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Issue 8: Ambivalent Criticism, Peer Reviewed Articles

Afterword: Ten More Sites of Ambivalence in the “Open”

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…

Issue 8: Ambivalent Criticism, Peer Reviewed Articles

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…

Issue 8: Ambivalent Criticism, Peer Reviewed Articles

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…

Issue 8: Ambivalent Criticism, Peer Reviewed Articles

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…

Issue 8: Ambivalent Criticism, Peer Reviewed Articles

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…

Issue 8: Ambivalent Criticism, Peer Reviewed Articles

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…

Issue 8: Ambivalent Criticism, Peer Reviewed Articles

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…

Peer Reviewed Articles

Contemporaries Essays, W(h)ither the Christian Right?

The Praise Band to English Professor Pipeline

Exchanging My Equipment for a Living I was recently searching for Kenneth Burke’s essay “Literature as Equipment for Living” when, by some algorithmic accident, the results confronted me with memories…

Contemporaries Essays, W(h)ither the Christian Right?

The Things You Can’t Teach in Evangelical Literature Classes

I deconstructed my faith completely while teaching English at an evangelical school, and while the school is not the main reason I left the faith, it is absolutely the reason…