How should we regard the contemporary proliferation of images? Today, visual information is available as projected, printed and on-screen imagery, in the forms of video games, scientific data, virtual environments and architectural renderings. Fearful and anti-visualist responses to this phenomenon abound. Spread by digital technologies, images are thought to threaten the word and privilege surface value over content. Yet as they multiply, images face unprecedented competition for attention. This book explores the opportunities that can arise from the ubiquity of visual stimuli. It reveals that 'technovisuality' - the fusion of digital technology with the visual - can work 'wonders'; not so much dazzling audiences with special effects as reviving our enchantment with popular culture. Introducing a new term for an entirely new field of academic study, this book reveals the centrality of 'technovisuality' in 21st century life.
In this companion, a diverse, international and interdisciplinary group of contributors and editors examine the rapidly expanding, far-reaching field of mobile media as it intersects with art across a range of spaces—theoretical, practical and conceptual. As a vehicle for—and of—the everyday, mobile media is recalibrating the relationship between art and digital networked media, and reshaping how creative practices such as writing, photography, video art and filmmaking are being conceptualized and practised. In exploring these innovations, The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media Art pulls together comprehensive, culturally nuanced and interdisciplinary approaches; considerations of broader media ecologies and histories and political, social and cultural dynamics; and critical and considered perspectives on the intersections between mobile media and art. This book is the definitive publication for researchers, artists and students interested in comprehending all the various aspects of mobile media art, covering digital media and culture, internet studies, games studies, anthropology, sociology, geography, media and communication, cultural studies and design.
Caught as we are in a grave climate crisis that seems more irreversible with every passing year, our literary portrayals of the future often feature the dystopian collapse of the world as we know it. Science fiction explores how we got here, while pointing toward a more hopeful path forward. From an ecofeminist perspective, a core cause of our current ecological catastrophe is the patriarchal domination of nature, playing out in parallel with the oppression of women. As an alternative to dystopian futures that seem increasingly inevitable, ecofeminist science fiction helps us conjure utopias that promote environmental sustainability based on more egalitarian human relationships. Dystopias and Utopias on Earth and Beyond: Feminist Ecocriticism of Science Fiction explores the fictional worlds of such canonical novelists as Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing, and Joan Slonczewski, as well as those of lesser-known science fiction writers, as they collectively probe humanity’s greatest existential threats. Contributors from five continents provide compelling analyses of far future dystopias on Earth that are all too easy to imagine becoming reality if humankind’s current trajectory continues, as well as provocative insights into science fiction utopias set on idyllic planets orbiting distant stars, which offer liberatory alternatives that might someday be actualized in the real world. By examining the links between the destruction of the environment and the domination of women, Dystopias and Utopias on Earth and Beyond provides the tools to counteract those intertwined oppressions, helping create a foundation for a truly habitable world.
This groundbreaking and truly interdisciplinary collection of essays examines how digital media technologies require us to rethink established conceptualisations of human memory in terms of its discourses, forms and practices.
The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature explores the interplay between the domination of nature and the oppression of women, as well as liberatory alternatives, bringing together essays from leading academics in the field to facilitate cutting-edge critical readings of literature. Covering the main theoretical approaches and key literary genres of the area, this volume includes: • Examination of ecofeminism through the literatures of a diverse sampling of languages, including Hindi, Chinese, Arabic, and Spanish; native speakers of Tamil, Vietnamese, Turkish, Slovene, and Icelandic. • Analysis of core issues and topics, offering innovative approaches to interpreting literature, including: activism, animal studies, cultural studies, disability, gender essentialism, hegemonic masculinity, intersectionality, material ecocriticism, postcolonialism, posthumanism, postmodernism, race, and sentimental ecology. • Surveys key periods and genres of ecofeminism and literary criticism, including chapters on Gothic, Romantic, and Victorian literatures, children and young adult literature, mystery, and detective fictions, including interconnected genres of climate fiction, science fiction, and fantasy, and distinctive perspectives provided by travel writing, autobiography, and poetry. This collection explores how each of ecofeminism’s core concerns can foster a more emancipatory literary theory and criticism, now and in the future. This comprehensive volume will be of great interest to scholars and students of literature, ecofeminism, ecocriticism, gender studies, and the environmental humanities.
