Books on the topic 'Radial configuration'

In Mass Hysteria, Rebecca Kukla examines the present-day medical and cultural practices surrounding pregnancy, new motherhood, and infant feeding. In the late-eighteenth century, the configuration of the maternal body underwent a radical transformation and the two maternal bodies that emerged out of this transformation still govern our imagination and rituals surrounding pregnancy and lactation. Exploring the history and the current life of these two maternal bodies within medical institutions, popular culture, and politics, Kukla offers a critical assessment of the lived repercussions of these ideological figures and practices for contemporary women's and infants' health and well-being.

China and India will have to radically transform their electric power systems in order to decouple economic growth from unsustainable resource consumption. The development and deployment of renewable energies offers a solution to this challenge. A clean energy transition, however, requires radical changes in the energy system that can only occur if a governing coalition is both willing and able to implement successful RET (renewable energy technology) policies. The authors analyse how this willingness and ability is shaped by the coalition’s power and cohesiveness, societal pressures, and the institutional configuration across levels of governance. In doing so, central drivers are identified and barriers to a clean energy transition in China and India.

French scholars have been remarkably resistant to the idea that fascism ever had much purchase as a political force in France. Yet, this article argues that, whatever the authentic ‘fascist’ credentials of the various French movements that have begged classification by scholars of fascism, it was a configuration of contextual factors which kept them out of power rather than the intrinsic ideological weakness of fascism as a political force. The question is how far any of them were fascist and why their advocates failed to seize power. This article reconstructs some of the conversations in which historians and other scholars have been engaged, convey the variety of illiberal populist positions that sought to mobilize support in this period, and articulate the nature of the inter-war crisis in French democracy which made the radical right so appealing to many.

An analysis that focuses on the metapsychological dimension of queer theorizations will demonstrate why, in spite of how bold and emancipatory key queer formulations might initially seem, the field maintains an uninterrogated reliance on erotophobic psychological conventions that ultimately reproduces an erotophobic relationship to sexuality. Homo Psyche introduces metapsychology as a new dimension of analysis that zeroes in on the underlying psychological assumptions that determine contemporary critical thought. Such an intervention deepens current debates about the future of queer studies by demonstrating how the field’s systematic neglect of metapsychology as a necessary and independent realm of ideology ultimately enforces the complicity of queer studies with psychological conventions that are fundamentally erotophobic and therefore inimical to queer theory’s radical and ethical project. Homo Psyche therefore introduces a break with the current configuration of traditional psychoanalysis as the presumptive and undisputed foundation for radical psycho-sexual theorizations. In order to elaborate a critical alternative, the French theoretician Jean Laplanche (1924–2012) will be introduced. In order to rigorously articulate and defend the centrality of sexuality to psychic life, Laplanche insisted on “new foundations for psychoanalysis” that radically departed from existing Freudian and Lacanian models of the mind. This study conducts a purposive survey of six major theoretical concepts, through the lens of six eminent individual critics who represent exemplary, influential, and authoritative developments of them: Eve Sedgwick on “hermeneutics,” Leo Bersani on “sex,” Jane Gallop on “violation,” Lee Edelman on “radicalism,” Judith Butler on “gender,” and Lauren Berlant on “relationality.”

This book unfolds an exploratory journey intended to scrutinise the suitability of entanglements and relations as a mode of thinking and seeing peacebuilding events. Through a reflection upon the UN’s limited results in the endeavour towards securing lasting peace in war-torn scenarios, Torrent critically engages with three relevant debates in contemporary peacebuilding literature, including the inclusion of ‘the locals’, the achievement of organisational system-wide coherence and the increasingly questioned agential condition of peacebuilding actors. Inattentive to the relational vulnerability of involved stakeholders, it is suggested that the UN seeks to secure a totalising modern distory, defined in the book as a story that undoes other stories. Whilst affirming the entangled ontogenesis of actors and processes in the conflict-affected configuration, Entangled Peace also delves into a cautionary argument about what the author refers to as entanglement fetishism, namely the celebratory, normative, deterministic and exclusionary projection of a relational world. Inspired by Alfred North Whitehead, Entangled Peace is an invitation to speculate over the peacebuilding milieu, and by extension the broader theatre of the real, as radical openness, in which events emanate from the collision of an infinite multiplicity of possible worlds.

