Dialogic Cinephilia - March 16, 2021

Biagetti, Samuel and Sonia Saraiy‪a‬. "Through a Glass Darkly: The 1980s Through Current Television." Historiansplaining (February 17, 2020) ["What is with the spate of 1980s themes on current "prestige" television? Is it Gen. X. nostalgia for their youthful days in suburban malls? Or something more? Television critic Sonia Saraiya discusses how our unresolved identity crises seem to have led us into a fascination with the last years of the Cold War, and with the secret mistakes and machinations that took place on both sides of the old Iron Curtain."]

Fawaz, Ramzi. "The New Mutants." This Is Not a Pipe (February 22, 2018) ["Ramzi Fawaz discusses his book The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics with Chris Richardson. Fawaz is assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The New Mutants won the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Fellowship Award for best first book manuscript in LGBT Studies and the 2017 ASAP Book Prize of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present. His work has been published in numerous journals including American Literature, GLQ, Feminist Studies, Callaloo, and Feminist Review. He is currently co-editing a special issue of American Literature with Darieck Scott titled "Queer About Comics," and co-editing Keywords in Comics Studies with Deborah Whaley and Shelley Streeby for NYU Press. His new book Queer Forms, explores the relationship between feminist and queer politics and formal innovation in the art and culture of movements for women’s and gay liberation. Queer Forms will be published by NYU Press."]

Fhlainn, Sorcha Ní. "Postmodern Vampires." This Is Not a Pipe (November 26, 2020) ["Sorcha Ní Fhlainn discusses her book Postmodern Vampires: Film, Fiction, and Popular Culture with Chris Richardson. Ní Fhlainn is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies and American studies at Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom. She is a founding member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies and author of Postmodern Vampires: Film, Fiction, and Popular Culture (Palgrave, 2019). She has published widely on socio-cultural history, subjectivity and postmodernism in Film Studies, American studies, Horror studies, and Popular Culture. Previous books include Clive Barker: Dark imaginer (Manchester UP, 2017), and The Worlds of Back to the Future: Critical Essays on the Films (McFarland, 2010), and articles in Adaptation (Oxford UP), and Horror Studies (Intellect). She is currently leading a research project and writing a monograph on the popular culture of the 1980s."]

Hampton, Timothy. "Bob Dylan's Poetics: How the Songs Work." Berkeley Book Chats (April 17, 2019) ["The 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature recognized Bob Dylan as a major modern artist, elevating his work beyond the world of popular music. In his book Bob Dylan's Poetics (Zone, 2019), Timothy Hampton (Comparative Literature and French, Townsend Center director) focuses on the details and nuances of Dylan's songs, showing how they work as artistic statements designed to create meaning and elicit emotion. Locating Dylan in the long history of artistic modernism, Hampton offers both a nuanced engagement with the work of a major artist and a meditation on the contribution of song at times of political and social change."]

Kunkle, Sheila. "Parasite and the Parallax of Social Relations Under Capitalism." Crisis Critique 7.2 (2020) ["This paper offers a psychoanalytic film analysis of director Bong Joon-ho’s 2019 film Parasite, which engages Slavoj Žižek’s concept of a “political parallax.” The analysis reveals how social (class) relations under Capitalism are anamorphically distorted and structured by way of an unsymbolizable gap. Ultimately, achieving a parallax view allows us to see that it’s not capitalism that breeds parasites; rather parasitism is already there, inherently built into capitalism in the form of an internal excess. Thus, capitalism itself becomes the parasitic system that perpetuates both the fantasy of freedom and the fetishization of class difference, which, paradoxically obfuscates class struggle itself."]

Nestle, Marion, et al. "Let's Ask Marion: What You Need to Know about the Politics of Food, Nutrition, and Health (University of California Press, 2020)." New Books in Food (January 13, 2021) ["Marion Nestle describes her new book as “a small, quick and dirty reader for the general audience” summarizing some of her biggest and most influential works. Let’s Ask Marion: What You Need to Know About the Politics of Food, Nutrition, and Health published September 2020 by University of California Press, was written in conversation with Kerry Trueman, a blogger and friend. Trueman’s questions served as prompts to organize Nestle’s 800-1000 word summaries in approachable and engaging prose. Readers familiar with Nestle’s groundbreaking Food Politics will recognize many of the ideas and information, but this new pocket-sized and affordable volume serves as an introduction for undergraduate students or readers new to Food Studies. However, Nestle does cover some new material in her explanation of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, especially the campaign for Zero Hunger. Nestle also summarizes how nutrition advice has changed in the last few years by thinking about food in categories ranging from unprocessed (corn on the cob) to ultraprocessed (Nacho Cheese tortilla chips). This reevaluation makes it easier to identify foods that are acceptable to eat without excessive focus on micronutrients. In the conversation, Nestle addresses the ethics of marketing food to children, food as a human right and access in the Covid era, the possibility of a National Food Policy Agency, the politics of food banks, and the promise of regenerative agricultural practices. Nestle concludes by talking about the pleasures of food and eating and how to establish a “loving relationship” with food that doesn’t include fear, guilt, or anxiety about nutrition. Marion Nestle is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita, at New York University, and the author of books about food politics, most recently Unsavory Truth."]

West, Stephen. "Frederick Hayek - The Road to Serfdom." Philosophy This! #139 (February 11, 2020)

Yuen, Nancy Wang. "Reel Inequality." This is Not a Pipe (December 7, 2017) ["Nancy Wang Yuen discusses her book Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism with Chris Richardson. She is an Associate Professor and the Chair of the Sociology Department at Biola University. She is the author of Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism (2016), the first book to examine the barriers actors of color face in Hollywood and how they creatively challenge stereotypes. Along with a team of researchers, she pioneered the first study of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders on television (2005/2006) and the 2017 study, Tokens on the Small Screen: Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Prime Time and Streaming Television. Dr. Yuen is an expert speaker on race and media, appearing on BBC World TV, NPR and The Washington Post. "]

Queen - Bicycle Race (Official Video) from dj pop on Vimeo.