Archive for publications, 2023

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[Commlist] New Book: Recovering the Radical Promise of Superheroes: Un/Making Worlds

Tue Sep 05 12:05:36 GMT 2023




Ellen Kirkpatrick is delighted to announce that the new book on superheroes, their fans, and the radical imagination has been published by the amazing open access press, punctum books <https://punctumbooks.com/titles/recovering-the-radical-promise-of-superheroes-un-making-worlds/> (TOC below).

//Recovering the Radical Promise of Superheroes: Un/Making Worlds/// <https://punctumbooks.com/titles/recovering-the-radical-promise-of-superheroes-un-making-worlds/>offers /a speculative response to the question of superhero meaning (making), detailing not so much a hunt for genre meaning as a trip through a genre’s meaningscape. Looking anew at superhero meaning-making practices allows a distinct way of thinking about and describing the creative, formal, and ideological conditions of the genre and its protagonists, one removed from corralling binaries, one foregrounding the idea of a synergy—often unseen, uneasy, and even hostile—between official and unofficial agents of superhero meaning and one reframing familiar questions: What kinds of meaning do superhero texts engender? How is this meaning made? By whom and under what conditions? What processes and practices inform, regulate, and extend superhero meaning? And finally, scrutinizing superhero meaning (making) presents a new question: How might we reimagine its agents, surfaces, and spaces?

Centering the experiences and practices of excluded and marginalized superhero fans, /Recovering the Radical Promise of Superheroes: Un/Making Worlds/ reveals that genre meaning is not lodged in one place or another, neither in its official creators or fans, nor in “black and white” conservatism or in a “rainbow” of progressive possibilities. Nor is it even located somewhere in the in-between; it is instead better conceived of as an antagonistic, in-process nexus of meaning (making) undergirded by imbricated systems of power.

/"//The superhero genre contains multitudes! Though it too often reverts back to its most conservative form, Ellen Kirkpatrick’s tour de force book makes the case for the radical potential and transformative power of the superhero, a trope she traces across media and history, armed with state of the art theories of genre, world-making, and the civic imagination. I could not be more excited to see such a book coming out in the current moment where there are superheroes, seemingly, everywhere we look."/ ~ Henry Jenkins, author of /Comics and Stuff/


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