Project MUSE®: Discourse - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/48
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Discourse.daily12026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 22, no. 3 (2000) through current issueLatest Articles: DiscourseTWOProject MUSE®Discourse1536-18101522-5321Latest articles in Discourse. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Media-Milieu Dialectic: Thinking beyond Elemental Media
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986920
<p></p>
Many Palestinian poets have marveled at the clouds as an elevated space in the skies where their children can live and play or as high and peaceful burial grounds that nobody is fighting over.1 Many others such as Mosab Abu Toha think of clouds as smoke, dust, and eradication of Palestinian life through Israeli airstrikes (Figure 1). How, if at all, can media theory grapple with such violent vertical mediations? How should media scholars conceptualize milieu—such as the skies and the clouds—that have been turned lethal not geologically but geopolitically? Yuriko Furuhata's work on anthropogenic nuclear mushroom clouds in the mid-twentieth century, both in Japan and the Marshall Islands, points to the military
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986927">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/48/image/coversmallMedia-Milieu Dialectic: Thinking beyond Elemental Media2026-04-02text/htmlen-USMedia-Milieu Dialectic: Thinking beyond Elemental Media2026-04-022026TWOProject MUSE®1039982026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-02The Queerness of Animation: Barry JC Purves and the Supplementarity of Form
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986921
<p></p>
One could almost be forgiven for misconstruing animation as an improbable site of queerness. Between enduring cultural narratives that keep animated visuality conceptually bonded to the aesthetic domains of childhood and a cinematic canon that, except for an insulated tradition of homoerotic anime, has historically been lacking in terms of unequivocal representations of queerness, there seems to be little reason to regard the animated text as anything more than a mere educational tool: an instrument of the very pedagogies that steer the "polymorphous perversity" of the child toward heteronormative maturity. It would be a grave mistake, however, to take animation at face value. Scholarship on the politics of
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986927">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/48/image/coversmallThe Queerness of Animation: Barry JC Purves and the Supplementarity of Form2026-04-02text/htmlen-USThe Queerness of Animation: Barry JC Purves and the Supplementarity of Form2026-04-022026TWOProject MUSE®917622026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-02Anachronic 1968: The Crisis of Media in Imagen de Caracas
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986922
<p></p>
This essay discusses Imagen de Caracas, a collective artistic project from 1968 and one of the most important pieces of avant-garde art in Venezuela, as a produced "crisis of media" to mobilize historiographic and aesthetic frameworks that disrupt traditional understandings of history and spatiotemporal concepts anchored in linearity. I will begin by stating that conducting research on a country such as Venezuela today brings along with it the difficulty of inscribing crisis within the cultural canon.1 Merely invoking the signifier "Venezuela" requires dealing with its many associations in global politics, in presidential campaigns around the world, on the news, and in socioeconomic discourses. The name "Venezuela"
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986927">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/48/image/coversmallAnachronic 1968: The Crisis of Media in Imagen de Caracas2026-04-02text/htmlen-USAnachronic 1968: The Crisis of Media in Imagen de Caracas2026-04-022026TWOProject MUSE®944612026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-02The Discourse of the Handle: Teachers, Students and the Blackboard Film
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986923
<p></p>
To begin, an anecdote from Étienne Balibar. We are in France, just after the events of May and June 1968. A number of Louis Althusser's former students from the École Normale Supérieure (ÉNS) have gathered together around a research project. The project is independently conceived. Although the students are strongly influenced by the work of their former teacher, Althusser is absent; he is staying in a clinic while coping with one of his periods of severe depression. Present are Balibar, Pierre Macherey, and Roger Establet, three of the four students who collaborated with Althusser on the 1965 publication Reading Capital. Also participating are Christian Baudelot and Michel Tort. The subject of their research is the
