Category Archives: SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE

Can’t read my broker face?—Tracing a motif and metaphor of expert knowledge through audiovisual images of the financial crisis

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Abstract

Based on the question of the representability of economy and economics in audiovisual media, developments on the financial markets have often been discussed as a depiction problem. The abstractness and complexity of economic interrelations seem to defy classical modes of storytelling and dramatization. Nevertheless, public opinion about economic changes and dependencies crucially relies on audiovisual media. But how can the public communicate in images, sounds, and words about forces that are out of sight and out of reach, and can supposedly only be adequately grasped by experts? In a case study on audiovisual images of the global financial crisis (2007–), this paper tracks and analyzes a recurring motif: the staging of expert knowledge as close-ups of expressive faces vis-à-vis computer screens in television news, documentaries, as well as feature films. It draws on the use of digital tools for corpus exploration (reverse image search) and the visualization of video annotations. By relating and comparing different staging strategies by which these “broker faces” become embodiments of turbulent market dynamics, the paper proposes to not regard them as repeated instantiations of the same metaphor, but as a developing web of cinematic metaphors. Different perspectives (news of market developments or historical accounts of crisis developments) and affective stances toward the global financial crisis are expressed in these variations of the face-screen constellation. The paper thus presents a selection of different appearances of “broker faces” as a medium for an audiovisual discourse of the global financial crisis. A concluding analysis of a scene from Margin Call focuses on its specific intertwining of expert and screen as an ambivalent movement figuration of staging insight. Between the feeling of discovery (of a potential future threat) and the sense of being haunted (by a menacing force), the film stages the emergence of a “broker face” in an atmospheric tension between suspense and melancholy. We argue that the film thereby reframes the motif and poses questions of agency, temporality, and expert knowledge.

Futures of english studies: Australia

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This paper considers the professionalization of literary studies in Australian universities. It traces ways in which its interdisciplinary formations have been shaped not only by the cultural contexts of colonialism and postcolonialism, but also by institutional factors and budgetary pressures. Nevertheless, it argues this framework has also created intellectual opportunities for positively reshaping the subject so as to bring it into discursive conversation with cognate fields. It suggests that the repositioning of Australian literature and literary studies in relation to World Literature may offer the prospect of opening up the field for the benefit of scholars the world over.

“For the planet. For home”: Generating planetary responsibility in the climate fiction of Los Angeles

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This article argues that three prominent recent works of Los Angeles climate fiction—Maria Amparo Escandon's L.A. Weather (2021), Alexandra Kleeman's Something New Under the Sun (2021) and Paul Beatty's The Sellout (2016)—generate a sense of planetary responsibility. Despite their regional settings, these novels possess a planetary consciousness, illuminating the local-global connectivity of climate change and the Anthropocene. As one of the biggest greenhouse gas emitting cities in the world, L.A. drives climate injustice, with its gargantuan energy consumption having an adverse impact on populations both within and far beyond its own borders. This article explains how literature, and climate fiction particularly, can highlight this inequality at micro and macro scales, and encourage collective opposition to it. I argue that the novels of Escandon, Kleeman and Beatty conjure the impression of responsibility identified by Kristian Shaw and Sara Upstone in their overview of post-postmodern fiction, while also exhibiting the ‘planetarity’ discussed by Amy Elias and Christian Moraru: a term to describe the global worldview of contemporary culture. In applying these concepts to the novels examined here, I ultimately contend that Los Angeles climate fiction demystifies the spatial and political dimensions of the Anthropocene, generating planetary responsibility and addressing local and global injustice.

Letters for Ukraine. Textual and institutional forms of global responsibility

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This essay analyses the epistolary correspondence between six Ukrainian and German-speaking authors published by WeiterSchreiben, a literary platform that belongs to the non-profit organisation WIR MACHEN DAS and which seeks to promote the work of exiled writers from regions affected by war and other humanitarian crises in the German cultural field. The essay argues that the collaborative, self-reflexive, and short form of the letters is particularly suitable to promote global responsibility and to quickly adapt to situations of political immediacy, thus accelerating literature's reaction capacity to ongoing conflicts such as the Russia-Ukraine war. While tracing the connections between the genre and the human rights discourse and looking at the politics of address that create a bond of communion between the correspondents and have the potential to foster various kinds of political identification among readers, the essay also explores this literary initiative from a sociological perspective, challenging strict distinctions between textual and contextual dynamics. By drawing attention to the literary and political dimension of non-profit organisations such as WIR MACHEN DAS, the essay demonstrates that literature constitutes an important tool in civil society, which helps create forms of transnational solidarity and shape collective debates around migration and social injustice that transcend the borders of states.

