. This book is ideal for professionals, researchers, managers, executives, leaders, academicians, sociologists, policymakers, and students in fields that include humanities, social sciences, women’s studies, gender studies, business management, management science, health sciences, educational studies, and political sciences.




Excitable Speech


Book Description

‘When we claim to have been injured by language, what kind of claim do we make?’ - Judith Butler, Excitable Speech Excitable Speech is widely hailed as a tour de force and one of Judith Butler’s most important books. Examining in turn debates about hate speech, pornography and gayness within the US military, Butler argues that words can wound and linguistic violence is its own kind of violence. Yet she also argues that speech is ‘excitable’ and fluid, because its effects often are beyond the control of the speaker, shaped by fantasy, context and power structures. In a novel and courageous move, she urges caution concerning the use of legislation to restrict and censor speech, especially in cases where injurious language is taken up by aesthetic practices to diminish and oppose the injury, such as in rap and popular music. Although speech can insult and demean, it is also a form of recognition and may be used to talk back; injurious speech can reinforce power structures, but it can also repeat power in ways that separate language from its injurious power. Skillfully showing how language’s oppositional power resides in its insubordinate and dynamic nature and its capacity to appropriate and defuse words that usually wound, Butler also seeks to account for why some clearly hateful speech is taken to be iconic of free speech, while other forms are more easily submitted to censorship. In light of current debates between advocates of freedom of speech and ‘no platform’ and cancel culture, the message of Excitable Speech remains more relevant now than ever. This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Preface by the author, where she considers speech and language in the context contemporary forms of political polarization.




Indigenous Research of Land, Self, and Spirit


Book Description

"This book explores recurrent generational implications and ongoing challenges with land dispossession, relocation, reacquisition, governmental influences, and economic impacts to contemporary indigenous land cultures"--




Dispossession


Book Description

Dispossession describes the condition of those who have lost land, citizenship, property, and a broader belonging to the world. This thought-provoking book seeks to elaborate our understanding of dispossession outside of the conventional logic of possession, a hallmark of capitalism, liberalism, and humanism. Can dispossession simultaneously characterize political responses and opposition to the disenfranchisement associated with unjust dispossession of land, economic and political power, and basic conditions for living? In the context of neoliberal expropriation of labor and livelihood, dispossession opens up a performative condition of being both affected by injustice and prompted to act. From the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa to the anti-neoliberal gatherings at Puerta del Sol, Syntagma and Zucchotti Park, an alternative political and affective economy of bodies in public is being formed. Bodies on the street are precarious - exposed to police force, they are also standing for, and opposing, their dispossession. These bodies insist upon their collective standing, organize themselves without and against hierarchy, and refuse to become disposable: they demand regard. This book interrogates the agonistic and open-ended corporeality and conviviality of the crowd as it assembles in cities to protest political and economic dispossession through a performative dispossession of the sovereign subject and its propriety.




National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life


Book Description

The Millennium Dome, Braveheart and Rolls Royce cars. How do cultural icons reproduce and transform a sense of national identity? How does national identity vary across time and space, how is it contested, and what has been the impact of globalization upon national identity and culture?This book examines how national identity is represented, performed, spatialized and materialized through popular culture and in everyday life. National identity is revealed to be inherent in the things we often take for granted - from landscapes and eating habits, to tourism, cinema and music. Our specific experience of car ownership and motoring can enhance a sense of belonging, whilst Hollywood blockbusters and national exhibitions provide contexts for the ongoing, and often contested, process of national identity formation. These and a wealth of other cultural forms and practices are explored, with examples drawn from Scotland, the UK as a whole, India and Mauritius. This book addresses the considerable neglect of popular cultures in recent studies of nationalism and contributes to debates on the relationship between ‘high' and ‘low' culture.




The Psychic Life of Power


Book Description

Judith Butler's new book considers the way in which psychic life is generated by the social operation of power, and how that social operation of power is concealed and fortified by the psyche that it produces. It combines social theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis in novel ways, and offers a more sustained analysis of the theory of subject formation implicit in her previous books.