Fetishism And Curiosity

Writer and film-maker Laura Mulvey is widely regarded as one of the most challenging and incisive contemporary cultural theorists, credited for incorporating film theory, psychoanalysis and feminism. Part of the pathbeating 1970s generation of British film theorists and independent film-makers, she came to prominence with her classic essay on the pleasures – and displeasures – of narrative cinema, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'. She went on to make her own avant-garde films, co-directed with Peter Wollen, and to write further, greatly influential works – including this one. Fetishism and Curiosity contains writings which range from analyses of Xala, Citizen Kane and Blue Velvet, to an extended engagement with the creations of Native American artist Jimmie Durham and the feminist photographer Cindy Sherman. Essays explore the concept of fetishism as developed by Marx and Freud, and how it relates to the ways in which artistic texts work. Mulvey returns to some of the knottier issues in contemporary cultural theory, especially the links between looking, fantasy and theorisation on the one hand, and the processes of historical change on the other. What are the modes of address that characterise 'societies of the spectacle'? How might 'curiosity' be directed towards deciphering the politics of popular culture? These are just some of the questions raised in this brilliant and subtle collection. Published as part of the BFI Silver series, this new edition of Mulvey's classic work of feminist theory features a new, specially commissioned introduction and stills from the films discussed.

Writer and filmmaker Laura Mulvey is widely regarded as one of the most challenging and incisive contemporary feminist cultural theorists. Part of the 1970s generation of British film theorists and independent filmmakers, she came to prominence with her classic work on the pleasures, and displeasures, of narrative cinema, Visual and Other Pleasures. This new collection contains her most recent writings, ranging from analyses of Xala, Citizen Kane, and Blue Velvet to an extended engagement with the work of the American Indian artist Jimmie Durham and the feminist photographer Cindy Sherman.

Representation, subjectivity and sexuality continue to be central to scholarly inquiry in the humanities and social sciences. Deciphering Culture explores their relationship, each author taking a distinct approach to the concept of 'curiosity' as a way of deciphering the working of particular cultural formations. In the process they address a variety of topics including: * the historical formation of subjectivities, identities and differences * cultural conduct and habits of the self * everyday cultures and negotiation * consumption and the body * memory, history and autobiography * the ethics of critical and textual inquiry. This fascinating book will appeal to students and academics from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds in the social sciences and cultural studies.

"Fetishism (supposing that it existed)": a preface to the translation of Charles de Brosses's Transgression / Rosalind C. Morris -- Introduction: fetishism, figurism, and myths of enlightenment / Daniel H. Leonard -- A note on the translation / Daniel H. Leonard -- On the worship of fetish gods; or, a parallel of the ancient religion of Egypt with the present religion of Nigritia / Charles de Brosses ; translated by Daniel H. Leonard -- After De Brosses: fetishism, translation, comparativism, critique / Rosalind C. Morris -- A fetiche is a fetiche: no knowledge without difference of the word: rereading De Brosses -- Excursus: recontextualizing De Brosses, with Pietz in and out of Africa -- Re Kant and the good fetishists among us -- Hegel: back to the heart of darkness -- Fetishism against itself; or, Marx's two fetishisms -- The great fetish; or, the fetishism of the one -- Freud and the return to the dark continent: the other fetish -- Conjuncture: Freud and Marx, via Lacan -- Anthropology's fetishism: the custodianship of reality -- Fetishism reanimated: surrealism, ethnography, and the war against decay -- Deconstruction's fetish: undecidable, or the mark of Hegel -- Rehistoricizing generalized fetishism: the era of objects -- Anthropological redux: the reality of fetishism -- The fetish is dead, long live fetishism

