Henriette Gunkel

Simon O'Sullivan

Ayesha Hameed

Futures and Fictions

Chrysanthi Nigianni

Fanny Söderbäck

"This exciting collection offers a range of undutiful feminist voices of our time. Employing experimental modes of thinking and writing, the contributors remain faithful to the feminist tradition of subversion and resistance, while refusing to submit to its political tradition of a loving sisterhood or dutiful daughterhood. Through productive disagreement and cognitive dissonance, the essays presented here reflect the specific circumstances of our present, and attempt to dream and envision possible alternatives for the future. The volume thus invites us to think of the becoming of feminism itself, and the possibilities of future feminisms-to-come. Contributors include Rosi Braidotti, Judith Butler, Claire Colebrook, Elizabeth Grosz, and Jack Halberstam"--

new directions in feminist thought and practice

Undutiful daughters

Sexual identity has emerged into the national discourse of post-apartheid South Africa, bringing the subject of rights and the question of gender relations and cultural authenticity into the focus of the nation state’s politics. This book is a fascinating reflection on the effects of these discourses on non-normative modes of sexuality and intimacy and on the country more generally. While in 1996, South Africa became the first country in the world that explicitly incorporated lesbian and gay rights within a Bill of Rights, much of the country has continued to see homosexuality as un-African. Henriette Gunkel examines how colonialism and apartheid have historically shaped constructions of gender and sexuality and how these concepts have not only been re-introduced and shaped by understandings of homosexuality as un-African but also by the post-apartheid constitution and continued discourse within the nation.

The Cultural Politics of Female Sexuality in South Africa

Sexual identity has emerged into the national discourse of post-apartheid South Africa, bringing the subject of rights and the question of gender relations into the nation’s politics. This book is a fascinating reflection on the effects of these discourses on non-normative modes of sexuality and on the country more generally.

kara lynch

A new take on Afrofuturism, this book gathers together a range of contemporary voices who, carrying legacies of 500 years of contact between Africa, Europe, and the Americas, reach towards the stars and unknown planets, galaxies, and ways of being. Writing from queer and feminist perspectives and circumnavigating continents, they recalibrate definitions of Afrofuturism. The editors and contributors of this exciting volume thus reflect upon the re-emergence of Black visions of political and cultural futures, proposing practices, identities, and collectivities. With contributions from AfroFuturist Affair, John Akomfrah, Jamika Ajalon, Stefanie Alisch, Jim Chuchu, Grisha Coleman, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Abigail DeVille, M. Asli Dukan with Wildseeds, Kodwo Eshun, Anna Everett, Raimi Gbadamosi, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Milumbe Haimbe, Ayesha Hameed, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Kara Keeling, Carla J. Maier, Tobias Nagl, Tavia Nyongo, Rasheedah Phillips, Daniel Kojo Schrade, Nadine Siegert, Robyn Smith, Greg Tate and Frohawk Two Feathers.

Black Imagination, Fragments, and Diffractions

We Travel the Space Ways

Futures and Fictions is a book of essays and conversations that explore possibilities for a different ‘political imaginary’ or, more simply, the imagining and imaging of alternate narratives and image-worlds that might be pitched against the impasses of our neoliberal present. In particular, the book contributes to prescient discussions around decolonization, post-capitalism and new kinds of social movements – exploring the intersections of these with contemporary art practice and visual culture. Contributions range from work on science, sonic and financial fictions and alternative space-time plots to myths and images generated by marginalized and ‘minor’ communities, queer-feminist strategies of fictioning, and the production of new Afro- and other futurisms.