This chapter compares John Woo's Hong Kong and Hollywood films in order to scrutinize the differing representations of gender they offer in relation to the different generic configurations at work in each production context. It seeks to identify which aspects of these representations have passed the test of cultural translatability and which have not. It examines how Woo's generation of a series of action and pathos driven films negotiates generically gendered bodies and how these undergo a radical shift within his Hollywood output. It asks what were the perceived assets of Woo's crossover appeal for Western audiences that led Universal to make him the first ever Chinese director in charge of a multimillion dollar motion picture, and what were the seemingly dangerous aspects of his representational templates that had to be “translated” to the social, sexual, and cultural codes of Western popular culture. In particular, the chapter explores the shift from male-to-male narratives and subordinated femininity to the heterosexual romance that dominates most of his American films.

In much of the critical discourse of the seventies, eighties, and nineties, scholars employed suspicion in order to reveal a given text’s complicity with various undesirable ideologies and/or psychopathologies. Construed as such, interpretive practice was often intended to demystify texts and authors by demonstrating in them the presence of false consciousness, bourgeois values, patriarchy, orientalism, heterosexism, imperialist attitudes, and/or various neuroses, complexes, and lacks. While it proved to be of vital importance in literary studies, suspicious hermeneutics often compelled scholars to interpret eudaimonia, or well-being variously conceived, in pathologized terms. At the end of the twentieth century, however, literary scholars began to see the limitations of suspicion, conceived primarily as the discernment of latent realities beneath manifest illusions. In the last decade, often termed the “post-theory era,” there was a radical shift in focus, as scholars began to recognize the inapplicability of suspicion as a critical framework for discussions of eudaimonic experiences, seeking out several alternative forms of critique, most of which can be called, despite their differences, a hermeneutics of affirmation. In such alternative reading strategies scholars were able to explore configurations of eudaimonia, not by dismissing them as bad politics or psychopathology but in complex ways that have resulted in a new eudaimonic turn, a trans-disciplinary phenomenon that has also enriched several other disciplines. The Eudaimonic Turn builds on such work, offering a collection of essays intended to bolster the burgeoning critical framework in the fields of English, Comparative Literature, and Cultural Studies by stimulating discussions of well-being in the “post-theory” moment. The volume consists of several examinations of literary and theoretical configurations of the following determinants of human subjectivity and the role these play in facilitating well-being: values, race, ethics/morality, aesthetics, class, ideology, culture, economics, language, gender, spirituality, sexuality, nature, and the body. Many of the authors compelling refute negativity bias and pathologized interpretations of eudaimonic experiences or conceptual models as they appear in literary texts or critical theories. Some authors examine the eudaimonic outcomes of suffering, marginalization, hybridity, oppression, and/or tragedy, while others analyze the positive effects of positive affect. Still others analyze the aesthetic response and/or the reading process in inquiries into the role of language use and its impact on well-being, or they explore the complexities of strength, resilience, and other positive character traits in the face of struggle, suffering, and “othering.”

What does it mean to be governed and what does it mean to resist? Examining how communities form amidst social and political turbulence, this open access book presents four case studies that demonstrate the power of organic social formations over imposed order. Understanding this formation of community in terms of ‘ungovernability’ and a ‘poetics of resistance’, Ungovernable Spaces charts a movement from oppression, through transformation, into imagining, and finally emergence. Throughout the book, the authors engage methods of situated practice and related modes of writing and image-making to consider a range of global case studies: the destruction of the Mecca apartment building in Chicago’s South Side in 1952, following a decade of resistance from the building’s predominantly African American occupants; M.K. Gandhi’s practices of social activism including the Salt March protest of 1930, and the daily practice of spinning and intermittent fasts; the Ciudad Abierta (Open City), a radical pedagogical experiment started by a poet and an architect in Valparaíso, Chile in 1970; and, finally, the urban ecologies developing on either side of Belfast's ‘peace walls’ in the wake of the Troubles and 1998's Good Friday Agreement. Structured via four spatial configurations – the grid, the charkha, the constellation, and the cluster –each case study explores community formation through artistic and aesthetic practices that resist and unsettle forms of hegemonic order. A truly interdisciplinary work at the intersection of poetry, art and spatial practice, Ungovernable Spaces argues for the importance of ethics, aesthetics, imagination and ecology in developing, of necessity, a new poetics of ‘us.’ In doing so, it demonstrates how the formation of community in and through resistance has the potential to introduce new models of social and cultural interaction that make something new, something different, something unknown of the world. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by UKRI.