The Haunting of a Modernism Conceived Differently
InVisible Culture
Tag: Articles
Re-reading “Mourning and Militancy” and its Sources in 2022
InVisible Culture
Manhattan-Hanover Transfer
InVisible Culture
Cultivating (In)attention, Listening to Noise
by Emily Bock Featured image: Chantal Regnault, Legendary Voguer Willi Ninja wearing a Thierry Mugler body piece, 1989. Photo courtesy of the photographer. For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to …
Cracks of Productivity: The Vitality of the “flesh” in Danzad Malditos
By Irene Alcubilla Troughton “Are we not in awe of this piece of flesh called our “body,” of this aching meat called our “self” expressing the abject and simultaneously divine potency of life?” —Rosi Braidotti1 Introduction Idleness is usually seen as …
The House That Ghosts Built (And Mediums Performed)
By Paula Vilaplana de Miguel Featured image: Seances, a popular entertainment in the late 19th century, under a red light. *The following work acknowledges that the phenomenon of haunting is neither uniquely Western nor exclusively related to the Spiri…
Black Futurities: Shape-Shifting beyond the Limits of the Human
by Hazel V. Carby Please follow each link to images, videos or sound as they occur because they are integral to the narrative. They thought they were tasting the future (which for some peopletasted like cardboard and for other people tasted like sugar)…
What’s Haunting Black Feminism?
by Alanna Prince and Alisa V. Prince Two Black Feminists Go For A Walk On a Wednesday afternoon, we walked down Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, our hometown. We saw the center aisle of the street lined with older white people holding signs for Black…
Athazagoraphilia: On the End(s) of Dreaming
By Jerome P. Dent, Jr. In the introductory chapter of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, entitled “When History Sleeps,” scholar and activist Robin D.G. Kelley ties his own political engagement with his mother’s “dream of a new world,” an i…
Get Down: Funk, Movement, and the End of the Great Migrations
By Patrick Sullivan Funk is neither an essence nor a Black metaphysics but rather should be seen as a complex musical and aesthetic form that was created by Black artists to respond to and mediate Black experience at the end of the Great Migrations (19…
Attuned Within, Attuned Without: Hazel Carby and the Lessons of Leadership
By Michelle Ann Stephens I have always been someone who is most comfortable in her head. Whether daydreaming, fantasizing or developing an idea, time spent creatively in my own mind has always come easily. In these strange times, as we all live through…
Susceptible Archives
By Anne Anlin Cheng In Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact and Exoticism in Modern America, a study of early Asian American sociologists who contributed to the birth of the famous Chicago School of Sociology, Henry Yu addresses the paradoxes of and …
Studying With Hazel Carby
By Heather V. Vermeulen October 27, 2019 Dear Hazel, I’ve decided to write you a letter. When I think about being your student, I think first of our conversations—in office hours, over coffee, via email—so this makes sense to me as a form.1 You are not…
On Needing Black Studies
By Kathryn A. Mariner Featured Image: Protest at RPD, Rochester NY, May 2020, Copyright Erica Jae. As I was preparing comments for this roundtable toward the end of 2018, I felt a bit like an interloper because I realized I had never—at least in my for…
Black Studies and the “Ideology of Relevance”
By Cilas Kemedjio Featured Image: Pool of Freedom, Washington DC, August 2020, Copyright Erica Jae. The late Professor Francis Abiola Irele (1936-2017) delivered an inaugural lecture at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria on November 22, 1982, which trad…
Black Studies in Haudenosaunee Country
By Brianna Theobald Featured Image: Two young Mexican-American protesters at the 2020 Indigenous People’s Day rally at the Seneca town of Canawaugus. Photograph courtesy of Michael Leroy Oberg. In January 2019, the University of Rochester hosted …
Extirpation is Not an Option: An Esperantic Vision of a Future for Black Studies from the Other Side of the Pacific
by Will Bridges Featured Image: Protestors on the steps of Rochester City Hall, September 7, 2020. Photo by Quajay Donnell. The promise is of “world-wide welcome” for the homeless and those yearning to breathe free. But Trump has no words of welcome fo…
The National Archives
By Hazel V. Carby Featured image: Windrush Stories exhibition at the British Library, 2018. Photo courtesy of Leon van Kemenade. I dressed conservatively; I did not appear to be a disruptive or unruly researcher. I was indistinguishable from the o…
“Negros, aquí? Blacks, here?”: Blackness in the Mexican Archive
By Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva Featured image: Black Lives Matter, Washington DC, August 2020, Copyright Erica Jae. “If someone I found disappeared without explanation from a subsequent record, I hoped they ran, ran fast and far and re-named themselves s…
Archival-Futurism: Archives as Social Justice
By Miranda Mims Featured image: Inscriptions at MLK Park community installation “The Empire Strikes Black,” created by public artist Shawn Dunwoody. Photo by Quajay Donnell. There should be a space for alternative realities, alternative way…
Wait Wait… Don’t Play Me: The Clicker Game Genre and Configuring Everyday Temporalities
By Oscar Moralde “We do not say that we have learnt, and that anything is made new or beautiful by mere lapses of time; for we regard time itself as destroying rather than producing, for what is counted in time is movement, and movement dislodges…
The Kinesthetic Index: Video Games and the Body of Motion Capture
Written by Grant Bollmer In this essay, I present a history of the graphic adventure genre of video and computer games and its attempts at achieving a kind of cinematic realism through the registration of the body. In reviewing the history of this genr…
Playful (Counter)Publics: Game Mods as Rhetorical Forms of Active and Subversive Player Participation
By Nicole Kurashige Introduction Though most digital humanities scholars readily agree that game developers need to offer more progressive functions and options to enhance player agency, such recommendations for further research or action often ignore …
The Monster Has Kind Eyes: Intimacy and Frustration in The Last Guardian
By Kaelan Doyle-Myerscough The Last Guardian is a 2016 single-player adventure game that follows the relationship between an unnamed young boy and a giant gryphon-like creature, referred to as Trico, as they navigate the ruins of an ancient, apparently…
“I’m controlling and composing”: The role of metacognition in The Incredible Machine
By Marc Ouellette1 Up, up and away: Introduction The mouse sets the bowling ball in motion, which falls and squeezes the bellows, which sends out a puff of air, which sends the balloon into the gears that are connect by a belt to another mouse’s exerci…