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3 books match the query 'Emergent Forms'

cover of A Dream to Conjure: Emergent Forms in Caribbean Art and Cinema

A Dream to Conjure

Emergent Forms in Caribbean Art and Cinema

Yasmine Espert

Duke University Press, 2027

In A Dream to Conjure, Yasmine Espert considers the hopes and imaginings of Caribbean film from its beginnings. Focusing on narratives of migration from the late 1980s to the late 2010s, Espert attends to the restorative and life-affirming practices that diasporic Caribbean filmmakers conjure to assert their wellbeing, sovereignty, and sense of relation to the Caribbean. She examines how their embodied, aesthetic, and political practices set precedents for organizing efforts and continue a tradition of resistance to colonial extraction. Drawing from her own conversations and collaborations with these artists, she elevates the study with a deeper reflection on what it is like to create in, and about, lands that many said had no place in the film industry. Through an anticolonial, queer-of-color framework, Espert engages the films, dreams, and acts of Caribbean creators as multisensory, time-bending forms of collective engagement that defy colonial logic and prioritize those most vulnerable under regimes of oppression.
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cover of Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice

Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice

Michael M. J. Fischer

Duke University Press, 2003

Anthropology as Cultural Critique helped redefine cultural anthropology in the 1980s. Now, with Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice, pathbreaking scholar Michael M. J. Fischer moves the discussion to a consideration of the groundwork laid in the 1990s for engagements with the fast-changing worlds of technoscience, telemedia saturation, and the reconstruction of societies after massive trauma. Fischer argues that new methodologies and conceptual tools are necessitated by the fact that cultures of every kind are becoming more complex and differentiated at the same time that globalization and modernization are bringing them into exponentially increased interaction. Anthropology, Fischer explains, now operates in a series of third spaces well beyond the nineteenth- and twentieth-century dualisms of us/them, primitive/civilized, East/West, or North/South. He contends that more useful paradigms—such as informatics, multidimensional scaling, autoimmunity, and visual literacy beyond the frame—derive from the contemporary sciences and media technologies.

A vigorous advocate of the anthropological voice and method, Fischer emphasizes the ethical dimension of cultural anthropology. Ethnography, he suggests, is uniquely situated to gather and convey observations fundamental to the creation of new social institutions for an evolving civil society. In Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice Fischer considers a dazzling array of subjects—among them Iranian and Polish cinema, cyberspace, autobiographical and fictional narrative, and genomic biotechnologies—and, in the process, demonstrates a cultural anthropology for a highly networked world. He lays the groundwork for a renewed and powerful twenty-first-century anthropology characterized by a continued insistence on empirical fieldwork, engagements with other disciplines, and dialogue with interlocutors around the globe.

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cover of Probing Arts and Emergent Forms of Life

Probing Arts and Emergent Forms of Life

Michael M. J. Fischer

Duke University Press, 2023

In Probing Arts and Emergent Forms of Life Michael M. J. Fischer calls for a new anthropology of the arts that attends to the materialities and technologies of the world as it exists today. Fischer examines the work of key Southeast and East Asian artists within the crucibles of unequal access, geopolitics, reverberating past traumas, and emergent socialities. He outlines the work of artist-theorists---including Entang Wiharso, Sally Smart, Charles Lim, Zai Kuning, and Kiran Kumar---who speculate about changing the world in ways that are attuned to its cultivation, repair, and rethinking in the Anthropocene. Their artistic vocabulary not only undoes Western art models and categories; it probes the unfolding future, addresses past trauma, and creates contested, vibrant, and flourishing spaces. Throughout Indonesia, Korea, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam---and from Kumar’s experimental dance to Kuning’s rattan and beeswax ghost ships to Lim’s videography of Singapore from the sea---Fischer argues that these artists’ theoretical discourses should be privileged over those of the curators, historians, critics, and other gatekeepers who protect and claim art worlds for themselves.
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