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986927">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/48/image/coversmallThe Discourse of the Handle: Teachers, Students and the Blackboard Film2026-04-02text/htmlen-USThe Discourse of the Handle: Teachers, Students and the Blackboard Film2026-04-022026TWOProject MUSE®1170612026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-02The "Inside-Out" Realist Cinema in Nigeria: A New Tradition of Publicizing the Hidden
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986924
<p></p>
In hindsight, a new realist cinema tradition began to take its legitimate place in the mapping of an ever-evolving Nigerian cinema around 2010. This new Nigerian film tradition shows a faithful interest in capturing a unique kind of reality, known only to those to whom it belongs but are decidedly uneager to publicly proclaim it, until the camera transgresses the barrier between the private and public spaces, dragging that concealed reality out into the open. That is, in its search for a new and distinct aesthetic of realism, something Bazin refers to in his study of cinema realism as a "faithfulness to everyday life in the scenario,"1 this Nigerian new realist cinema finds itself looking behind the curtains
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986927">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/48/image/coversmallThe "Inside-Out" Realist Cinema in Nigeria: A New Tradition of Publicizing the Hidden2026-04-02text/htmlen-USThe "Inside-Out" Realist Cinema in Nigeria: A New Tradition of Publicizing the Hidden2026-04-022026TWOProject MUSE®763572026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-02"The Bard Wouldn't Recognize Hamlet": On Medium Specificity and Shakespeare in Africa
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986925
<p></p>
In the introduction to the notorious 1969 Playboy interview with Marshall McLuhan, in which McLuhan talks explicitly about race and media, the interviewer notes that McLuhan has been described by critics as the "Canadian Nkrumah who has joined the assault on reason."1 The comparison is at first glance unfathomable. Kwame Nkrumah, the prominent Pan-Africanist, anticolonialist, and first president of independent Ghana, would seem to have nothing in common with the pop media theorist. If their mutual attack on reason is what brings these two men together, what did this critic mean by "reason"? Certainly, Nkrumah's Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism—a book that came out in 1965, just one year after
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986927">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/48/image/coversmall"The Bard Wouldn't Recognize Hamlet": On Medium Specificity and Shakespeare in Africa2026-04-02text/htmlen-US"The Bard Wouldn't Recognize Hamlet": On Medium Specificity and Shakespeare in Africa2026-04-022026TWOProject MUSE®1364792026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-02Animal In/Media Out
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986926
<p></p>
An attention to animal life in film studies might be understood as always carrying a potentially disruptive force to textual and conceptual boundaries; the ability to puncture diegetic worlding and radically draw together disparate works/concepts/events into relation. This disruption might be better understood as a fissure or eruption in the exclusionary ontological underpinnings of what constitutes humanitis and its disavowal of animal consciousness as a justification for their exploitation. In film studies more specifically, an attention to animal life can be understood as a reparative intervention for a discipline that's very origin, technologically, aesthetically, and materially, is entangled with animal
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986927">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/48/image/coversmallAnimal In/Media Out2026-04-02text/htmlen-USAnimal In/Media Out2026-04-022026TWOProject MUSE®104712026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-02Experiment, Never Interpret: Nicole Brenez and Figural Analysis
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986927
<p></p>
The introduction to Nicole Brenez's pathbreaking 1998 book De la figure en général et du corps en particulier, now translated into English by Ted Fendt, takes the form of a missive written to fellow film writer Tag Gallagher who has asked Brenez to clarify her new approach to cinema, "figural analysis." Gallagher objects: "If you can't define it briefly in two or three words (and not two or three words in a figurative sense), you'd be better off considering another approach" (ix). Brenez, who takes some issue with the need for any method to be reduced to a few words, obliges her friend, "Dear Tag." She borrows three words from Gilles Deleuze in response: "experiment, never interpret" (ix). While figural analysis
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986927">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/48/image/coversmallExperiment, Never Interpret: Nicole Brenez and Figural Analysis2026-04-02text/htmlen-USExperiment, Never Interpret: Nicole Brenez and Figural Analysis2026-04-022026TWOProject MUSE®207142026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-02