Making Worlds in 2014!

Greetings from the new year, all! The Cultural Studies Reading Group has resumed our discussion of "Making Worlds" with renewed gusto. Last week, we watched Jia Zhangke's 2004 film The World (stills included here), in conversation with Timothy Mitchell's article "The World as Exhibition." Our discussion ranged over many aspects of world-making, including the interrelated moral and aesthetic projects of worlding; economic precarity and contingency; spectacle, simulacrum and the world as picture or the world as object; and imaginaries/economies of scale as they highlight global positioning and metonymic forms of autonomy.

This very productive discussion will be, we think, further explored and complicated in our upcoming reading by Mimi Nguyen. Selected by CSRG member Kasim Husain, "The Biopower of Beauty: Humanitarian Imperialisms and Global Feminisms in an Age of Terror" will be discussed for our next meeting on February 5th (4:30-6:30pm in CNH 317). As usual, please feel free to comment or email us @ readingculturalstudies@gmail.com if you'd like a copy of the article. Stay tuned for what promises to be a generative meeting in February!