Politics and Cultures of Liberation

Politics and Cultures of Liberation: Media, Memory, and Projections of Democracy focuses on mapping, analyzing, and evaluating memories, rituals, and artistic responses to the theme of “liberation.” The contributors offer a wide range of diverse intercultural perspectives on media, memory, liberation, (self)Americanization, and conceptualizations of democracy. Readership: This book is crucial for scholars and students of transnational studies, media studies, literature, history, and cultural studies who are interested in socio-cultural and political constructions of Europe and “America.

Damien Hirst and the legacy of the sublime in contemporary art and culture

Research Questions: • How can we understand the legacies of the eighteenth-century sublime in contemporary culture – including commercialised and commodified forms? • What are the insistent reiterations of tropes, affects and themes of the sublime doing in contemporary art and culture? • How are the aesthetic forms of the sublime bound in to economic, social and political histories? • What happens when we read Hirst in terms of the histories of the sublime? And the sublime through Hirst? • The work also more generally sets out to examine the cultural forms of our own global-capitalist moment, and to think this within the longer histories of capital. Research Context • Hirst is a highly successful artist but there is a dearth of serious critical writing about him. Most extant work on the yBas was produced in the 90s, as part of a critical polemic around the work. My own work starts from the historical distance which is now opening up between then and now to read Hirst as srt history. • The work also positions itself with regard to a currently burgeoning body of literature around the sublime. I draw on the different approaches of aesthetics, criticism and cultural history to read the relation between past and present forms of the sublime. • My work focuses on the intertwinement of the sublime (from its earliest histories) with commodified culture, rather than just high culture. Research Methods • Hirst is treated as a cultural symptom. • The work investigates forms of historical repetition (Nachträglichkeit, Nachleben, figurality, hauntology, etc.) • Hirst is a focal point for a wider exploration of a wide-ranging cultural history. Other objects of inquiry include: Alexander Pope and the Scriblerians, Bertolt Brecht, John Singleton Copley, James Thomson, Bruegel the Elder, Piranesi, Wordsworth, Steven Spielberg, Mary Shelley and Emile Zola. • My approach is broadly Marxian, but I also critically interrogate Marx, and draw on other approaches including those of Freud, Lyotard, Derrida and Braudel. • Particular attention is given to the early eighteenth century. Findings: • The strength of Hirst’s best work stems from its condensation of social contradiction into complex, haunting images – images which are in turn haunted by the histories of sublimity, an aesthetic formed in, and which also serves to help form, capital’s imaginary. Hirst and the sublime are bound in to a representational logic of an imperialism common to our own moment and that of early modernity. Such links to the imperialist imaginary belie the use of the sublime by contemporary leftist theorists (such as Lyotard) to valorize the sublime

The Shaping of 'West Barbary': The Re/construction of Identity and West Country Barbary Captivity

Divided into three parts, this thesis maps a cultural history of Barbary captivity; concentrating on the early 17th century leading up to the Civil Wars; an aspect of British-Muslim contact within which the West Country is overrepresented in the archives. However, this wealth of material contrasts sharply with the paucity of popular and public-facing representations. Situating these accounts within wider contexts, this thesis investigates this contrast, exploring the social, cultural, emotional and economic impact of Barbary captivity upon understandings of place and identity. The first part examines representations of being taken captive, the terror and distress of West Country inhabitants, and the responses and concerns of the authorities. The on-going failure to protect the region and its seafarers exacerbated this distress, producing marginalised geographies of fear and anxiety. The second part explores the themes of memory and identity, arguing that how captives were remembered and forgotten had implications for localised and national identities. For those held in Barbary, families and communities petitioned and undertook ransom collections to redeem the captives, providing reminders to the authorities and appealing for wider remembrance as part of the processes of Christian compassion. Nevertheless, the majority of captives were ‘forgotten’, neither ransomed nor leaving their individual mark within the historical record. This part concludes with a discussion of the role of memory in managing and articulating the ‘trauma’ of captivity. The final part examines mobile and fluid identities, concentrating on returning captives and Islamic converts. Early modern theories of identity situated the humoral body of the captive as susceptible to ‘turning Turk’, contributing to wider negotiations of national, ethnic and religious identities. Cultural anxieties were preoccupied with the ill-defined borders of the geographically displaced material body, generating mutable, hidden and shameful identities. In conclusion, sites of cultural trauma are produced, indicated by the subsequent silence regarding this aspect of localised history.Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC