English, Drama & Film Research Collection
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- PublicationThe doctor's knife(Radical Philosophy Group, 2021-07-26)Silvia Federici is one of contemporary feminism’s celebrity thinkers, and with good reason. Her work since the 1970s on capitalism and gender has been of fundamental importance in developing theories of social reproduction. She is known as both a scholar and an activist, as a founding member of the Wages for Housework campaign. Her writings have reached a new audience in recent years through a series of essay collections published by PM Press, helping to galvanise a popular revival of Marxist feminism that offers a valuable counterpoint to the shallow neoliberal individualism that has underlaid much of feminism’s mainstream resurgence. Federici remains distinctive in Anglophone feminism for her attention to environmental issues and to feminist justice on a global scale; her concern with elder care and ageing is similarly unusual and praiseworthy. Her work on social reproduction has taken on a renewed urgency in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, with women disproportionately bearing the burden of homeschooling and increased demands for unpaid care.
5 - PublicationCaptive Audiences: Quarantining with Tiger King(Routledge, 2022)Shortly after a deadly virus leapt (possibly) from bats or pangolins to humans in late 2019, much of the quarantined Western world found itself enraptured by the spectacle of another boundary breach: humans handling wild cats in Netflix’s series Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness.
6 - PublicationGirls Like Us(Post45, 2021-09-11)In summer 2014, as Israel's war on Gaza intensified, Israeli actor Gal Gadot uploaded a selfie to Facebook that drew worldwide attention. It showed Gadot and her daughter covering their eyes after lighting Shabbat candles, with the caption "I am sending my love and prayers to my fellow Israeli citizens. Especially to all the boys and girls who are risking their lives protecting my country against the horrific acts conducted by Hamas, who are hiding like cowards behind women and children...We shall overcome!!! Shabbat Shalom! #weareright #freegazafromhamas #stopterror #coexistance #loveidf."
5 - PublicationHydrocultures(Routledge, 2021-09-01)It is impossible to think about energy without thinking about water. The world’s bodies of water are sites of energy extraction and subjected to some of petroculture’s most devastating violence, from Deepwater Horizon to the Niger Delta. Water is crucial to the extraction, processing, refinement and transportation of fossil and nuclear energy, often with less visible but equally long-term impacts on water supply, as recognised by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in their protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline. The impacts of fossil fuels on our climate are primarily registered in watery terms, through fears of rising sea levels and ‘water wars’. Access to fresh water, meanwhile, requires energy: water must be pumped, purified and delivered to point of use, a process that is becoming increasingly energy-intensive with the rise of desalination. Water, then, is deeply implicated in the fossil fuel economy. It also, however, provides the basis for alternatives. We might think first of hydropower dams, the dominant source of renewable energy, and a booming industry once again. Yet the ‘green’ credentials of big dams have justifiably been called into question, just as their production of displacement on a mass scale is now widely recognised. Nevertheless, thinking with water itself can have valuable ecological ends. Water provides a reminder of the inextricability of our bodies from the world and from each other, and a prompt to imagine different, non-exploitative relationships with nonhuman nature that renew the notion of the commons.
5 - PublicationIntroduction: On the Meanings of 'American Reality'(Palgrave Macmillan, 2022-08-24)This chapter begins by considering the dominant affective state that came into being after the election of Trump in 2016, namely shock and disbelief, and contextualizes it through two opposed yet complementary impulses. First, it illustrates how political and cultural derealization was actively promoted by Trump himself and his administration, to then consider the liberal biases that were already implicit in the widespread perception that reality was collapsing. In the context of the emergence of two and seemingly irreconcilable American realities, ever more polarized along partisan lines, the literary world felt compelled to respond and did so publicly. This chapter considers various initiatives but focuses in particular on the insights provided by writers Aleksandar Hemon, Jan Clausen, and Viet Thanh Nguyen, who denounced the exceptionalist rhetoric that was often employed and called for a more engaged and less self-deluded American literature. It then proceeds to map the emerging corpus of ‘Trump fiction’ and existing scholarly studies, and argues that the analyses offered in American Literature in the Era of Trumpism contribute not only to the continued understanding of the landscape of American literature after 2016, but also to the long-standing scholarly tradition of decentering the notion of ‘America.’
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