New Books in Art

Burn It Down: Feminist Manifestos for the Revolution (Verso, 2020), Breanne Fahs has curated a comprehensive collection of feminist manifestos from the nineteenth century to today. Fahs collected over seventy-five manifestos from around the world, calling on feminists to act, be defiant and show their rage. This thought-provoking and timely collection includes not only popular manifestos often taught in women and gender studies courses, but also introduces readers to works from feminist activists who are often placed on the margins. The eight sections of the book cover manifestos from a wide range of feminist activist spectrums: queer/trans, anticapitalist/anarchist, angry/violent, indigenous/women of color, sex/body, hacker/cyborg, trashy/punk, and witchy/bitchy. Fahs has put together a collection that has something for everyone and that is a must-need on every feminist bookshelf.Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. She is the author of Writing a Riot: Riot Grrrl Zines and Feminist Rhetorics (Peter Lang, 2018). You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In Vanishing Vienna: Modernism, Philosemitism, and Jews in a Postwar City (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) historian Frances Tanzer traces the reconstruction of Viennese culture from the 1938 German annexation through the early 1960s. The book reveals continuity in Vienna's cultural history across this period and a framework for interpreting Viennese culture that relies on antisemitism, philosemitism, and a related discourse of Jewish presence and absence. This observation demands a new chronology of cultural reconstruction that links the Nazi and postwar years, and a new geography that includes the history of refugees from Nazi Vienna. Rather than presenting the Nazi, exile, and postwar periods as discrete chapters of Vienna's history, Tanzer argues that they are part of a continuous spectrum of cultural evolution--the result of which was the creation of a coherent Austrian identity and culture that emerged by the 1950s. As she shows, antisemitism and philosemitism were not contradictory forces in post-Nazi Austrian culture. They were deeply interconnected aspirations in a city where nostalgia for the past dominated cultural reconstruction efforts and supported seemingly contradictory impulses. Viennese nostalgia at times concealed the perpetuation of antisemitic fantasies of the city without Jews. At the same time, the postwar desire to return to a pre-Nazi past relied upon notions of Austrian culture that Austrian Jews perfected in exile, as well as on the symbolic remigration of a mostly imagined "Jewish" culture now taxed with redeeming Austria in the aftermath of the Holocaust. From this perspective, philosemitism is much more than a simple inversion of antisemitism--instead, Tanzer argues, philosemitism, problematic as it may be, defines Vienna in the era of postwar reconstruction. In this way, Vanishing Vienna uncovers a rarely discussed phenomenon of the aftermath of the Holocaust--a society that consumes, redefines, and bestows symbolic meaning on the victims in their absence.Paul Lerner is Professor of History at the University of Southern California where he directs the Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. He can be reached at plerner@usc.edu and @PFLerner. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series. This podcast is a multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues.In this episode, our host, Kinjal Dave, sits down with filmmaker, artist, and writer Paromita Vohra for a wide-ranging conversation about the artist’s career. As an artist, Vohra has worked across a variety of forms, including film, comics, digital media, installation art and writing to explore themes of feminism, desire, sexuality and popular culture. In this interview, she reflects on the provocations and practices that have shaped her approach as an artist, as well as the pedagogical possibilities that multimodal artworks provide in the classroom.Over the next forty-five minutes, you will hear about: What inspired Paromita Vohra to pick up a camera The challenges of building and sustaining a career as an independent filmmaker Social, political, and cultural shifts in the India during the 1990s that informed Vohra’s media production How digital media technologies and the Internet shaped Vohra’s work How Unlimited Girls sought to capture a particular moment within a globalizing feminist discourse, How Vohra has rejected certain aesthetic and narrative paradigms to craft her own style and voice as an artist, straddling comedy, irony, and politically incisive commentary Vohra’s digital platform Agents of Ishq and the sense of community the project has built How to cultivate and encourage complex conversations about gender, sex, desire, and politics in the classroom Building intimacy with audiences and being vulnerable to criticism Vohra’s upcoming projects …and more!Guest BiographyParomita Vohra is an artist who works with a range of forms, including