The supply‐chain sublime: Spectacles of unagency in fictions of planetary economy

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This paper is about the literary representation of supply chains: the political-material pathways by which goods are produced and delivered to consumers. It considers the ethical and aesthetic problems posed by the fact that the daily lives of people living in consumer societies in the Global North are deeply dependent on material networks that sustain violent relations between people and with earth’s ecologies. How can we be ethical global citizens when we are already material global subjects? The paper considers how literature confronts this ethical-representational challenge, and asks whether literature might help us take responsibility over the material economic networks that structure our everyday lives. I examine two novels that make use of strikingly similar techniques for narrating their characters’ immersion in globalized economies: Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014) and Ling Ma’s Severance (2018). Both novels strive to represent the incomprehensible global economy by calling attention to their inability to represent it. I argue that this technique—which I call the “supply chain sublime”—ultimately reflects the incapacity of current forms of collective political agency to manage our material lives.

“The heat of a multitudinous assembly”: Striking short fiction and the rise of feminist potencia

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This article considers how a recent wave of Latin American short fiction captures with immediate topicality new forms of transversal political subjectivity engendered by the international feminist reinvention of the strike in the 21st century. Drawing on Verónica Gago's theorization of the political cartography of feminist potencia (power), alongside the work of Silvia Federici, Rita Segato and Sayak Valencia, it considers how the short story form facilitates a strategic recognition of interconnected violences perpetrated against women and feminized bodies, “mapping forms of violence based on their organic connection, without losing sight of the singularity of the production of the nexus between them” (Gago, 2020, p. 58). In particular, the article examines two exemplary short story collections, Cars on Fire (2020) by Mónica Ramón Ríos and Things We Lost in the Fire (2017) by Mariana Enríquez, considering how these writers repurpose the potential for socio-criticism embedded in the fantastical short story by offering a multi-focal critique of how patriarchy and gender violence interact with the structural inequalities unleashed by neoliberal capitalism. The article also considers how these riotous collections mediate the transversal fabric of communitarian struggle in feminist imaginaries, drawing narrative energy from the localised proliferation of neighbourhood assemblies and solidarity networks, while speaking to transnational feminist movements more broadly.

Seeing Shakespeare: Narco narratives and neocolonial appropriations of Macbeth in the US–Mexico Borderlands

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This essay examines the racializing logics and consequences of drawing analogies between the works of William Shakespeare and the devastatingly violent realities of the drug trade in the Americas. The particular prominence of Macbeth in the wide range of Shakespearean invocations and appropriations in contemporary US narratives about narcotrafficking cannot be attributed simply to the fact that it is a tale of bloody ambition. Rather, the repeated mapping of a play that comes to its conclusion with an English military invasion of its “barbarous” Scottish neighbors onto the US–Mexico Borderlands speaks to much deeper histories of colonial conquest and to neocolonial interventionist policies and actions of the present. The essay concludes by turning to two recent instances in which theater artists have translated and significantly revised Macbeth in order to reframe dominant narratives about narcotrafficking, racial supremacy, and the border. These productions demonstrate the disruptive and transformative potential of Shakespearean appropriations that resist neocolonial power structures and ideologies.

When the master’s tools fail: Racial euphemism in Shakespeare appropriation, or, the activist value of Premodern Critical Race Studies

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As premodern studies continues to develop tools for anti-racist scholarship and pedagogy, this essay establishes the stakes of adaptation/appropriation studies especially committing to these efforts. Turning to the novel The Serpent of Venice, I demonstrate how appropriations that engage with race too often employ what I frame as racial euphemism: palliative engagements with race that sidestep questions of power and inequity. This is especially true for those attempting to maintain distance between Shakespeare and questions of race, and especially racism, often under the guise of historical accuracy. This racially euphemistic approach, therefore, disseminates to especially wide audiences white supremacist approaches to race. Premodern Critical Race Studies provides a vital activist framework, and with it, important conceptual and methodological tools, that help adaptation/appropriation scholars identify racial euphemism in premodern retellings, while at the same time offering appropriators scholarship that can help them craft anti-racist appropriations that resist the idea of a race-neutral past.

Philology and racist appropriations of the medieval

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Recent decades have seen an increase in white supremacist appropriations of the Middle Ages. While many medievalists have sought to distance medieval studies from racist appropriations, these appropriations echo positions advanced and legitimized by philologists especially during the nineteenth century. Medieval studies as a discipline developed in the nineteenth century during the rise of nationalist movements, which often manifested as racial nationalism in Europe and the United States, and philologists actively participated in these movements by projecting contemporary national identity unto a constructed medieval past. These philologists often conflated language and race, and their nationalist scholarship helped justify imperialism. Although the ideas of these philologists are considered outdated, they set the foundation for racist appropriations of the Middle Ages and established nationalist frameworks that continue to influence the academy.