[ecrea] CULTURAL POLITICS Volume 7, Issue 2, JULY 2011

Dear friends and colleagues



I am pleased to announce the publication of CULTURAL POLITICS Volume 7, 
Issue 2, JULY 2011, which is a General Issue.



Official website here: 
http://www.bergpublishers.com/BergJournals/CulturalPolitics/tabid/520/Default.aspx



Cultural Politics’ Artists’ website here: 
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/culturalpolitics/



Subscribe here: 
http://www.bergpublishers.com/JournalsHomepage/CustomerServices/SubscribeRenew/tabid/3420/Default.aspx



Please feel free to circulate this message to any relevant email lists etc.



PLEASE NOTE: CULTURAL POLITICS IS MOVING TO DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS FROM 
VOLUME 8, ISSUE 1, 2012



Best wishes.



John.

Dr John Armitage

Associate Dean &

Head of Department of Media

Co-editor, Cultural Politics

School of Arts & Social Sciences

Room SQ318d, Squires Building

Northumbria University

Newcastle upon Tyne

NE1 8ST

(e) (w): (j.armitage /at/ unn.ac.uk)

(e) (h): (j.armitage /at/ technologica.demon.co.uk)

(t) Blackberry: +44 (0)7966977782

(t) Office: +44 (0)191 227 4971

Visit the Cultural Politics website at:

http://www.bergpublishers.com/BergJournals/CulturalPolitics/tabid/520/Default.aspx



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Cultural Politics



Volume 7, Issue 2



GENERAL ISSUE



July 2011



Articles



The Hurt Locker: Cinematic Addiction, ‘Critique’, and The War on Terror

Bruce Bennett and Bulent Diken interrogate The Hurt Locker, an 
enthusiastically-received ‘critical’ film, as a symptom of today’s 
prevailing cultural and political codes. Dwelling on the homologies 
between the state of exception and the narrative logic of the film, 
including its reflection on the banalization of exception, Bennett and 
Diken emphasize that, ddespite its critical credentials, The Hurt Locker 
is totally silent on the most crucial aspect of the war against terror, 
its de-politicizing effects.



Che and the Pre-Eminence of Culture in Revolutionary Cuba: The Pursuit 
of a Spontaneous, Inseparable Integrity

Clive W. Kronenberg on the triumphs and continuity of the Cuban 
revolution with regard to the close bond that exists between political 
and cultural practice on the island. Emblematic of Cuban politics, key 
aspects of Ernesto Che Guevara’s revolutionary thought find expression 
in Cuban cultural theory and practices in the national, popular, and 
expressive arts domains, which strikingly sustains the revolution’s 
goals to bring about an equal and unified national community, a radical 
anti-imperialist, internationalist political ethos, and a deeply-rooted 
universal arts tradition.



A People of Seers: The Political Aesthetics of Postwar Cinema Revisited

Julian Reid probes the politics of Gilles Deleuze’s study of cinematic 
modernity. Issuing a challenge to film studies’ traditional 
understanding of the political in Deleuze’s studies, Reid argues that 
understanding and fulfilling the political potential of his works 
requires analyzing the importance of Deleuze’s account of the rupture 
between classical and modern cinema for his political concept of ‘a 
people’, an argument that moves beyond the impoverished state of the 
debate on Deleuze and ‘political cinema’ by exploring how his works 
trace the changing relation of cinema to the historical development of a 
post-national politics of people-production, and especially his account 
of what it names ‘a people of seers’.



Masquerade

Phyllis Galembo is an American photographer who has traveled extensively 
in the Caribbean and Africa to witness and document rituals that involve 
extraordinarily creative masking and costuming. Over the past 20 years, 
she has traveled to the Republic of Benin, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, 
Brazil, Cuba, Jamaica, and Haiti to photograph traditional priests and 
priestesses, carnival masqueraders, dancers, and Haitian Vodou 
practitioners, wearing elaborate costumes created for weddings and 
burials, initiations, chiefs’ coronations, protests and holidays.



On the Political in the Wake: Carl Schmitt and James Joyce’s Political 
Theologies

Kieran Keohane explores the work of Carl Schmitt and James Joyce and, 
particular, their response to the crisis of European civilization of the 
inter-war years. Bringing Schmitt and Joyce into conversation with one 
another through the mediation of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, 
Schmitt as representative and advocate of Apollonian logocentrism and 
Joyce of Dionysian muthos, Keohane investigates the parallels as well as 
differences in these authors’ works while illuminating the figure of the 
dictator and the theme of political theology, to reveal the deep 
affinity between Schmitt and totalitarianism on the one hand and Joyce 
and radical and plural democracy on the other.



