Review(s) of: The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change, by McRobbie, Angela, Sage, London, 2009, ISBN 9 7807 6197 0620, vi + 184 pp., A$49.95, Distributor: Footprint Books.

The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change [Book Review]

Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, An Aesthetic of Education in the Era of Globalization (Harvard University Press, 2012)For over a quarter of a century, Gayatri Spivak's scholarship has remained at the forefront of postcolonial studies, pushing the discipline forward, asking the uncomfortable questions, and engaging in spirited debates. Spivak's 1988 essay, 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' launched her into academic prominence, and while the essay still is regarded as enormously influential, unfortunately, it often overshadows many of her other important works, which is why her recent book, An Aesthetic of Education in the Era of Globalization, published by Harvard University Press, is such a welcome reminder of her varied and important contributions. The 25 essays, spanning nearly an equal number of years, not only reveal Spivak's unwavering commitment to an ethical, aesthetic engagement with literature (and the world) as a way of fulfilling the humanities' promise to contest the logic of capital, but also they reveal her enormous capacity as a teacher.In the preface and introduction, Spivak informs readers that she writes now with a 'desperate honesty' and that doubt will be her guiding refrain (x). From the outset, it is clear that she is concerned deeply by 'this era of the mantra of hope' and deploys doubt, which she sees as a great inheritance of the Enlightenment, as a way to recuperate the aesthetic (1). This meditation on the aesthetic gives the collection a thematic thread for readers to grasp as they move through the essays. Additionally, running throughout the collection is the frame of the double bind. Spivak instructs readers to keep this structure in mind while engaging with the essays as it reveals the tensions that undergird many of her arguments. Ultimately Spivak's work attempts to displace globalisation's hold on information, data, and capital through a 'productive undoing' of the legacy of the aesthetic coupled with the structure of the double bind (1). At times this lofty project is undermined by a determined insistence to use the double bind framework even when the fit isn't comfortable, leading to several unnecessarily opaque moments. The introduction also is mired in a selected history of the double bind that contain large tracts of quoted text, with little exposition, that divert readers from Spivak's more urgent claims. To be fair, Spivak asks for 'an interactive reader' that is willing to take this journey with her in which the 'reconsiderations and realizations' of the introduction are not always expounded in the essays themselves (3).The book is not divided into sections, but there are narratives that reflect a progression of ideas. Spivak's essays transition fluidly from issues of difference to translation to disciplinary concerns. Throughout these movements, readers will observe Spivak's willingness to draw from intimate, often private moments to forward a thesis. It is this vulnerability that reveals the stakes of Spivak's work. The most striking moment of intimacy occurs in the final chapter, 'Tracing the Skin of Day,' Spivak takes readers on her journey to view Chittrovanu Mazumdar's Nightskin. We walk with Spivak through the museum, and it is here that Spivak brings her discussion of the aesthetic to a close, remarking how 'in the visual, the lesson of reading is the toughest' (507). Spivak offers a poststructural meditation on Mazumdar's artwork, suggesting that his work 'protects the trace away from the promise of the sign' leaving viewers 'with no guarantees' (502). …

An Aesthetic of Education in the Era of Globalization

The dust-jacket of this book defines Diane Purkiss as a Lecturer in English; within its pages she prefers to describe herself as a feminist literary critic. It is a potent combination, and has resulted in a thoroughly individual and very important book. Its preoccupation is with the manner in which images of English witches have been formed and manipulated during two distinct periods of history, that of Elizabeth and the early Stuarts, and the late twentieth century. In tackling the job, the first half of Dr Purkiss's identity has given her an instinctual love of texts and of language, reflected in her own exuberant and often very funny use of words. The other half has reinforced both an attachment to current critical fashions and ideologies and a style which might be politely described as pugnacious, although I suspect that she herself might prefer the expression 'feisty'. A reader is given little option other than to applaud or to fight back; this one, perhaps unsurprisingly, is going to do both.