film, comics, digital media, installation art and writing to explore themes of feminism, desire, sexuality and popular culture. Her extraordinary body of truth-telling, kinetic and intensely sensuous films, online videos, art installations, television programming and writing have made sense of feminism, love, sexuality, urban life and popular culture for a diverse and loving audience for over 25 years.Host BioKinjal Dave is a PhD Student at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She researches critical perspectives on gender, technology, and labor in the South Asian diaspora at the intersection of Media and Communication Studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Diaspora Studies. She is a fellow with the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) and an affiliate of Data & Society Research Institute. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Numerous Iron-Age nomadic alliances flourished along the 5000-mile Eurasian steppe route. From Crimea to the Mongolian grassland, nomadic image-making was rooted in metonymically conveyed zoomorphic designs, creating an alternative ecological reality. The nomadic elite nucleus embraced this elaborate image system to construct collective memory in reluctant, diverse political alliances organized around shared geopolitical goals rather than ethnic ties. Largely known by the term “animal style,” this zoomorphic visual rhetoric became so ubiquitous across the Eurasian steppe network that it transcended border regions and reached the heartland of sedentary empires like China and Persia. In Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE (Edinburgh UP, 2024) Art historian Petya Andreeva’s research shows how a shared fluency in animal-style design became a status-defining symbol and a bonding agent in opportunistic nomadic alliances, and was later adopted by their sedentary neighbors to showcase worldliness and control over the nomadic “other.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

The notion of beauty is inherently elusive: aesthetic judgments are at once subjective and felt to be universally valid. In Beauty Matters: Modern Japanese Literature and the Question of Aesthetics, 1890-1930 (Columbia UP, 2024), Anri Yasuda demonstrates that by exploring the often conflicting yet powerful pull of aesthetic sentiments, major authors of the late Meiji (1868–1912) and Taishō (1912–1926) periods illuminated themes and perspectives that resonated broadly in modern Japanese society. This approach presents an alternative to conventional accounts in which Japanese literature before the modernist turn of the 1920s has tended to be defined by an insular focus on subjective representation and autobiographical realism.Yasuda investigates how Natsume Sōseki, Mori Ogai, Mushanokōji Saneatsu and his peers at Shirakaba magazine, and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke sought to identify the aesthetic properties of literature through comparisons with the visual arts. They also considered the position of Japanese cultural sensibilities within the Eurocentric imperial world order. Their stories featuring painters and paintings weigh the fundamental challenge of representing anything when the conditions of knowledge are in flux, and their stories about cross-cultural encounters display both hope and ambivalence about the prospect of cosmopolitanism. Yasuda shows how thinking about beauty and art enabled these authors to surpass purely “literary” concerns. By tracing the wide-reaching significance of aesthetic affect in literary thought, Beauty Matters destabilizes received conceptions of literature’s parameters and affirms literature’s continued potential to intervene in cultural discourses in Japan and beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Counter-Cartographies: Reading Singapore Otherwise (Liverpool UP, 2024) draws from a body of Anglophone and multilingual cultural texts created in contemporary Singapore and in its diasporic communities. From banned documentaries to award-winning graphic novels, flash fiction collections to conceptual art, there is a vibrant, growing body of transmedial, multi-genre resistance to an overmapped, hyper-planned, and ecologically destructive postcolonial development.The author proposes methods of cultural analysis and close reading that are “counter-cartographical” --- reading in resistance to and yet pressed up against the regulations of a (post)colonial map. To excavate, wayfind, circumvent, and confabulate in these spaces enables us to understand the contours and pressures of authoritarian governance and reveal the insidious aspects of biopolitical power in the (post)colonial city. These four spatial and theoretical movements deliberately enmesh the space of everyday life in a complex awareness of time: in historical contexts, in ongoing social relations, in contemporary political realities, and the imagined possibilities of literary spaces.In a global political context that is increasingly marked by a return to authoritarianism, cultural