Animal Narratology interrogates what it means to narrate, to speak—speak for, on behalf of—and to voice, or represent life beyond the human, which is in itself as different as insects, bears, and dogs are from each other, and yet more, as individual as a single mouse, horse, or puma. The varied contributions to this interdisciplinary Special Issue highlight assumptions about the human perception of, attitude toward, and responsibility for the animals that are read and written about, thus demonstrating that just as “the animal” does not exist, neither does “the human”. In their zoopoetic focus, the analyses are aware that animal narratology ultimately always contains an approximation of an animal perspective in human terms and terminology, yet they make clear that what matters is how the animal is approximated and that there is an effort to approach and encounter the non-human in the first place. Many of the analyses come to the conclusion that literary animals give readers the opportunity to expand their own points of view both on themselves and others by adopting another’s perspective to the degree that such an endeavor is possible. Ultimately, the contributions call for a recognition of the many spaces, moments, and modes in which human lives are entangled with those of animals—one of which is located within the creative bounds of storytelling.

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This book explores the link between gender and urban space, attempting to incorporate a joyful activism into geographical research and embracing forms of ""self-awareness and self-ignorance"" (Harding 1992) to reconsider established theoretical and methodological approaches and enact research practices informed by liberatory politics (Federici 2023). The author worked together with transfeminist activists in Cagliari and Brussels, socialised as white and cisgender women as her, to observe the urban space by considering the intersection between gender oppression and the privilege of whiteness and cisgenderness. The result is a deeply reflexive book, because the theory it contains is conceived out of the personal experiences and individual histories of the people involved and is marked by a constant questioning of the author's presence and limits; joyful, because it chooses the path of attention by focusing on the relationships between the people involved and embracing feminist practices of parody; political, because it offers both individual and collective representations that express how power relations work in urban space. Parody is the feminist practice for a joyful geography that the author and participants chose to critically imitate discrimination and create three collaborative short films, entitled: ""By Bike She Lives"", on the right to slowness from a feminist perspective; ""Urban Piss-Ups"", on the act of urinating in public space as a metaphor for the right to the city; and finally ""Freedom for Jeanneke-Pis"", on the symbolism associated with sexist public representations. While the individual cartographies contribute to a theoretical discourse on the city, the films are suitable for public debate, to be discussed, disseminated and used to exercise the right to critique, the right to ask questions and to imagine, think and share urban scenarios other than the existing ones.

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The art of mashup music, its roots in parody, and its social and legal implications.Parody needn't recognize copyright—but does an algorithm recognize parody? The ever-increasing popularity of remix culture and mashup music, where parody is invariably at play, presents a conundrum for internet platforms, with their extensive automatic, algorithmic policing of content. Taking a wide-ranging look at mashup music—the creative and technical considerations that go into making it; the experience of play, humor, enlightenment, and beauty it affords; and the social and legal issues it presents—Parody in the Age of Remix offers a pointed critique of how society balances the act of regulating art with the act of preserving it.In several jurisdictions, national and international, parody is exempted from copyright laws. Ragnhild Brøvig contends that mashups should be understood as a form of parody, and thus be protected from removal from hosting platforms. Nonetheless, current copyright-related content-moderation regimes, relying on algorithmic detection and automated decision making, frequently eliminate what might otherwise be deemed gray-area content—to the detriment of human listeners and, especially, artists. Given the inaccuracy of takedowns, Parody in the Age of Remix makes a persuasive argument in favor of greater protection for remix creativity in the future—but it also suggests that the content-moderation challenges facing mashup producers and other remixers are symptomatic of larger societal issues.

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In Plankton Dreams,Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay crafts a proud, satiric style: the special ed student as literary troublemaker. 'Mother had always taught me to learn from circumstance,' he writes. 'Here, the circumstance was humiliation, a particularly instructive teacher.' 'But I’m not complaining,' he continues. 'Humiliation, after all, made me a philosopher.'

For all of its comic effects, the book alerts readers to an alternative understanding of autism, an understanding that autistics themselves have been promoting for years. Frustrated by how most scientists investigate autism, Mukhopadhyay decides to investigate neurotypicality, treating his research subjects the way he himself was treated. Why shouldn’t the autist study the neurotypical? This artful parody of scientific endeavor salvages dignity from a dark place. It also reveals a very talented writer. It is most certainly time to study the neurotypical—his or her relentless assumptions. Perhaps by doing so we may devise a more humble and hospitable society.

Buy paperback at Open Humanities Press

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Die gesellschaftliche Relevanz visueller Kommunikation nimmt immer weiter zu. Postmoderne Bildparodien sind Teil dieser Kultur. Dabei erschöpfen sie sich nicht im Aspekt des Komischen. Johanna Hornauer erläutert am Beispiel ausgewählter Werke von Sigmar Polke, dass Bildparodien eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit Geschichte als autoritativer Instanz darstellen. Ihre Untersuchung von postmodernen Bildparodien als ästhetischer Praxis und Intervention in bestehende (Herrschafts-)Diskurse entwickelt neue Analysestrategien und fördert damit unter medienkritischer Perspektive ein generelles »Lesenlernen« von Bildern, das im Museum ebenso nützlich ist wie auf Social Media.

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An investigation of sexual themes in electronic music since the 1950s, with detailed case studies of “electrosexual music” by a wide range of creators. In Sex Sounds, Danielle Shlomit Sofer investigates the repeated focus on sexual themes in electronic music since the 1950s. Debunking electronic music's origin myth—that it emerged in France and Germany, invented by Pierre Schaeffer and Karlheinz Stockhausen, respectively—Sofer defines electronic music more inclusively to mean any music with an electronic component, drawing connections between academic institutions, radio studios, experimental music practice, hip-hop production, and histories of independent and commercial popular music. Through a broad array of detailed case studies—examining music that ranges from Schaeffer's musique concrète to a video workshop by Annie Sprinkle—Sofer offers a groundbreaking look at the social and cultural impact sex has had on audible creative practices. Sofer argues that “electrosexual music” has two central characteristics: the feminized voice and the “climax mechanism.” Sofer traces the historical fascination with electrified sex sounds, showing that works representing women's presumed sexual experience operate according to masculinist heterosexual tropes, and presenting examples that typify the electroacoustic sexual canon. Noting electronic music history's exclusion of works created by women, people of color, women of color, and, in particular Black artists, Sofer then analyzes musical examples that depart from and disrupt the electroacoustic norms, showing how even those that resist the norms sometimes reinforce them. These examples are drawn from categories of music that developed in parallel with conventional electroacoustic music, separated—segregated—from it. Sofer demonstrates that electrosexual music is far more representative than the typically presented electroacoustic canon.

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There is a vast body of imaginal literature in Bengali that introduces fictional Sufi saints into the complex mythological world of Hindu gods and goddesses. Dating to the sixteenth century, the stories—pīr katha—are still widely read and performed today. The events that play out rival the fabulations of the Arabian Nights, which has led them to be dismissed as simplistic folktales, yet the work of these stories is profound: they provide fascinating insight into how Islam habituated itself into the cultural life of the Bangla-speaking world. In Witness to Marvels, Tony K. Stewart unearths the dazzling tales of Sufi saints to signal a bold new perspective on the subtle ways Islam assumed its distinctive form in Bengal.

“The tales that are the subject of Tony K. Stewart’s book depict a Bengal that is miraculously hybrid, innocent of the estrangements of the modern era. This is essential reading for everyone interested in precolonial South Asia.” AMITAV GHOSH, author of The Great Derangement

“This is a work of great erudition; the sophisticated analysis is testament to Stewart’s deep engagement with Bengal’s religious, cultural, and literary histories.” FARINA MIR, University of Michigan

“While inspiring readers to acquire fresh methodological and analytical tools for studying religion and region, history, and aesthetics, this triumph of a book also causes us to pause and marvel at the art of translation. This is nothing less than a standard-setter in the studies of South Asia, Islam, and literature.” SYED AKBAR HYDER, University of Texas at Austin

TONY K. STEWART is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in Humanities at Vanderbilt University and a specialist in the religions and literatures of early modern Bengal. His works include The Final Word: The Caitanya Caritamrta and the Grammar of Religious Tradition and Fabulous Females and Peerless Pīrs: Tales of Mad Adventure in Old Bengal.

Islamic Humanities, 2

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In this capacious transnational film history, renowned scholar Masha Salazkina proposes a groundbreaking new framework for understanding the cinematic cultures of twentieth-century socialism. Taking as a point of departure the vast body of work screened at the Tashkent International Festival of Cinemas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, World Socialist Cinema maps the circulation of films between the Soviet Bloc and the countries of the Global South in the mid- to late twentieth century, illustrating the distribution networks, festival circuits, and informal channels that facilitated this international network of artistic and intellectual exchange. Building on decades of meticulous archival work, this long-anticipated film history unsettles familiar stories to provide an alternative to Eurocentric, national, and regional narratives, rooted outside of the capitalist West.

“Deftly tessellating a dazzling array of institutions, films, languages, and geopolitical, formal, and theoretical questions, World Socialist Cinema is a field-changing book, and a model for future scholarship.” — ALICE LOVEJOY, author of Army Film and the Avant Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military

“Masha Salazkina’s scholarship is breathtaking, using hitherto unexplored archives and primary sources to complicate what we understand by terms like ‘world cinema,’ ‘global cinema,’ or ‘cinemas of solidarity.’ I know of nothing comparable.” — PETER LIMBRICK, author of Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi

MASHA SALAZKINA is Concordia Research Chair in Transnational Media Arts and Cultures at Concordia University, Montreal. She is the author of In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein’s Mexico and coeditor of Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema and Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures.

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«The good comic novel». La narrativa comica di Henry Fielding e l’importanza dell’esempio cervantino analyses the influence of Don Quixote on Henry Fielding’s fiction, starting with a survey of the reception of the Spanish novel in England. Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones are analyzed and compared with the Spanish novel, from which Fielding overtly borrowed some characters, episodes, and Cervantes’ parodic strategies. Fielding’s and Cervantes’s narrative proceeded from the parodic deconstruction and subsequent innovation of previous literature, with the main purpose of teaching and amusing the reader at the same time. Finally, the volume examines the role of Fielding and Cervantes in the rise of the fictional and the self-conscious novel.

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