Argues that the modern subject did not emerge from psychoanalysis or existential philosophy but rather within early-twentieth-century Viennese portraiture.

The Material Subject emphasises how bodily and material cultures combine to make and transform subjects dynamically. The book is based on the French Matière à Penser (MaP) school of thought, which draws upon the ideas of Mauss, Schilder, Foucault and Bourdieu, among others, to enhance the anthropological study of embodiment, practices, techniques, materiality and power. Through theoretical sophistication and empirical field research, case studies from Europe, Africa and Asia bring MaP’s ideas into dialogue with other strands of material culture studies in the English-speaking world. These studies mediate different scales of engagement through a sensori-motor, affective and cognitive focus on practices of making and doing. Examples range from the precarity of professional divers in French public works to the gendered subjectivity of female carpet weavers in Morocco, from the ways Swiss watchmakers transmit craft knowledge to how Hindu devotees in India make efficacious use of altars, and from the enskilment of Paiwan indigenous people in Taiwan to the prestige of women’s wild silk wrappers in Burkina Faso. The chapters are organised according to domains of practice, defined as 'matter of' work and technology, heritage, politics, religion and knowledge. Scholars and students with an interest in material culture will gain valuable access to global research, rooted in a specific intellectual tradition.

An exploration of the visual culture of “race” through the work of five contemporary artists who came to prominence during the 1990s. Over the past two decades, artists James Luna, Fred Wilson, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Pepón Osorio, and Renée Green have had a profound impact on the meaning and practice of installation art in the United States. In Subject to Display, Jennifer González offers the first sustained analysis of their contribution, linking the history and legacy of race discourse to innovations in contemporary art. Race, writes González, is a social discourse that has a visual history. The collection and display of bodies, images, and artifacts in museums and elsewhere is a primary means by which a nation tells the story of its past and locates the cultures of its citizens in the present. All five of the American installation artists González considers have explored the practice of putting human subjects and their cultures on display by staging elaborate dioramas or site-specific interventions in galleries and museums; in doing so, they have created powerful social commentary of the politics of space and the power of display in settings that mimic the very spaces they critique. These artists' installations have not only contributed to the transformation of contemporary art and museum culture, but also linked Latino, African American, and Native American subjects to the broader spectrum of historical colonialism, race dominance, and visual culture. From Luna's museum installation of his own body and belongings as “artifacts” and Wilson's provocative juxtapositions of museum objects to Mesa-Bains's allegorical home altars, Osorio's condensed spaces (bedrooms, living rooms; barbershops, prison cells) and Green's genealogies of cultural contact, the theoretical and critical endeavors of these artists demonstrate how race discourse is grounded in a visual technology of display.

"Between the invention of photography in 1839 and the end of the nineteenth century, portraiture became one of the most popular and common art forms in the United States. ... images of human surfaces became understood as expressions of human depth during this era. Combining visual theory, literary close reading, and in-depth archival research, Blackwood examines portraiture's changing symbolic and aesthetic practices, from daguerreotype to X-ray. Considering painting, photography, illustration, and other visual forms alongside literary and cultural representations of portrait making and viewing, Blackwood argues that portraiture was a provocative art form used by writers, artists, and early psychologists to imagine selfhood as hidden, deep, and in need of revelation, ideas that were then taken up by the developing discipline of psychology"--

In Changing the Subject Srila Roy maps the rapidly transforming terrain of gender and sexual politics in India under the conditions of global neoliberalism. The consequences of India’s liberalization were paradoxical: the influx of global funds for social development and NGOs signaled the co-optation and depoliticization of struggles for women’s rights, even as they amplified the visibility and vitalization of queer activism. Roy reveals the specificity of activist and NGO work around issues of gender and sexuality through a decade-long ethnography of two West Bengal organizations, one working on lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues and the other on rural women’s empowerment. Tracing changes in feminist governmentality that were entangled in transnational neoliberalism, Roy shows how historical and highly local feminist currents shaped contemporary queer and nonqueer neoliberal feminisms. The interplay between historic techniques of activist governance and queer feminist governmentality’s focus on changing the self offers a new way of knowing feminism—both as always already co-opted and as a transformative force in the world.

Subject and Object in Modern English, first published in 1979, deals with subjects in the English language (one of the two main constituents of a clause), first comparing two possible notions of derived subject and then re-examining some derived subjects which had been assumed to be underlying subjects as well. This title also concerns itself with the basic verb phrase relations; not only with direct and indirect objects, but locative and directional phrases, with-phrases, and of-phrases considered. This book will be of interest to students of English language and linguistics.

Birkerts "examines the changes that he has observed in himself and others [since allowing a degree of everyday digital technology into his life]: the distraction induced by reading on the screen; the loss of personal agency through reliance on GPS and one-stop information resources; an increasing acceptance of 'hive' behaviors. 'An unprecedented shift is underway,' he argues, and 'this transformation is dramatically accelerated and more psychologically formative than any previous technological innovation.' He finds solace in engagement with art, particularly literature, and contemplates the countering energies available to us through acts of sustained attention, even as he worries that our increasingly mediated existences are a threat to creativity"--Page 4 of cove

Alcorn (English and humanities, George Washington U.) argues that the gradual shift in the teaching of composition from a curriculum that looked at literature as an attempt to represent reality to one that stresses the subjectivity of the student in decoding texts has incorporated an insufficiently complex understanding of subjectivity. The current cultural studies programs stress political ideas over expressive writing, but Alcorn argues that political ideas will never be right unless there is attention to self-expression. Basing his work in the conceptual world of psychoanalytic theory, he outlines a cultural-studies practice that develops anti-ideological identity. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This collection of original essays brings together some of the most prominent figures in new historicist and cultural materialist approaches to the early modern period, and offers a new focus on the literature and culture of the Renaissance. Traditionally, Renaissance studies have concentrated on the human subject. The essays collected here bring objects - purses, clothes, tapestries, houses, maps, feathers, communion wafers, tools, pages, skulls - back into view. As a result, the much-vaunted early modern subject ceases to look autonomous and sovereign, but is instead caught up in a vast and uneven world of objects which he and she makes, owns, values, imagines, and represents. This book puts things back into relation with people; in the process, it elicits new critical readings, and new cultural configurations.