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Abjection Incorporated
Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence
Edited by Maggie Hennefeld and Nicholas Sammond
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Book Presentation:
From the films of Larry Clark to the feminist comedy of Amy Schumer to the fall of Louis C. K., comedic, graphic, and violent moments of abjection have permeated twentieth- and twenty-first-century social and political discourse. The contributors to Abjection Incorporated move beyond simple critiques of abjection as a punitive form of social death, illustrating how it has become a contested mode of political and cultural capital—empowering for some but oppressive for others. Escaping abjection's usual confines of psychoanalysis and aesthetic modernism, core to theories of abjection by thinkers such as Kristeva and Bataille, the contributors examine a range of media, including literature, photography, film, television, talking dolls, comics, and manga. Whether analyzing how comedic abjection can help mobilize feminist politics or how expressions of abjection inflect class, race, and gender hierarchies, the contributors demonstrate the importance of competing uses of abjection to contemporary society and politics. They emphasize abjection's role in circumscribing the boundaries of the human and how the threats abjection poses to the self and other, far from simply negative, open up possibilities for radically new politics.
Contributors. Meredith Bak, Eugenie Brinkema, James Leo Cahill, Michelle Cho, Maggie Hennefeld, Rob King, Thomas Lamarre, Sylvère Lotringer, Rijuta Mehta, Mark Mulroney, Nicholas Sammond, Yiman Wang, Rebecca Wanzo
About the authors:
Maggie Hennefeld is Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and author of Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes. Nicholas Sammond is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto and author of Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation, also published by Duke University Press.
Press Reviews:
"Passionate, eye-opening, exciting! From Lena Dunham to Amy Schumer to Larry Clark and Louis C. K. (not to mention Mad Magazine), who would have thought that forty years after Kristeva's Powers of Horror so much insight for our times could be discovered through the lens of abjection! Editors Maggie Hennefeld and Nicholas Sammond have contributed to and guided the production of a timely and unusually cohesive anthology." -- Linda Williams, Professor Emerita, University of California, Berkeley
"Abjection Incorporated makes a strong case for the abject as an important political space for confrontations between identities assigned and performed. Even as many seek to displace the subject as a meaningful category of analysis and action, these essays demonstrate that the fundamental tension between the fragility of self and the abjection of otherness remains a viable and quite possibly unavoidable foundation for cultural theory and criticism." -- Jeffrey Sconce, author of ― The Technical Delusion: Electronics, Power, Insanity
"In an unique way, Abjection Incorporated makes a compelling argument about the concept of abjection as a useful tool to understand our peculiar existences in a sensory and irrational way.... [It] strongly advocates for a more nuanced perspective than the usual post-structuralist binary opposition of pleasure and violence...."
-- Éric Falardeau ― Jump Cut
"Abjection Incorporated succeeds in offering its readers a significant tool that helps to explain social, political, and cultural forces at work.... [T]he subject matter alone provides an important timely theoretical framework that can help make better sense of the competing reality spheres that have come to dominate the discourse over our present moment." -- David Morton ― Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
"Comedy’s need to be miserable deeply complicates its relationship to power. Abjection Incorporated contributes essential scholarship to this historical and present problem." -- Will Schmenner ― Studies in American Humor
See the publisher website: Duke University Press
> From the same authors:
Birth of an Industry (2015)
Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation
Subject: History of Cinema
Babes in Tomorrowland (2005)
Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960
Subject: Sociology
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