Imagining Otherwise

This is a book of failure and mistakes; it begins with what is stolen from us and proposes only an invitation to imagine. In these playful written experiments, Lola Olufemi navigates the space between what is and what could be. Weaving together fragmentary reflections in prose and poetry, this is an exploration of the possibility of living differently, grounded in black feminist scholarship and political organising. Olufemi shows that the horizon is not an immaterial state we gesture toward. Instead, propelled by the motion of thinking against and beyond, we must invent the future now and never let go of the otherwise.

Andrew Cutrofello's book performs a psychoanalytic inversion of transcendental philosophy, taking Kant's synthetic a prior judgments and reading them in terms of a foreclosed Kantian category--that of the analytic a posteriori. Working primarily out of Freudian and Lacanian problematics, Cutrofello not only subjects Kantian thought to psychoanalytic questioning, but also develops a systematic critique of metapsychology itself, disclosing and assessing its own paralogisms, antinomies, ideal, and ethics. This is a provocative reflection on the tensions between the Enlightenment project of critique and psychoanalytic theory.

It is possible to beirrational without beinguneconomic ? What is the link betweenValue andvalues ? What do economists do when theyexplain ? We live in times when the economic logic has become unquestionable and all-powerful so that our quotidian economic experiences are defined by their scientific construal. This book is the result of a

How Victorian authors engaged the imaginations of their readers and elevated the novel to new heights As novel publication exploded in nineteenth-century Britain, writers such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot learned from experience—sometimes grudgingly—that readers tend to make their own imaginative contributions to fictional worlds. Imagining Otherwise shows how Victorian writers acknowledged, grappled with, and ultimately enlisted the prerogative of readers to conjure alternatives and add depth to the words on the page. Debra Gettelman provides incisive new readings of novels such as Sense and Sensibility, Little Dorrit, and Middlemarch, exploring how novelists known for prescriptive and didactic narrative voices were at the same time exploring the aesthetic potential for the reader’s independent imagination to lend nuance and authenticity to fiction. Modernist authors of the twentieth century have long been considered pioneers in cultivating the reader’s capacity to imagine what is not said as part of the art of fiction. Gettelman uncovers the roots of this tradition of novel reading a century earlier and challenges literary criticism that dismisses this spontaneous, readerly impulse as being unworthy of serious examination. As readers demand novels with relatable characters and fan fiction grows in popularity, the reader’s imagination has become a determining element of today’s literary environment. Imagining Otherwise takes a deeper look at this history, offering a critical perspective on how we came to view fiction as a site of imaginative appropriation.

This collection of articles is a sociolinguistic response to the recent explosion of scholarly interest in issues of identity. Identity is central to all human beings as we are all concerned with how to conceive of ourselves, present ourselves and comprehend our relationships with others. The book tackles the problem of how personal identity is made visible and intelligible to others through language, and how this may be constrained. Part One, Emblematic identities, focuses on the construction of self-definitions based on various forms of group identities, including national and ethnic ones. Part Two, Multicultural Identities, looks at negotiation of identities in multicultural contexts involving relations of power, drawing on examples from Europe and the Americas. Finally, Part Three, Emergent Identities, collects empirical studies based on a close reading of texts in which identities are being articulated and negotiated.

In a world of political upheaval, rising inequality, catastrophic climate change, and widespread doubt of even the most authoritative sources of information, is there a place for critique? This book calls for a systematic reappraisal of critical thinking—its assumptions, its practices, its genealogy, its predicament—following the principle that critique can only start with self-critique. In A Time for Critique, Didier Fassin, Bernard E. Harcourt, and a group of eminent political theorists, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, and literary and legal scholars reflect on the multiplying contexts and forms of critical discourse and on the social actors and social movements engaged in them. How can one maintain sufficient distance from the eventful present without doing it an injustice? How can one address contemporary issues without repudiating the intellectual legacies of the past? How can one avoid the disconnection between theory and action? How can critique be both public and collective? These provocative questions are addressed by revisiting the works of Foucault and Arendt, Said and Césaire, Benjamin and Du Bois, but they are also given substance through on-the-ground case studies that treat subaltern criticism in Palestine, emancipatory mobilizations in Syria, the antitorture campaigns of Sri Lankan activists, and the abolitionism of the African American critical resistance and undercommons movements in the United States. Examining lucidly the present challenges of critique, A Time for Critique shows how its theoretical reassessment and its emerging forms can illuminate the imaginative modalities to rejuvenate critical praxis.

DIVA critical examination of what constitutes the varied positions grouped together as Asian American, seen in relation to both American and transnational forces./div

While feminist art history and queer theory both have a strong presence in academic discourse, there is no clear existing queer feminist art history. This book examines how and why this is the case. Otherwise: Imagining queer feminist art histories addresses the historiographic and politicalquestions arising from the relationship between art history and queer theory in order to help map exclusions and to offer models of a new queer feminist art historical or curatorial approach in a European-North American context and beyond. Including essays by both emerging scholars and renownedfeminist art historians, critics and queer theorists, as well as an extensive historical chapter contextualising the interrelated but never fully coextensive developments of feminist art and art history, and queer theories of visual culture, Otherwise is a crucial resource for specialists andstudents seeking to enrich the understanding of the relationship between gender politics and visual culture.Otherwise: Imagining queer feminist art histories is oriented towards students at all levels, as well as scholars and practitioners in art and performance, art history and gender studies, visual culture studies, performance studies and other fields in the arts and humanities dealing with queertheory, feminist theory and cultural history. The book will also be of interest to museum-goers and those interested in the visual arts and performance art in general, a growing audience with the popularisation of art and performance across the now global art world.