SOUNDBITES: MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN APPROACHES TO SOUND AND LITERATURE
Editors: Erik Born, Andrew Hicks, and Simone Pinet (all Cornell)
Developing new approaches for research in literary and cultural sound studies, medievalists and early modernists have leveraged a number of critical concepts, such as R. Murray Schafer’s “soundscapes” and Stephen Feld’s “acoustemology.” What did the world sound like before the emergence of modern sound recording and reproduction technologies? What might we gain from approaching premodern literature as an acoustic system that only truly comes to life when voiced? Studying periods without live recordings demands innovative critical approaches. This special issue collects a series of “soundbites,” each focusing on one key medieval or early modern contribution to the history of sound, not as a given or a natural acoustic habitat but a construct akin to Jonathan Sterne’s “audile techniques”—artificial, cultural, and bound up with contested processes of meaning-making. The issue thus suggests new directions for research, connecting the present state of sound studies to both the past and the future.
BIOPOLITICS 3.0
Editors: Judith Tauber (Cornell University) and Sergio Ferrarese (William & Mary)
Updating biopolitical theory has perhaps never been as urgent as it is today. Surveillance now extends into everyday life with unprecedented intimacy. Ecological devastation blurs the boundaries between environmental and political crisis. Desire, pleasure, memory, and vulnerability are incorporated in new forms of governance, while institutions continue to produce lives that are constantly disciplined, optimized, neglected, or rendered disposable. These transformations demand more than the repetition of established biopolitical theories. They call for new conceptual languages capable of grasping the shifting relation between sovereignty, technology, violence, and survival. This issue is animated by a sense that existing critical vocabularies may no longer be fully adequate to the present. Rather than treating biopolitics as a settled theoretical paradigm, this issue approaches it as a concept still in motion—one that must be revised, challenged, and expanded in response to contemporary sociopolitical conditions. Moving across political theory, psychoanalysis, ecology, philosophy, and critical theory, the issue asks what an updated paradigm of biopolitical thought might look like today, and what forms of life, resistance, and collective future it might still allow us to imagine.
VIOLENCE AND THE LEFT
Political violence is on the rise, and not just on the right. Confronted with the breakdown of liberal democracy and the entrenchment of right-wing populism, the left is beginning to reconsider its relationship to violence. No longer reflexively non-violent, these often uncoordinated practices take many forms: self-defense, rioting, sabotage, and assassinations. This shift in attitudes toward violence is part of a larger disruption of traditional political alignments, including understandings of what constitutes the left. Approaching contemporary political violence as a matter that the left can no longer externalize, this special issue addresses the following questions: When is violence a legitimate political strategy? Which new forms of political violence are emerging with the decline of liberalism, and what is their relationship to mass movements? And does the polycrisis necessarily bend toward fascism, or can it generate openings for left-wing visions of a postcapitalist future?