The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations

'Much nonsense has been written on this subject', wrote Keith Thomas in a famous and influential footnote to his own pioneering chapter on English witchcraft in Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971). In similar vein, Robin Briggs remarks near the st art of this magnificent new survey that 'common assumptions about the subject tend to have one very marked feature in common, which is that they are hopelessly wrong' (p. 9). The concept of witchcraft is notoriously slippery; scholarly research over the past quarter-century has barely changed the received ideas of most people. Some of what reputable and intelligent scholars have contributed to the subject has proved at best untypical of the wider witchcraft phenomenon, at worst seriously misleading. Robin Briggs has devoted many years to meticulous examination of a large body of trial records of witchcraft cases from the Duchy of Lorraine in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this book he has brought the insights from that research to a synt hesis and survey of the social context of all early modern witchcraft cases in western Europe and New England. The resulting book will have a deeply corrosive effect on all sorts of traditional wisdom about the subject of witchcraft and society.

Witches and Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft

A collection of 22 essays by 24 women critics, artists, writers and art historians, which is intended to counter the post-feminist backlash and to focus attention on the continuing discrimination in the art world. There are essays on subjects such as feminist art publishing in the 1980s, black women artists in Britain, censorship and art, the representation of the female body, so-called traditional female art forms such as textiles and needlework, and the role of women in the art market.

New feminist art criticism: critical strategies

New Feminist Art Criticism

A collection of essays on the theme of women in 20th century art history, with particular reference to their position in relation to modernism. Each of the following essays is abstracted in this issue of ABM: `Women artists, modernity and suffrage cultures in Britain and Germany 1890-1920' by Rosemary Betterton; `Modern women, modern spaces: women, metropolitan culture and Vorticism' by Jane Beckett and Deborah Cherry; `Black awakening: gender and representation in the Harlem Renaissance' by Pauline de Souza; `Performing the picture or painting the other: Romaine Brooks, Gluck and the question of decadence in 1923' by Bridget Elliott; `Elizabeth McCausland: art, politics and sexuality' by Susan Platt; `Hepworth and her critics' by Deepwell; `Cornubia: gender, geography and genealogy in St Ives modernism' by Nedira Yakir; `Talking back: an exchange with Marcel Duchamp' by Moira Roth; `Making a mess: women's bane, women's pleasure' by Joanna Frueh; `Beauty, the universal, the divine: Irigaray's re-valuings' by Hilary Robinson; and `Desiring daughters' by Renee Baert.

Women artists and modernism

This essay is in four parts. The first offers a critique of James Elkins and Michael Newman’s book The State of Art Criticism (Routledge, 2008) for what it tells us about art criticism in academia and journalism and feminism; the second considers how a gendered analysis measures the “state” of art and art criticism as a feminist intervention; and the third, how neo-liberal mis-readings of Linda Nochlin and Laura Mulvey in the art world represent feminism in ideas about “greatness” and the “gaze”, whilst avoiding feminist arguments about women artists or their work, particularly on “motherhood”. In the fourth part, against the limits of the first three, the state of feminist art criticism across the last fifty years is reconsidered by highlighting the plurality of feminisms in transnational, transgenerational and progressive alliances.

Art Criticism and the State of Feminist Art Criticism

This article considers feminist interpretations of the witch in contemporary art in relation to the witch craze: examples are by Georgia Horgan, Ann-Sofi Siden, Mathilde ter Heijne, Monica Sjoo, Tania Antoshina, Helen Chadwick, Jesse Jones, and Carolee Schneemann. The argument explores the ways that the figure of the witch is analyzed in three different feminist critiques of patriarchy, and subsequently pursues how these ideas have been taken up in contemporary art by these women artists. The differences between three authors: Matilda Joslyn Gage (1893); Mary Daly (1984); and Silvia Federici (2004) are highlighted and contrasted to other historians’ analyses from the last thirty years of the fate of women accused as witches during the European Witch Hunt between the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. This was a paper given at Misogyny: Witches and Wicked Bodies, Institute of Contemporary Arts, (ICA) London in March 2015. Normal 0 false false false EN-GB ZH-TW X-NONE

/pdf/feminist-interpretations-of-witches-and-the-witch-craze-in-4dkt1p0ipu.pdf

Feminist Interpretations of Witches and the Witch Craze in Contemporary Art by Women

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