The Intellectual

Author Ajay Verghese discusses the article, "The Problem of Infinite Regress: A Stopping Rules Approach" published in the March 2023 issue of Sociological Theory. 

A critical figure in queer Sinophone cinema, Tsai Ming-liang is a major force in Taiwan cinema and global moving image art. A new book by Nicholas de Villiers, CRUISY, SLEEPY, MELANCHOLY, offers a fascinating, systematic method for analyzing the queerness of Tsai’s films and reveals striking connections between sexuality, space, and cinema. Here, the author is joined in conversation with Beth Tsai.

Nicholas de Villiers is professor of English and film at the University of North Florida.

Beth Tsai is visiting assistant professor of East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

REFERENCES:

Books by Nicholas de Villiers (all with University of Minnesota Press):

-Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual DIsorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-liang

-Sexography: Sex Work in Documentary

-Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol

Book by Beth Tsai:

-Taiwan New Cinema at Film Festivals (Edinburgh University Press)

Tsai Ming-liang films:

-No No Sleep

-Stray Dogs

-Goodbye, Dragon Inn

-Vive L’Amour

-I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone

-Rebels of the Neon God

-The Wayward Cloud

-It’s a Dream

-The Hole

-Face (Visage)

-What TIme Is It There?

-Days

Other films:

-Saw Tiong Guan / Past Present (documentary)

-Fred Barney Taylor / The Polymath 

-Elizabeth Purchell / Ask Any Buddy (podcast: https://www.ask-any-buddy.com/podcast)

-Hou Hsiao-hsien / Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge

-Hou Hsiao-hsien / Café Lumière

-Albert Lamorisse / Le Ballon Rouge

-Wong Kar-wai / Chungking Express

-Jon M. Chu / Crazy Rich Asians

-Peter Wang / A Great Wall

-Edward Yang / The Terrorizers

Research, persons, publications:

-Song Hwee Lim / Tsai Mingliang and the Cinema of Slowness

-François Truffaut

-Elena Pollacchi

-Samuel Delany / Times Square Red, Times Square Blue 

-José Esteban Muñoz / Cruising Utopia

-John Paul Ricco / The Logic of the Lure

-Alex Espinoza / Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pasttime

-Roland Barthes

-Elena Gorfinkel’s public lecture: Cinema, the Soporific: Between Exhaustion and Eros

-Jean Ma / At the Edges of Sleep

-Marcel Proust / Swann’s Way

-Jean Ma / Melancholy Drift

-Jonathan Flatley’s work on melancholia and modernism

-Judith Butler

-Douglas Crimp

-Anne Cvetkovich / Depression: A Public Feeling

-David Eng

-Anne Anlin Cheng

-Shi-Yan Chao / Queer Representations in Chinese-language Film and the Cultural Landscape

-Sianne Ngai

-Christopher Lupke / The Sinophone Cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien

-Zhu Tianwen

-Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh and Darrell Williams Davis / Thirty-Two New Takes on Taiwan Cinema

-David Lynch

-Sara Ahmed / Queer Phenomenology

-Michel de Certeau

-Fran Martin

-The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Camp: Notes on Fashion

-Susan Sontag on camp

-Esther Newton / Mother Camp

-Jonathan Te-hsuan Yeh

-Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis, “Camping Out with Tsai Ming-liang”

-Stray Dogs at the Museum: Tsai Ming-liang Solo Exhibition 

-Fran Martin, “Introduction: Tsai Ming-liang’s intimate public worlds,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas Vol. 1 No. 2.

-Eve Sedgwick’s idea of camp as a form of reparative reading

-Tom Roach / Friendship as a Way of Life

-Rey Chow / Writing Diaspora

-Michelle Bloom

-Fran Martin, “The European Undead: Tsai Ming-liang’s Temporal Dysphoria,” Senses of Cinema (https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2003/feature-articles/tsai_european_undead/) 

Flooded Pasts: UNESCO, Nubia, and the Recolonization of Archaeology (Cornell UP, 2022) examines a world famous yet critically underexamined event—UNESCO's International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia (1960–80)—to show how the project, its genealogy, and its aftermath not only propelled archaeology into the postwar world but also helped to "recolonize" it. In this book, William Carruthers asks how postwar decolonization took shape and what role a colonial discipline like archaeology—forged in the crucible of imperialism—played as the "new nations" asserted themselves in the face of the global Cold War.

As the Aswan High Dam became the centerpiece of Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egyptian revolution, the Nubian campaign sought to salvage and preserve ancient temples and archaeological sites from the new barrage's floodwaters. Conducted in the neighboring regions of Egyptian and Sudanese Nubia, the project built on years of Nubian archaeological work conducted under British occupation and influence. During that process, the campaign drew on the scientific racism that guided those earlier surveys, helping to consign Nubians themselves to state-led resettlement and modernization programs, even as UNESCO created a picturesque archaeological landscape fit for global media and tourist consumption.

Flooded Pasts describes how colonial archaeological and anthropological practices—and particularly their archival and documentary manifestations—created an ancient Nubia severed from the region's population. As a result, the Nubian campaign not only became fundamental to the creation of UNESCO's 1972 World Heritage Convention but also exposed questions about the goals of archaeology and heritage and whether the colonial origins of these fields will ever be overcome.

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This month we are thrilled to be joined by University of Helsinki doctoral researcher Mariam Khawar. Mariam is in the Doctoral Programme in Political, Soci­etal and Regional Change, which is part of the Faculty of Social Sciences and is affiliated with Helsinki Centre for Global Political Economy.

Mariam’s work focuses on Islamic economic philosophy, specifically through a Marxist lens. Her work is highly interdisciplinary drawing on feminist political economy, economics, and feminism in Islamic theology and philosophy. She is working toward filling in gaps in the theoretical materials in that discipline. This work started during her master’s studies at King’s College London, where she made an analysis of Islamic banks during the 2007 financial crisis. We discuss the role of research within global capitalist banking and how her research is not about banking and finance. Rather Mariam focuses on the philosophical aspects of Islamic economics. She interrogates questions like what constitutes economic agents within Islamic economic philosophy. Within the conversation Mariam reminds us to think outside the box and to always be boldly interdisciplinary in academic work. 

If you would like to follow Mariam’s work, check out her profile at University of Helsinki. 

Resources

One art movement has become a household name in a way that few recent art movements can match. This is Afrofuturism. From the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installing an Afrofuturist period room to the blockbuster movie Black Panther and its sequel to an upcoming survey of the movement at the National Museum of African American history and culture, Afrofuturism is being canonized in art and beyond.

It's an extraordinarily rich tradition, bringing together influences from experimental jazz and Detroit techno sci-fi and fantasy, art and technology. With Black History Month here, we decided to dig into Afrofuturist art history with Ytasha Womack. Womack is the author of Afrofuturism, The World of Black Sci-fi and Fantasy Culture. She's also an artist herself, actively working in the tradition now.

So how can you define the afro futurist aesthetic? What are some of its touchstones? And why has there been such a surge of excitement around Afrofuturism in the recent past? Artnet News National Art Critic, Ben Davis, sits down with Womack to find out.