Group items tagged

"Conceptual writing has been thought of as an afterthought to conceptual art. And yet, writers deployed strategies of appropriation and recontextualization long before Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal as sculpture. Centos made up of fragments of other works, poems built on the pure meaninglessness of sight or sound, and procedure-riddled texts where language play trumps sense anticipated and developed this tradition. In their anthology Against Expression, Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith take a broadly inclusive view to present this genre. For this ABR Focus, I would also like to concentrate on a subset of the genre that is sometimes used interchangeably with the term for the whole: uncreative writing. Uncreative writing is the appropriation of previously produced material, taking something out of its original context and putting it forth as art by reproducing it in another context."

This essay attempts to make more pliable three overly rigid claims persistent in the diaspora literature: that diaspora members' imaginations of the homeland are either beautifying/idealizing or unequivocally inimical; that their relations with the host country are inherently distant - they are in it but not of it; and that diasporism and (im)migrant transnationalism constitute two distinct phenomena. It also aims at genderizing the stubbornly genderless study of diasporas. The empirical analysis compares representations of the homeland among turn-of-the-twentieth-century and present-day lower-class Polish migrs in the United States and the United Kingdom, first-wave (1959-61) Cuban refugees in Miami and 1956 Hungarian political refugees dispersed into different west European countries, and contemporary Mexican men and women migrants in the American Southwest. On the basis of these comparative assessments, the author identifies the major circumstances that shape diaspora members' portrayals of the homeland.

This qualitative study examined the meanings ascribed to the construct "home" by 208 youths defined by mainstream society as "homeless". Youth narratives on the topic of home ranged across a continuum with home as state at one end (i.e., home is a state of mind, comprised of one's friends) and home as place at the other (i.e., home as a physical dwelling). Youths employing the former meanings had typically been on the street for longer periods and identified with counterculture-type ideologies. For youths who defined home as place, home was constructed in direct opposition to street experiences. For both of these groups, control emerged as a central theme in their narratives. The implications of these findings for engaging youth and goal setting regarding exiting the streets are described.

This essay supplements a growing body of work on domestic television in China by exploring some histories of the screen outside the home. Rooted in Olympic-era Beijing, this discussion converges around three intermedial contexts: (1) contemporary art and exhibition; (2) nondomestic and unhomely space; (3) contemporary cinema. These disparate assemblages reimagine the space of television and the medium's role as a form of social communication. The primary focus is the intersection of television and the city in articulating the social body in transition. Focusing on artists, audiences, state media, and elided spaces of electronics production, the essay develops the notion of "screen postsocialism" to explore the logic of development in contemporary China. In particular, it argues that the Olympic era consolidates a transitional imaginary around outside television forms. This emphasis on a particular technology of reception, moreover, acts to screen out the broader textures of postsocialist cultural and economic production.

This article analyses 'heritage' as a conceptual category among current and former residents affected by the proposed redevelopment of Protea Village, a neighbourhood in Cape Town razed during apartheid. Former residents, who were forcibly resettled in townships on the outskirts of the city on account of being coloured, won their land back through the Land Restitution Programme in 2006. Some 86 families were planning to return. Based on fieldwork conducted intermittently between 2005 and 2008, this article analyses three different idioms through which former and current residents made sense of the pending return of the community. While those who supported it hailed the proposed redevelopment as a chance to right the wrongs of the past, to reverse the spatial legacy of apartheid and to put the new democratic South Africa into practice, others feared declining property prices and the development of 'shanty towns' on their doorstep.

"The concept of diaspora enjoys a significant currency in contemporary cultural theory. Its descriptive paradigm associates it with the shared experience of displacement, a sense of common origins, and a material or symbolic attachment to the 'original' homeland. This traditional framework overlooks diaspora as a narrative of national desire that enables contestation and disruption of dominant hierarchies and ideologies of nation from within the territorial, political, and cultural boundaries of the nation. It is this neglected aspect of diaspora as a narrative of national identification that is addressed in this paper, which examines the significance of contemporary diaspora cultural politics and formations vis-à-vis the exclusionary hegemonies and workings of the nation-state. In this sense, it seeks to re-orientate diaspora as a conceptual process that brings to the fore the 'routed' dimensions in the national affiliations and longings of marginalized minority communities. Focusing on the postcolonial nation-state of Malaysia and its literary productions, the paper's point of anchorage and discussion, to paraphrase Paul Gilroy, is 'where you're born', rather than 'where you're from'. This shift from a descriptive to a processual approach to diaspora enables more inclusive and emancipatory ways of reading both diaspora and homeland."