The past two decades witnessed the rise of television entertainment in China. Although television networks are still state-owned and Party-controlled in China, the ideological landscape of television programs has become increasingly diverse and even paradoxical, simultaneously subservient and defiant, nationalistic and cosmopolitan, moralistic and fun-loving, extravagant and mundane. Studying Chinese television as a key node in the network of power relationships, therefore, provides us with a unique opportunity to understand the tension-fraught and , paradox-permeated conditions of Chinese post-socialism. This book argues for a serious engagement with television entertainment. rethinking, It addresses the following questions. How is entertainment television politically and culturally significant in the Chinese context? How have political, industrial, and technological changes in the 2000s affected the way Chinese television relates to the state and society? How can we think of media regulation and censorship without perpetuating the myth of a self-serving authoritarian regime vs. a subdued cultural workforce? What do popular televisual texts tell us about the unsettled and reconfigured relations between commercial television and the state? The book presents a number of studies of popular television programs that are sensitive to the changing production and regulatory contexts for Chinese television in the twenty-first century. As an interdisciplinary study of the television industry, this book covers a number of important issues in China today, such as censorship, nationalism, consumerism, social justice, and the central and local authorities. As such, it will appeal to a broad audience including students and scholars of Chinese culture and society, media studies, television studies, and cultural studies.
How does contemporary literature respond to the digitalized media culture in which it takes part? And how do we study literature in order to shed light on these responses? Under the subsections Technology, Subjectivity, and Aesthetics, Literature in Contemporary Media Culture sets out to answer these questions. The book shows how literature over the last decade has charted the impact of new technologies on human conduct. It explores how changes in literary production, distribution, and consumption can be correlated to changes in social practices more generally. And it examines how (and if) contemporary media culture affects our understanding of literary aesthetics. Addressing Scandinavian and Anglo-American poetry and fiction produced around the beginning of the present century, Literature in Contemporary Media Culture highlights both well-known and unfamiliar literary texts. It offers cross-disciplinary methodological tools and reading strategies for studying literary phenomena such as intermedial aesthetics, the autobiographical novel, conceptual literature, and digital poetry, all of which are prevalent across national borders at the outset of the twenty-first century. This book will be of interest to students and established scholars in the fields of literature, film and media studies, and visual studies, as well as to members of the general reading public.
While a decade ago much of the discussion of new media in Asia was couched in Occidental notions of Asia as a "default setting" for technology in the future, today we are seeing a much more complex picture of contesting new media practices and production. As "new media" becomes increasingly an everyday reality for young and old across Asia through smartphones and associated devices, boundaries between art, new media, and the everyday are transformed. This Handbook addresses the historical, social, cultural, political, philosophical, artistic and economic dimensions of the region’s new media. Through an interdisciplinary revision of both "new media" and "Asia" the contributors provide new insights into the complex and contesting terrains of both notions. The Routledge Handbook of New Media in Asia will be the definitive publication for readers interested in comprehending all the various aspects of new media in Asia. It provides an authoritative, up-to-date, intellectually broad, conceptually cutting-edge guide to the important aspects of new media in the region — as the first point of consultation for researchers, advanced level undergraduate and postgraduate students in fields of new media and Asian studies.
The schizoanalytic method and the lines of flight that it has inspired align with contemporary feminist concerns and practices in productive and revealing ways in this ground-breaking collection. To address the relevance of schizoanalysis for contemporary developments in new materialism, affect theory, transnational feminism, political ontology, feminist critiques of globalization and capitalism, feminist pedagogy, and ethics, the overarching questions explored are: What can schizoanalysis do for feminist theory? What would a feminist schizoanalysis look like? Is it possible to perform a schizoanalysis of feminism? How do schizoanalytic-feminist alliances create new ways of understanding the future, sexuality and bodily transformation, political resistance, new subjectivities, and ethical relationships? Highlighting the strength, richness, and diversity of feminist perspectives this collection shows how issues of re-conceiving desire, theorizing embodiment and materiality, interrogating the status of sexuality and difference, decentring feminist practice to be inclusive of transnational and de-colonial concerns, critiques of binary logic and gender, transversal politics, and the need for new political visions in light of advanced capitalism are all enhanced by this alliance.
Cinema and audiovisual media are integral to the culture, economy and social experience of the contemporary global city. But how has the relationship between cinema and the urban environment evolved in the era of digital technology, new media and globalization? And what are the critical tools and concepts with which we can grasp this vital interconnection between space and screen, viewer and built environment? Engaging with a rapidly transforming urban world, the contributions to this collection rethink the 'cinematic city' at a global scale. By presenting a global constellation of screen cities within one volume, the book encourages juxtapositions and comparisons across the North and South to capture the global city and its dynamics of exchange, hybridity, and circulation. The contributions examine film and screen cultures in a range of locations spanning five continents: Antibes, Beijing, Buenos Aires, Busan, Cairo, Caracas, Copenhagen, Jakarta, Kolkata, Lagos, Los Angeles, Malmö, Manila, Mumbai, Nairobi, Paris, Seoul, Sète, and Shanghai. The chapters address topics that range across the contemporary film and media landscape, from popular cinema, art cinema, and film festivals to serial television, public screens, multimedia installations, and video art. Contributors: Chris Berry, Yomi Braester, Jinhee Choi, Pei-Sze Chow, Thomas Elsaesser, Malini Guha, Jonathan Haynes, Will Higbee, Igor Krstic, Christian B. Long, Joanna Page, Lawrence Webb.
