The Ruse of Repair


Book Description

Since the 1990s, literary and queer studies scholars have eschewed Marxist and Foucauldian critique and hailed the reparative mode of criticism as a more humane and humble way of approaching literature and culture. The reparative turn has traveled far beyond the academy, influencing how people imagine justice, solidarity, and social change. In The Ruse of Repair, Patricia Stuelke locates the reparative turn's hidden history in the failed struggle against US empire and neoliberal capitalism in the 1970s and 1980s. She shows how feminist, antiracist, and anti-imperialist liberation movements' visions of connection across difference, practices of self care, and other reparative modes of artistic and cultural production have unintentionally reinforced forms of neoliberal governance. At the same time, the US government and military, universities, and other institutions have appropriated and depoliticized these same techniques to sidestep addressing structural racism and imperialism in more substantive ways. In tracing the reparative turn's complicated and fraught genealogy, Stuelke questions reparative criticism's efficacy in ways that will prompt critics to reevaluate their own reading practices.




Critically Capitalist


Book Description

Critically Capitalist presents an ethnography of South Korea’s asset seekers, including amateur stock investors, real estate enthusiasts, and money coaches, to demonstrate how financialized asset capitalism is sustained. As they hunt for profit margins, rent, and dividends, they simultaneously critique capitalism and posit their pursuit of assets as a form of resistance. Bohyeong Kim theorizes this new spirit of capitalism in South Korea as “critical capitalism,” arguing that it reflects the popular discontent with both national development and financial neoliberalism. As a paradoxical critique and legitimation, Bohyeong Kim argues that critical capitalism valorizes the capitalist economy not through a triumphant narrative, but by highlighting the emotional wounds, destroyed communities, and oppressive tactics of modern capitalism. Drawing on multi-sited ethnography and in-depth interviews with a broad community of aspiring millionaires, Critically Capitalist illuminates how contemporary capitalism thrives by channeling discontent into financial and real estate markets, which in turn has cemented critical capitalism as the cultural and affective backbone of South Korea’s economy.




Attack of the New B Movies


Book Description

Since its inception in 1992, the Sci-Fi Channel (later rebranded as SYFY) has aired more than 500 network-produced or commissioned films. Campy and prolific, the network churned out one low-budget film after another, finally finding its zenith in the 2013 release of Sharknado. With unpretentious charm and a hearty helping of commodified nostalgia, the Sharknado franchise briefly ruled the cultural consciousness and temporarily transformed SYFY's original films from cult fringe to appointment television. Naturally, the network followed up with a steady stream of sequels and spin-offs, including Lavalantula and its sequel, 2 Lava 2 Lantula! This collection of essays is the first to devote critical attention to SYFY's original film canon, both pre- and post-Sharknado. In addition to unpacking the cultural, historical and critical underpinnings of the monsters at the heart of SYFY's classic creature features, the contributors offer a variety of approaches to understanding and interrogating these films within the broader contexts of ecocriticism, monster theory, post-9/11 criticism, and neocolonialism. Providing a further entry point for future scholarship, an appendix details a thorough filmography of SYFY's original films from 1992 to 2022.




The Ruse of Techne


Book Description

The Ruse of Techne offers a reappraisal of Heidegger’s entire work by focusing on the forms of activity he regards as separate from instrumentality. Non-instrumental activities like authenticity, poetry, and thinking—in short, the ineffectual—are critical for Heidegger as they offer the only path to the truth of being throughout his work. By unearthing the source of the conception of non-instrumental action in Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle, Vardoulakis elaborates how it forms part of Heidegger’s response to an old problem, namely, how to account for difference after positing a single and unified being that is not amenable to change. He further demonstrates that an action without ends and effects leads to an ethics and politics rife with difficulties and contradictions that only become starker when compared to other responses to the same problem that we find in the philosophical tradition and which rely on instrumentality. Heidegger’s conception of an action without ends or effect forgets the role of instrumentality in the tradition that posits a single, unified being. And yet, the ineffectual has had a profound influence in how continental philosophy determines the ethical and the political since World War II. The critique of the ineffectual in Heidegger is thus effectively a critique of the conception of praxis in continental philosophy. Vardoulakis proposes that it is urgent to undo the forgetting of instrumentality if we are to conceive of a democratic politics and an ethics fit to respond to the challenges of high capitalism.




So Happiness to Meet You


Book Description

After job losses and the housing crash, the author and her family leave LA to start over in a most unlikely place: a 9-foot-wide back-alley house in one of Ho Chi Minh City's poorest districts, where neighbors unabashedly stare into windows, generously share their barbecued rat, keep cockroaches for luck, and ultimately help her find joy without Western trappings.




Unmoored


Book Description

New England's Puritans were devoted to self-scrutiny. Consumed by the pursuit of pure hearts, they latched on to sincerity as both an ideal and a social process. It fueled examinations of inner lives, governed behavior, and provided a standard against which both could be judged. In a remote, politically volatile frontier, settlers gambled that sincerity would reinforce social cohesion and shore up communal happiness. Sincere feelings and the discursive practices that manifested them promised a safe haven in a world of grinding uncertainty. But as Ana Schwartz demonstrates, if sincerity promised much, it often delivered more: it bred shame and resentment among the English settlers and, all too often, extraordinary violence toward their Algonquian neighbors and the captured Africans who lived among them. Populating her "city on a hill" with the stock characters of Puritan studies as well as obscure actors, Schwartz breathes new life into our understanding of colonial New England.










Black News Digest


Book Description




International Intellectual Property in an Integrated World Economy


Book Description

International Intellectual Property in an Integrated World Economy, Fifth Edition provides a comprehensive analysis of the international intellectual property system across the spectrum of intellectual property (IP) rights and interests. It introduces the institutional architecture at the multilateral, regional/plurilateral, bilateral, and national levels. For each form of IP, it addresses the legal rules and illustrative jurisprudence with a focus on major jurisdictions, as well as economic and social welfare implications. It also considers the continuously growing importance of IP in a constantly changing technological environment, currently reflected in the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and its deployment in creative and inventive activities. Each of the authors has played a role in the development and implementation of the international rules, and they bring their experience to bear in introducing students to the field. New to the Fifth Edition: New co-authors: Ryan B. Abbott, Mira Burri, Henning Grosse Ruse-Khan, and Maegan McCann, who bring additional expertise to the book The latest developments in bilateral and regional agreements regulating intellectual property, including implementation of the EU Unitary Patent and Unified Patent Court system and the EU intermediaries’ liability regime for copyright infringement Important new judicial decisions, including the U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Google v. Oracle and Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith, as well as decisions from EU and U.S. courts addressing identifiers for food products (Emmental and Gruyere cheeses) Developments in AI in the context of content-creation, inventions, IP-registration and enforcement, as well as support or substitute for human decision-making The expanding discourse on trade secret protection and its importance for international technology transfer The phenomenon of the anti-suit injunction in international patent litigation Benefits for instructors and students: An approach to the international IP system that situates the rules within the broader context of international law and the public policy objectives that governments, industry, and interest groups are seeking to achieve Case law from international dispute settlement bodies, as well as from national and regional courts and administrative authorities Discussion of patent, trademark, copyright, design, trade secret, and geographical indication protection, as well as plant variety protection, the protection of genetic resources and traditional knowledge, and the role of open source and open innovation systems An explanation of the European Union Unitary Patent system Exploration of the increasingly important role of emerging market IP systems Materials to help students understand the disputes between the United States and China involving IP, investment, and transfer of technology Identification of important trends in the enforcement of IP