Through a variety of studies in the emerging field of attentional studies, this book examines and seeks alternatives to the current attention economy. Bringing together the work of leading scholars of ‘critical attention studies’ to reflect on issues such as techno-politics, socio-politics, and the politics of distraction, it offers a new and multi-disciplinary conceptualization of attention that emphasizes the connections between attention and curiosity, distraction, decoloniality and care. Above all, The Politics of Curiosity asks us to consider the nature and ambivalence of the curious forms of politics that might be taking shape in the shadow of our current attention economy. The “attention economy” has become a household name: we all know our attention is being harvested, commodified and packaged to be sold to advertisers by capitalist platforms. We all complain about it; some of us dream of disconnection; others call to fight back. By focusing on attentional deficits, and by reducing attention to being focused, however, the common view may miss wider stakes, and more promising opportunities. This collective volume provides a new frame of analysis based on three displacements. First, it relocates attentional issues within a triangulation that explores a continuum between attention, distraction and curiosity. Second, it invites us to investigate into the mental infrastructures that socially condition our perceptions and understandings of the world. Third, it points towards emancipatory politics of curiosity to provide alternatives to the attention economy. Contributions range from pedagogy to media theory, via digital studies, epistemology, sociology, political philosophy, literary history, aesthetics, film and dance studies. They gather some of the leading scholars who shaped the study of attention, questioned the values of distraction and explored the potentials of curiosity over the recent years. They extend across nine countries, four continents and seven languages, to provide a multicultural approach to these debates. Together, they help us understand how our current mental infrastructures have taken shape, under specific regimes of power and authority, in a world dominated by capital, colonialism and patriarchy. But they also sketch what can be done to redeploy them around imperatives of respect and care – from a better awareness of our mental biases, online behaviors and bodily movements, to our collective capacity to restructure classroom interactions, to launch alternative digital platforms, to build democratic movements. The first platform for discussion of the politics of attention and curiosity – and an essential point of reference for future debate – this book will appeal to scholars of sociology, politics and psychology.

"[W]hat is true of Rwanda is true in each of us; we all share in Africa." -- L'Harmattan "[This novel] comes closer than have many political scientists or historians to trying to understand why this small country... sank in such appalling violence." -- Radio France International In April of 1994, nearly a million Rwandans were killed in what would prove to be one of the swiftest, most terrifying killing sprees of the 20th century. In Murambi, The Book of Bones, Boubacar Boris Diop comes face to face with the chilling horror and overwhelming sadness of the tragedy. Now, the power of Diop's acclaimed novel is available to English-speaking readers through Fiona Mc Laughlin's crisp translation. The novel recounts the story of a Rwandan history teacher, Cornelius Uvimana, who was living and working in Djibouti at the time of the massacre. He returns to Rwanda to try to comprehend the death of his family and to write a play about the events that took place there. As the novel unfolds, Cornelius begins to understand that it is only our humanity that will save us, and that as a writer, he must bear witness to the atrocities of the genocide. From the novel: "If only by the way people are walking, you can see that tension is mounting by the minute. I can feel it almost physically. Everyone is running or at least hurrying about. I meet more and more passersby who seem to be walking around in circles. There seems to be another light in their eyes. I think of the fathers who have to face the anguished eyes of their children and who can't tell them anything. For them, the country has become an immense trap in the space of just a few hours. Death is on the prowl. They can't even dream of defending themselves. Everything has been meticulously prepared for a long time: the administration, the army, and the [militia] are going to combine forces to kill, if possible, every last one of them."

By delving into the history of the fetish-object among both modern and contemporary commentators, this book highlights the fetish-object’s role as a philosophical and religious concept of the highest significance. Historically, fetishes are implicated in specific struggles for sovereign (political) and/or religious (hierarchical) power, with their interwoven symbols defined as the primary location for transcendence in our world. This book defines the political consequences of fetish-objects within a western cultural, and primarily theological context through a comparative approach of various literatures on fetish-objects—anthropological to the psychological, Marxist to the theological. It reconceives of fetishes as a form of resistance to oppressive structures, something which motivated Christians themselves historically, and shaped our western understanding of the sacraments far more than has been acknowledged. Taking up this conversation likewise holds forth the possibility of reconceptualizing how fetish-objects and sacramental presences both speak profoundly to our late-modern selves.

Films evoke broad moods and cue particular emotions that can be broadly shared as well as individually experienced. Although the experience of emotion is central to the viewing of movies, film studies have neglected to focus attention on the emotions, relying instead on vague psychoanalytic concepts of desire. Movies, Emotion, and Mood synthesizes recent research on emotion in cognitive psychology and neurology in an effort to provide a more nuanced understanding of how film evokes emotion.