Media Criticism
Diary of a Digital Plague Year with Dennis Broe
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsDENNIS BROE, author of Birth of the Binge: Serial TV and The End of Leisure, will be talking about his new book Diary of a Digital Plague Year: Corona Culture, Serial TV and The Rise of The Streaming Services. The book offers a blow-by-blow account of the ongoing confinement, charting the changes in our lives exacerbated by the coronavirus. Corona culture is a digital culture extraordinaire for some, while for others it has increased panic and terror about being at work.
Disputing the Deluge with Darko Suvin joined by Editor Hugh O’Connell and special guests
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsDarko Suvin’s writings from the early 2000s investigate the function of literary genres and reconsider the relationship between science fiction and fantasy, the essays collected here highlight the value of science fiction for grappling with the key events and transformations of recent years. Suvin’s interrogations show how speculative fiction has responded to 9/11, the global war on terror, the 2008economic collapse, and the rise of conservative populism, along with contemporary critical utopian analyses of the Capitalocene, the climate crisis,COVID19, and the decline of democracy. This collection allows new generations of students and scholars to engage directly with his work and its continuing importance and timeliness.
Late Capitalist Fascism
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYWhat if fascism can no longer be confined to political parties or ultra nationalist politicians but has become something much more diffuse that is spread across our societies as cultural expressions and psychological states? This is the thesis developed by Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, who argues that late capitalism has produced hollowed-out and exchangeable subjectivities that provide a breeding ground for a new kind of diffuse, banal fascism.
The Art of Activism
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYTHE ART OF ACTIVISM brings together the authors’ extensive practical knowledge—gleaned from over a decade’s experience training activists around the world—with theoretical insights from fields as far-ranging as cultural studies and cognitive science.
The Hard Right and the Political Parties of Capital
2nd in the Socialist Register 58 Series: Old Polarizations, New Contradictions: The Crisis of Centrism
BILL FLETCHER on Trump and the Danger of Right-wing Populism in the US
SAMIR GANDESHA on Identity Crisis: The Politics of False Concreteness
INGAR SOLTY on Market Polarization Means Political Polarization
Iran Awakening: Novels by Iranian Women
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe winter 2023 series of the MEP Literature Group focuses on Iranian women writing since the 1978-79 Revolution whose stories are set in Iran in the 20th and 21st centuries. We will read three novels from the 1920s to the present: 'The Gardens of Consolation,' by Parisa Reza; 'Women Without Men,' by Shahrnush Parsipur; and 'Man of My Time,' by Dalia Sofer.
Woman, Life, Freedom: Iran through the Lens of Antonio Gramsci
On-Line via Zoom You will receive Zoom link by email before the event., NYJuxtaposing documentary video footage with selected readings from Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, we will deepen our understanding of the current uprising among women and young people in Iran. Applying Gramsci's dual perspective on Individuality/Universality, Hegemony/Authority, Force/Consent, Terror/Legitimacy, Strategy/Tactic, Agitation/Propaganda, and State/Civil Society, we will examine spontaneous movements, subaltern groups, and the balance of domestic and international forces. Convened and facilitated by Piruz Alemi.
The Fallout of War: Metonyms of Militarism
Video available on YouTubeVideo available at https://youtu.be/h0dYxI2zDoY
In the second of two linked sessions, the Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture presents their collective research on a keyword of contemporary cultural studies - war - and investigates its many valences as lived reality and as metaphor. Taking account of war as constitutive of the present, the working group explores war's myriad meanings.
Summertime … and the Living Ain’t Easy: Black Noir
Online: Zoom link will be provided to registered participantsThe Marxist Education Project's Literature Group continues its summertime tradition of reading noir fiction: the popular American crime genre that explores the corruption of society - and, in our selected books by Chester Himes, Walter Mosley, Attica Locke, and Bill Fletcher Jr. - corruption in the workplace, in unions, and among workers.