Becomings

This volume explores the ontological, epistemic, and political implications of rethinking time as a dynamic and irreversible force. Its authors seek to stimulate research in the sciences and humanities which highlight the temporal foundations.

All human life unfolds within a matrix of relations, which are at once social and biological. Yet the study of humanity has long been divided between often incompatible 'social' and 'biological' approaches. Reaching beyond the dualisms of nature and society and of biology and culture, this volume proposes a unique and integrated view of anthropology and the life sciences. Featuring contributions from leading anthropologists, it explores human life as a process of 'becoming' rather than 'being', and demonstrates that humanity is neither given in the nature of our species nor acquired through culture but forged in the process of life itself. Combining wide-ranging theoretical argument with in-depth discussion of material from recent or ongoing field research, the chapters demonstrate how contemporary anthropology can move forward in tandem with groundbreaking discoveries in the biological sciences.

Queer theory essays on time and becoming in the fields of literature, philosophy, film, and performance.

Cartographies of becoming in education: A Deleuze-Guattari Perspective proposes a non-hierarchical approach that maps teaching and learning with the power of affect and what a body can do/become in different educational contexts. Teaching and learning is an encounter with the unknown and happen as specific responses to particular problems encountered with/in life. In this edited volume, international scholars map out potential ruptures in teaching and learning in order to conceptualize education differently. One way is through the multidisciplinary lens of MLT (Multiple Literacies Theory) in which reading is intensive and immanent. The authors deploy different aspects of MLT while creating and experimenting with ethology, teaching, learning, curriculum, teacher education and technology in relation to visual arts, music, mathematics, theatre, workplace literacy, second language education, and architecture. With the forces of globalization, digital media and economic re-structuring reconfiguring the social, political and economic landscape, societies require innovative ways of thinking about education. Cartographies of becoming in education: A Deleuze-Guattari Perspective is a response to problems posed by such forces. The problematic surrounding Deleuze-Guattari and education continues to grow. Diana Masny’s scholarship in this area is well known and appreciated through her many essays and books that develop MLT (Multiple Literacies Theory). Cartographies of Becoming in Education: A Deleuze-Guattari Perspective continues her effort to broaden the notion of education and show its intersections with MLT. The series of essays do this by forming a number of ‘entries,’ five to be precise: politicizing education, affect and education, literacies and becoming, teacher-becomings, and deterritorializing boundaries. Each ‘entry’ explores the way an MLT inflected orientation enables us to further grasp the creative inventiveness of the Deleuze-Guattarian tool kit that can be applied to areas of music education, ethnography, art, drama, literacy, mathematics, landscape ecology, ethology and teacher education. It is a vivid illustration of the cartography that maps the rhizomatic movements that are taking place by international scholars who are deterritorializing education as a discipline of modernity. I highly recommend this collection of essays to those of us who are continually asking how might education be rethought through the unthought. It opens up new territories. – Jan Jagodzinski, University of Alberta, Author of Psychoanalyzing Cinema.

This book explores postmodern choreographic engagements of pregnant bodies in the US over the last 70 years. Johanna Kirk discusses how choreographers negotiate identification with the look of their pregnant bodies to maintain a sense of integrity as artists and to control representations of their gender and physical abilities while pregnant. Across chapters, the artists discussed include Anna Halprin, Trisha Brown, Twyla Tharp, Sandy Jamrog, Jane Comfort, Jody Oberfelder, Jawole Willa, Miguel Gutiérrez, Yanira Castro, Noémie LaFrance, and Meg Foley. By presenting their bodies in performance, these artists demonstrate how their experiences surrounding pregnancy intersect not only with their artform and its history but also with their personal experiences of race, gender, and sexual identification. In these pages, Johanna Kirk argues that choreography offers them tools that are alternative to medicine (or other forms of social representation) for understanding what/how pregnant bodies do and feel and what they can mean for individuals and their communities. The works within these chapters invite readers to see dancing bodies and pregnant bodies in new ways and for their potential to manifest new possibilities. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars exploring dance, theatre and performance, race, and gender.

This volume explores the ontological, epistemic, and political implications of rethinking time as a dynamic and irreversible force. Its authors seek to stimulate research in the sciences and humanities which highlight the temporal foundations.

Violent Becomings conceptualizes the Mozambican state not as the bureaucratically ordered polity of the nation-state, but as a continuously emergent and violently challenged mode of ordering. In doing so, this book addresses the question of why colonial and postcolonial state formation has involved violent articulations with so-called ‘traditional’ forms of sociality. The scope and dynamic nature of such violent becomings is explored through an array of contexts that include colonial regimes of forced labor and pacification, liberation war struggles and civil war, the social engineering of the post-independence state, and the popular appropriation of sovereign violence in riots and lynchings.