darkmatter Journal» | darkmatter Journal

The Infidel – an East End ‘skin flick’

Gil Toffell — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 22:52:16 +0000

Earlier this year, walking the south side of Whitechapel High Street in London’s East End I passed an advertisement for the cinematic release of the film The Infidel. Staring at me from a poster on the side of a bus stop was the film’s hero Omid Djalili. A curious figure he’s presented as cultural confusion embodied.

Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century – Review

Stephan Scheel — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 14:20:16 +0000

The central question of Escape Routes sounds quite simple: 'How does social transformation begin?' But the answer that the book provides is provocative and contests many dominant explanations of social change: according to the authors it is not the brimming revolutionary events occupying the imagination of the left that capture the mechanics of social transformation but the seemingly 'insignificant occurrences of people’s daily actions'.

Policy and Planning

Fred Moten — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 10:22:18 +0000

The hope that Cornel West wrote about in Social Text in 1984 was not destined to become policy in 2008. The ones who practiced it, within and against the grain of every imposed contingency, always had a plan.

Digitizing Race – Lisa Nakamura

Sanjay Sharma — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 16:15:09 +0000

For those of you with a soft spot for the anthropomorphized cartoon dog surfing the Internet, Lisa Nakamura abolishes such nostalgia, and misunderstanding. Half way through Digitizing Race, she coolly declares '...nobody believes anymore that on the Internet nobody knows you're a dog...'.

Darker than Blue

Ben Pitcher — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 10:04:55 +0000

Paul Gilroy carries a lot of symbolic weight. In our transnational academic milieu, Gilroy’s status as a superstar professor overdetermines his writing, forcing a peculiar disjuncture between the character of his project and the expectations of his eager audience. While Gilroy speaks of a poststructural cultural politics, he is too often forced into the position of custodian or leader that sometimes rubs up uncomfortably with his analysis...

The Informational University, the Uneven Distribution of Expertise and the Racialization of Labour

Ned Rossiter — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:34:52 +0000

This essay revisits Marc Bousquet’s insight that the flexibilization of labour is at the centre of the informatization of the university as it embraces the force of neoliberal regimes. This orientation of labour around processes of informatization draws on work undertaken by various researchers...

Who gets ‘booked’: Super-Surveillance & the case of Ali Dizaei

Nirmal Puwar — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 19:37:10 +0000

Could it be that racialized bodies who speak out of turn and engage in the renegade act of whistle blowing, especially risk feeling the cold wrath of administrative controls mangled in the terms of misconduct and professional integrity. Codes of…

‘You are not welcome here’: post-apartheid negrophobia and real aliens in Blomkamp’s District 9

Henriette Gunkel — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 23:11:29 +0000

When District 9 was released...the film was an immediate box office hit...This was much to the surprise of critics, reviewers and bloggers, who seemed astonished...that a science fiction film with this impact could originate from South Africa.

Editorial Notes: Pirates and Piracy – Material Realities and Cultural Myths

Andrew Opitz — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 21:55:13 +0000

This special issue of darkmatter sets out to examine the complicated and often incongruous cultural meanings assigned to pirates and piracy in the twenty-first century.^[1] Debates about piracy have long featured certain telling contradictions. At different times,…

Revolution Bootlegged: Pirate Resistance in Nigeria’s Broken Infrastructure

Jason Crawford — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 21:45:43 +0000

When news of the M/V Maersk Alabama hijacking broke from Western media outlets, Americans scoffed at the notion of a forthcoming “War on Piracy” where the global shipping industry would be at the mercy of young Somalians dressed in second-hand…