Identity, mediation, and the cunning of capital / Ani Maitra.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Maitra, Ani, author.

Series:

Critical insurgencies.

Critical insurgencies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Identity (Psychology) and mass media.

Identity (Psychology)--Social aspects.

Identity (Psychology).

Identity politics--Social aspects.

Identity politics.

Fanon, Frantz, 1925-1961--Criticism and interpretation.

Fanon, Frantz.

Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung--Criticism and interpretation.

Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung.

Djebar, Assia, 1936-2015--Criticism and interpretation.

Djebar, Assia.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, [2020]

Summary:

"In Identity, Mediation, and the Cunning of Capital, Ani Maitra calls for an urgent reevaluation of identity politics as an aesthetic maneuver regulated by capitalism. A dominant critical trend in the humanities, Maitra argues, is to dismiss or embrace identity through the formal properties of a privileged aesthetic medium like literature, cinema, or even the performative body. In contrast, he demonstrates that identity politics becomes unavoidably real and material only because the minoritized subject is split between multiple sites of mediation-visual, linguistic, and sonic-while remaining firmly tethered to capitalism's hierarchical logic of value production. Only in the interstices of media can we track the aesthetic conversion of identitarian difference into value, marked by the inequities of race, class, gender, and/or sexuality. Maitra's archive is reflexively transnational and multimodal. Moving from anticolonial polemics to psychoanalysis to diasporic experimental literature to postcolonial feminist and queer media, he lays bare the cunning through which capitalism produces and fragments identity through an intermedial "aesthetic dissonance" with the commodity form. Maitra's novel contribution to theories of identity and, indeed, to the concept of "mediation" will interest a wide range of scholars in media studies, critical race and postcolonial studies, and critical aesthetics"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Identity in between media

1. The aesthetic wounds of identity, or what Fanon can tell us about its mediation

2. Aesthetic divides and complicities in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee

3. The "haptic" feminism of Assia Djebar's The Nouba of the women of Mount Chenoua

4. Queer aesthetic dissonance in neoliberal times

Conclusion: Interdisciplinarity as queer optimism

Notes

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

0-8101-4181-7

OCLC:

1150114973