In the introduction to this special issue, we argued that ambivalence is a disposition animating all criticism, even if only its disavowal, but that ambivalence becomes particularly charged in criticism…
Issues
Caribbean Conflagrations: Camouflage, Ambivalence, and Anti-Analogical Entanglements
Beauty’s Blemish: Figuring Caribbean Landscapes The environmental figures that seek to portray the Caribbean’s strange place in the world can be easily recalled and most attributed to the work of…
Racialized Femininity and Representation’s Ambivalences in Trajal Harrell’s The Return of La Argentina
The audience is seated several rows deep, facing a blank gallery wall. As they wait, their chatter buzzes through the room. From an open panel at one side, Trajal Harrell…
Reading Interculturalism After Kalamandalam
In the first half of the last century, scores of Western artists and art historians traveled to India to have a firsthand experience of its variegated heritage of performing arts…
In the Same Room, Again: Anecdotes about Feminist Meetings
A Light Loose Commitment When I was a graduate student in New York, I worked as the managing editor of a feminist academic journal that focused on art and performance…
Circuit Training: The Critique of Narrative Reason
The system must be oriented to openness de novo. Peter Sloterdijk We fence our encounters in with gates. Erving Goffman Form, in the narrow sense, is nothing more than the…
An Introduction to Ambivalent Criticism
This special issue doesn’t propose Ambivalent Criticism™. Instead, this issue forwards essays that reflect on a style in which we already do criticism — a style we are calling ambivalent…
Introduction: Contemporary Culture After Data Science
The computational study of contemporary culture is experiencing something of a renaissance across the university. Computer scientists are writing algorithms to identify the emotional arcs of novels.1 Sociologists are building…
Content-Era Ethics
Between 2008 and 2012, social media changed. Previously, companies like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr had been small, independent startups. Their sites were walled gardens where users could create and…
Squatter Regionalism: Postwar Fiction, Geography, and the Program Era
The last chapter of Tom Lutz’s landmark study Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value (2004) is ambitiously titled “The New New Regionalism and the Future of Literature.” In it, Lutz reminds…