Un Timely Crises

Un)timely Crises explores how ‘crisis’—as a narrative, concept, grammar, and experience—structures time and space. This collectively written volume extends Bakhtin’s ‘chronotope’ to challenge mobilizations of crisis within neoliberal governmentality. The book explores how contemporary crises can trigger memories and traumas of earlier events as well as foster practices of resistance and alternative visions of the future. Drawing from across disciplines and geographical contexts, (Un)timely Crises reimagines the relation of ‘crisis’ with ‘critique’, proposing future trajectories for thinking and living in and through crisis.

This volume explores the historical and theoretical underpinnings of personal liberty and free government and provides an analysis of the crisis of civic consciousness endangering both.

The planetary instantaneity that digital technologies have enabled is leading to an effacement of the divisions that separate the past from the future, ensuring that the present is ubiquitous. While contemporary architecture seems to have lost the capacity to conceive of the past as a transformative force, this book stresses the need to rethink today's complex temporal mechanisms through the notion of the untimely. This concept opens up a whole spectrum of possibilities to go beyond what seems predictable. The contributors to this book employ critical concepts and architectural design tools in order to offer experimental and speculative approaches for unknown futures of architecture.

An examination of the influential Italian architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri's historical construction of contemporary architecture. The influential Italian architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri (1935–1994) invoked the productive possibilities of crisis, writing that history is a "project of crisis" (progetto di crisi). In this entry in the Writing Architecture series, Marco Biraghi explores Tafuri's multifaceted and often knotty oeuvre, using the historian's concept of a project of crisis as a lens through which to examine his historical construction of contemporary architecture. Mindful of Tafuri's statement that there is no such thing as criticism, only history, Biraghi carefully maps the influences on Tafuri's writing—Walter Benjamin, Karl Krauss, Massimo Cacciari, and the architect Ludovico Quaroni, among others—in order to create a portrait of one of the most complex minds in twentieth-century architecture and architectural history. Tracing an arc from Tafuri's first articles in the magazine Contropiano to the idea of contradiction at the center of the project of crisis, Biraghi cites Tafuri's writing on some of his contemporaries, including Louis Kahn, Le Corbusier, Robert Venturi, Aldo Rossi, and the "Five Architects" (Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk, and Richard Meier). Tafuri's historical construction of the contemporary, Biraghi explains, is based on the idea that the past is open, providing the present with ever-changing and indeterminate form. There is no contradiction between Tafuri the historian and Tafuri the contemporary critic, only the greatest possible integration. The importance of Tafuri's interpretation of architecture goes beyond mere academic or historiographic interest, Biraghi argues; Tafuri's notion of the project of crisis is fundamentally important in understanding our present-day architectural condition

While heteronormativity continues to permeate nearly all threads of the socio-cultural fabric, several early twenty-first-century German films offer insight into how we might challenge that dominance and disrupt its linear construction of time. Examining the fluidity of time in eight contemporary films of the Berlin School, Untimely Bodies, Untimely Aesthetics foregrounds how queer conceptualizations of temporality can engage notions of subjectivity, relationality, and intimacy in visual representations. Each film depicts figures that grapple with an unattainable desire for connection, placed in landscapes shaped by hegemonic heteronormative intimacies, and a linear temporal organization of life that conforms to mainstream, traditional rhythms, and milestones. Simone Pfleger proposes a new model for viewing non-normative relationality and intimacies, using the concept of untimeliness as an analytical framework for examining content and aesthetics. In these films, untimeliness provides an alternative to the romanticization of progress by charting how the filmic figures understand themselves and relate to one another in various spheres: work, love, sex, home, family, and self. Ultimately, Pfleger shows how the texts uncover a temporary promise of breaking free from restrictive social structures, even as they make clear that this schism cannot and should not be permanent. By proposing time as a critical lens through which to investigate our relationships and intimacies, Untimely Bodies, Untimely Aesthetics offers a new way to think about film and encourages moviegoers to turn the analysis back toward themselves and their own desires, expectations, assumptions, and adherence to or deviation from normative narratives in their own lives.

The Untimely Present examines the fiction produced in the aftermath of the recent Latin American dictatorships, particularly those in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. Idelber Avelar argues that through their legacy of social trauma and obliteration of history, these military regimes gave rise to unique and revealing practices of mourning that pervade the literature of this region. The theory of postdictatorial writing developed here is informed by a rereading of the links between mourning and mimesis in Plato, Nietzsche's notion of the untimely, Benjamin's theory of allegory, and psychoanalytic / deconstructive conceptions of mourning. Avelar starts by offering new readings of works produced before the dictatorship era, in what is often considered the boom of Latin American fiction. Distancing himself from previous celebratory interpretations, he understands the boom as a manifestation of mourning for literature's declining aura. Against this background, Avelar offers a reassessment of testimonial forms, social scientific theories of authoritarianism, current transformations undergone by the university, and an analysis of a number of novels by some of today's foremost Latin American writers--such as Ricardo Piglia, Silviano Santiago, Diamela Eltit, João Gilberto Noll, and Tununa Mercado. Avelar shows how the 'untimely' quality of these narratives is related to the position of literature itself, a mode of expression threatened with obsolescence. This book will appeal to scholars and students of Latin American literature and politics, cultural studies, and comparative literature, as well as to all those interested in the role of literature in postmodernity.

Addresses the three pillars of an integrated approach to drought risk reduction: monitoring and early warning and information delivery systems; vulnerability and impact assessment; and mitigation and response. Provides sound analyses of the growing challenges presented by drought events and the shortcomings and opportunities for drought policy and preparedness in the context of water-related stresses across many jurisdictions Discusses in-depth case studies from researchers and practitioners dealing with drought and water-sensitive issues at local, national, and global scales. Presents the new science, theory and state-of the-art methods that have emerged throughout the world since the publication of the first edition.

As atrocity has become characteristic of modern history, testimonial writing has become a major twentieth-century genre. Untimely Interventions relates testimonial writing, or witnessing, to the cultural situation of aftermath, exploring ways in which a culture can be haunted by its own history. Ross Chambers argues that culture produces itself as civilized by denying the forms of collective violence and other traumatic experience that it cannot control. In the context of such denial, personal accounts of collective disaster can function as a form of counter-denial. By investigating a range of writing on AIDS, the First World War, and the Holocaust, Chambers shows how such writing produces a rhetorical effect of haunting, as it seeks to describe the reality of those experiences culture renders unspeakable. Ross Chambers is Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Michigan. His other books includeFacing It: AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author.