The Politics of Transcendence

Harald Wydra on modern politics and its dogmatic separation of politics 
from religion, of the state from promises of salvation. Making a case 
for the fundamentally political nature of transcendence, Wydra argues 
that the changing relationships between authority and salvation depend 
on culturally crafted engagements of the spiritual and the temporal. 
Examining configurations of the political in the history of the west, 
which can be grasped as extraordinary form of “absolute” politics, he 
shows how ultimate ends influenced the emergence of secular forms of 
power and how the politics of transcendence must go beyond the 
friend-enemy distinction by incorporating the potentiality of forms of 
non-violent political action, where the ends are superior to the means.



Traveling Spies and Liminal Texts: Cold War Culture in Asian Spy Films

Leong Yew examines little known Asian spy films and their relationship 
with Cold War cultural studies. While their Anglo-American counterparts 
could be discursively analyzed for the way they portrayed Western 
anxieties about communism, constructed own identities as opposed to the 
alterity of Russians and communists, these films defy easy 
categorization because they not only reproduced these cinematic tropes 
but also weaved in politics, themes, and conventions outside the 
mainstream Cold War narrative. Exploring four spy/cop action films made 
by Filipino director, Bobby Suarez, and surveying how a global cinematic 
circularity shapes the creative and industrial aspects of Asian spy 
films, Yew considers how the importation of cinematic styles like 
blaxploitation and the Hong Kong kung fu genre reconfigured Asian 
culturalist positions and redrew conflict positions from that of 
capitalism versus communism to that of Asians versus Westerners.



Book Review Essay



The Limits of Control

Seb Franklin on Raiford Guins’ Edited Clean Version: Technology and the 
Culture of Control and Jussi Parikka and Tony D. Sampson (Eds.)’ The 
Spam Book: on Viruses, Porn and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of 
Digital Culture. Beginning with Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the control 
society, Franklin analyzes its substantial role in shaping scholarly 
discourse on new media and politics over the past twenty years prior to 
foregrounding the problems associated with this perspective and 
presenting a variety of approaches to the difficulty of critique related 
to new media.

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About Cultural Politics



“Cultural Politics is a welcome and innovative addition. In an academic 
universe already well populated with journals, it is carving out its own 
unique place—broad and a bit quirky. It likes to leap between the 
theoretical and the concrete, so that it is never boring and often 
filled with illuminating glimpses into the intellectual and cultural 
worlds.” Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina, USA.



Edited by

John Armitage, Northumbria University, UK
Ryan Bishop, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Douglas Kellner, University of California, Los Angeles, USA



Cultural Politics is an international, refereed journal that explores 
the global character and effects of contemporary culture and politics. 
It analyzes how cultural identities, agencies and actors, political 
issues and conflicts, and global media are linked, characterized, 
examined and resolved. In doing so, the journal explores precisely what 
is cultural about politics and what is political about culture. It 
investigates the marginalized and outer regions of this complex and 
interdisciplinary subject area.

Each issue publishes artwork by selected artists reflecting contemporary 
cultural and political issues.



Official website here: 
http://www.bergpublishers.com/BergJournals/CulturalPolitics/tabid/520/Default.aspx



Cultural Politics’ Artists’ website here: 
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/culturalpolitics/



Subscribe here: 
http://www.bergpublishers.com/JournalsHomepage/CustomerServices/SubscribeRenew/tabid/3420/Default.aspx



WANT TO SUBMIT AN ARTICLE OR BOOK REVIEW?



1) Manuscript Submissions

Should you have an article you would like to submit, please write to the 
editors:



Dr John Armitage

Associate Dean &

Head of Department of Media

Co-editor, Cultural Politics

School of Arts & Social Sciences

Room SQ318d, Squires Building

Northumbria University

Newcastle upon Tyne

NE1 8ST

(e) (w): (j.armitage /at/ unn.ac.uk)

e) (h): (j.armitage /at/ technologica.demon.co.uk)

(t) Blackberry: +44 (0)7966977782

(t) Office: +44 (0)191 227 4971

Visit the Cultural Politics website at:

http://www.bergpublishers.com/BergJournals/CulturalPolitics/tabid/520/Default.aspx



And

Dr Ryan Bishop
Co-Editor, Cultural Politics
Associate Professor of English
The National University of Singapore
Department of English
AS5, Arts Link
Singapore 117570
Tel. + 65-6874 6633
Fax: + 65-6773 2981
Email: (ellrb /at/ nus.edu.sg)



2) Book Reviews

Please contact Mark Featherstone for consideration for review in 
Cultural Politics.

Dr Mark Featherstone
Book Reviews Editor
Cultural Politics
Sociology
CESSW, Keele University
Keele ST5 5BG
Staffordshire
UK

Email: (spa.37 /at/ keele.ac.uk)

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