This essay explores how the early American stage functioned as an incubator for ideas about national identity, artistic expression, and masculinity. Reading four plays from the early years of the Republic – Royall Tyler’s The Contrast, William Dunlap’s Andre´, John Augustus Stone’s Metamora, and Robert Montgomery Bird’s The Gladiator, I demonstrat…[Read more]

This article analyzes the connections between Lorde’s representations of blindness in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and its connection to lesbian sexuality.

Feminist resistance has been crucial for Argentina’s recovery from the military dictatorship of 1976-1983. Alicia Partnoy was “disappeared” into one of hundreds of torture centers sardonically called “Little Schools.” After her release and exile to the United States, she published her poetic testimony, The Little School, with Cleis Press in 1986.…[Read more]

Inspired by my work on the Women in Book History Bibliography, this presentation takes a different angle on discussions of women’s texts in digital archives. The WBHB collects secondary sources on women’s writing and labor over a broad range of languages, subjects, geographic locations, and time periods. Because we collect secondary sources, we…[Read more]

This paper highlights the multiple modalities through which writer, activist, and educator June Jordan materialized a placemaking pedagogy, grounded in the art of structural critique and using language in the service of social change. In this paper, I show how Jordan “implicitly instructs” her students and young readers in cultivating a str…[Read more]

Encounters with the Russian Avant Garde

Since the 1950s, Brigadoon has been accepted as a representation of Scotland. Brigadoon’s Scotland consists of a highland landscape with lochs, mists, castles populated by fair maidens, warlike yet sensitive kilted men and bagpipers. Much of this comes from the invented traditions of Scotland, particularly kilts and clan tartans; late n…[Read more]

Ladies that UX (LTUX) is an international organization focused on mentoring women in the software industry. In order to explore both the mission and the focus of the international organization and smaller, localized chapters of LTUX, we conducted a series of surveys and interviews. These surveys focused on how local groups of LTUX were formed and…[Read more]

Users of contemporary media technology in religious settings often oscillate between immediacy in spiritual interaction and the increasing complexity and visibility of media technology as human artifacts. Drawing on approaches to mediation from philosophy and media theory, I examine Mauritian Muslims’ uses of sound reproduction in performing a d…[Read more]

This essay discusses anthropological approaches to the study of media interacting with contexts of ethnic and religious diversity. The main argument is that not only issues of access to and exclusion from public spheres are relevant for an understanding of media and pluralism. Background assumptions and ideologies about media technologies and…[Read more]

In this article I suggest that the rapidly growing interest in the intersection of linguistic anthropology and media needs to be accompanied by a deeper investigation of the mediality of language. Discussing Mauritian Muslims’ uses of sound reproduction in religious events revolving around the recitation of devotional poetry, this paper explores h…[Read more]

This review addresses recent work on media practices in situations of religious diversity. I hereby distinguish three approaches in this literature: the media politics of diversity, religious diversity and the public sphere, and the diversity of religious mediations. Whereas the first focuses on the control of representations of religious…[Read more]

Die massenmediale Durchdringung des Alltagslebens ist ein globales Phänomen und stellt die sozialwissenschaftliche Forschung vor wichtige Fragen. Wie beeinflussen Technologien von Film und Fernsehen die Wahrnehmung der uns umgebenden Welt? Oder bestimmt umgekehrt unsere soziokulturelle Wirklichkeit diese Technologien? Welche Akteure sind bei der…[Read more]

This article is a print rendition of a web-based experimental publication which reflects upon and at the same time is itself an example of performative publishing. A performative publication wants to explore how we can bring together and align more closely the material form of a publication with its content. Making use of hypothes.is software, the…[Read more]

Introductory article to a section on changing media and religious renegotiations

In this contribution, I critically engage with the notion of the postsecular through the lens of religious mobilizations among Muslims in Mauritius and in Mumbai. Religious activism among Sunnis in Mauritius and Shi‘ites in Mumbai conforms to a trend of increasingly salient public religion in the world today that has led to widespread doubting o…[Read more]

In this article, I approach regimes of time as a medial question, examining the interplay of different temporalities in ritual and media practices among Hindus in Mauritius and Twelver Shi’ite Muslims in Mumbai. These interactions consist of fluctuations between modernist linear modes of time and suspensions of the distinctions of past, present, a…[Read more]

This paper develops an analysis of documentary sources of chilean’s Public Health Policy of Indigenous Peoples from a critical medical anthropology standpoint. Understanding public policy as ideological productions, it analyses the axis of interculturality, equity and participation in the context of Chile’s governmental “Neoliberal multi…[Read more]

In this article I demonstrate how listeners understand musical processes with their bodies, and how their gestures can be used to build analytical models. Specifically, I draw on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to argue that situated, active listeners project their motor intentional gestures inside music, where they reconstitute the…[Read more]