Max Annas

Jyoti Mistry

Antje Schuhmann

Beti Ellerson

Gaze Regimes is a bricolage of essays and interviews showcasing the experiences of women working in film, either directly as practitioners or in other areas as curators, festival programme directors or fundraisers. It does not shy away from questioning the relations of power in the practice of filmmaking and the power invested in the gaze itself. Who is looking and who is being looked at, who is telling women’s stories in Africa and what governs the mechanics of making those films on the continent? The interviews with film practitioners such as Tsitsi Dangarembga, Taghreed Elsanhouri, Jihan El-Tahri, Anita Khanna, Isabel Noronhe, Arya Lalloo and Shannon Walsh demonstrate the contradictory points of departure of women in film – from their understanding of feminisms in relation to lived-experiences and the realpolitik of women working as cultural practitioners. The disciplines of gender studies, postcolonial theory, and film theory provide the framework for the book’s essays. Jyoti Mistry, Antje Schuhmann, Nobunye Levin, Dorothee Wenner and Christina von Braun are some of the contributors who provide valuable context, analysis and insight into, among other things, the politics of representation, the role of film festivals and the collective and individual experiences of trauma and marginality which contribute to the layered and complex filmic responses of Africa’s film practitioners.

Film and feminisms in Africa

Gaze Regimes

S Ayesha Hameed

The notion of time travel marked by possibility and loss. Visual Cultures as Time Travel makes a case for cultural, aesthetic, and historical research that is oriented toward the future, not the past, actively constructing new categories of assembly that don't yet exist. Ayesha Hameed considers the relationship between climate change and plantation economies, proposing a watery plantationocene that revolves around two islands: a former plantation in St. George's Parish in Barbados, and the port city of Port of Spain in Trinidad. It visits a marine research institute on a third island, Seili in Finland, to consider how notions of temporality and adaptation are produced in the climate emergency we face. Henriette Gunkel introduces the idea of time travel through notions of dizziness, freefall, and of being in vertigo as set out in Octavia Butler's novel Kindred and Kitso Lynn Lelliott's multimedia installation South Atlantic Hauntings, exploring what counts as technology, how it operates in relation to time, including deep space time, and how it interacts with the different types of bodies--human, machine, planetary, spectral, ancestral--that inhabit the terrestrial and extraterrestrial worlds. In conversation, Hameed and Gunkel propose a notion of time travel marked by possibility and loss--in the aftermath of transatlantic slavery and in the moment of mass illegalized migration, of blackness and time, of wildfires and floods, of lost and co-opted futures, of deep geological time, and of falling. Copublished with Goldsmiths, University of London

Visual Cultures as Time Travel

Eva Bischoff

Uta Fenske

M. Michaela Hampf

Elahe Haschemi Yekani

Arne Klawitter

In den letzten Jahren wurde der Körper zum zentralen Thema in den Kulturwissenschaften. Ausgehend von der Wendung "What can a body do?" (Was vermag ein Körper?) werden in diesem Band sowohl Praktiken (also Handlungs- und Herstellungsweisen) als auch Figurationen (also materialisierte Formen) des Körpers in den Blick genommen. Der ungewöhnliche Band bietet zehn Texte zu Körperpraktiken, die von "Aufführen" über "Essen" bis zu "Sterben" reichen. In 36 Figurationstexten und künstlerischen Arbeiten, vom Avatar über die Leihmutter oder den Radrennfahrer bis hin zum Tanzpaar, wird ein breites Spektrum konkreter Verkörperungen vorgestellt. Da der Band sich aus zwei Richtungen den Verortungen des Körpers in den Kulturwissenschaften annähert, ist er entsprechend als Wendebuch gestaltet: Er kann "auf den Kopf gestellt" und von zwei Seiten gelesen werden. Das Netzwerk "Körper in den Kulturwissenschaften" ist ein von der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft seit 2007 geförderter Zusammenschluss von Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftlern aus verschiedenen Disziplinen. Ziel war es, die unterschiedlichen Konzeptionen und Begriffe von Körper, wie sie in den Kulturwissenschaften und darüber hinaus kursieren, kritisch zueinander in Bezug zu setzen. Der Band präsentiert die Ergebnisse.

Henriette Gunkel

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