production from Singapore provides an intense, microcosmic view of the conditions of art-making an overdetermined urban space, under duress and censorship. It further lays bare the ecological and human costs of unbridled postcolonial extraction and development.Joanne Leow is an Associate Professor of English and Canada Research Chair at Simon Fraser University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Working across and among languages, media, and art forms, Caroline Bergvall’s writing takes form as published poetic works and performance, frequently of sound-driven projects. Her interests include multilingual poetics, queer feminist politics and issues of cultural belonging, commissioned and shown by such institutions as MoMA, the Tate Modern, and the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Antwerp, and won numerous awards.Ragadawn is a multimedia performance that explores ideas of multi-lingualism, migration, lost or disappearing languages, and how language and place intersect. Ragadawn is performed with two live voices and recorded elements, outdoors, at dawn, which means the start and end times are location specific. It features song composed by Gavin Bryars, sung by Peyee Chen.   Ragadawn premiered at the Festival de la Bâtie (Geneva) and at the Estuary Festival (Southend) in 2016.You can find more work(s) by Caroline Bergvall at: http://carolinebergvall.comAlso on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/carolinebergvall/ohmyohmyand Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/carolinebergvall/videosHer publications include:·      Éclat, Sound & Language, 1996·      Fig: Goan Atom 2, Salt, 2005·      Middling English, John Hansard Gallery, 2010·      Meddle English: New and Selected Texts, Nightboat Books, 2011·      Drift, Nightboat Books, 2014 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

What does an art history of Instagram look like? Appreciation Post: Towards an Art History of Instagram (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Tara Ward reveals how Instagram shifts long-established ways of interacting with images. Dr. Ward argues Instagram is a structure of the visual, which includes not just the process of looking, but what can be seen and by whom. She examines features of Instagram use, including the effect of scrolling through images on a phone, the skill involved in taking an “Instagram-worthy” picture, and the desires created by following influencers, to explain how the constraints imposed by Instagram limit the selves that can be displayed on it. The proliferation of technical knowledge, especially among younger women, revitalises on Instagram the myth of the masculine genius and a corresponding reinvigoration of a masculine audience for art.Dr. Ward prompts scholars of art history, gender studies, and media studies to attend to Instagram as a site of visual expression and social consequence. Through its insightful comparative analysis and acute close reading, Appreciation Post argues for art history’s value in understanding the contemporary world and the visual nature of identity today.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Asians on Demand: Mediating Race in Video Art and Activism (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) explores a multilingual archive of contemporary queer and feminist videos by Asian diasporans in North America, Europe, and East Asia. It grapples with the pressing question of how media representation can critique and advance social justice for racialized minorities in the wake of today’s unprecedented rise of onscreen diversity.Feng-Mei Heberer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. She is also a faculty affiliate of the department’s Asian Film and Media Initiative. Her research interests lie at the junctures of labor, transnational migration, and Asian diaspora, and her work draws heavily on the insights of ethnic studies, queer studies, feminist studies, and critical area studies. In addition, she researches and works in film curation and community arts and culture organizing.Ailin Zhou is a PhD student in Film & Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research interests include transnational Chinese cinema, Asian diasporic visual culture, contemporary art, and feminist and queer theories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

The Loneliness Room: A Creative Ethnography of Loneliness (Manchester University Press, 2024) by Dr. Sean Remond is a remarkably unique book takes the conceit of the loneliness room to show how everyday artistic practice opens up loneliness to new definitions and new understandings. Refusing to pathologise loneliness, the book draws on the creative submissions supplied by its participants to demonstrate that being lonely can mean different things to different people in differing contexts. Filled with the photographs, paintings, videos, songs, and writings of its participants, The loneliness room is a deeply moving account of loneliness today. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art