Revolts in Cultural Critique

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Centered around the relationship between art and political transformation. From Charlott Bronte and Virginia Woolf, to Marlene van Niekerk and William Kentridge, artists and intellectuals have tried to address the question: How to deal with the legacy of exclusion and oppression Via substantive works of art, this book examines some of the answers that have emerged to this question, to show how art can put into motion something new and how it can transform social and cultural relations in a sustainable way. In this way, art can function as an effective form of cultural critique.

In the course of this book, a range of artworks are examined, through a postcolonial and feminist lens, in which revoltboth as a theme and as a medium-specific technique or/as critique is made visible. Time and time again, revolt takes the form of a slow and thorough working through of the position of the individual in relation to her history and her contemporary geopolitical circumstances. It thus becomes evident that renewal and transformation in art and society are most successful when they proceed according to the method of self-reflexive cultural critique; when they do not present themselves as revolution, radical breaks with the past, but rather as processes of revolt in which knowledge of the past is investigated, complemented, corrected, and bent to a new collective will.

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In Revolts in Cultural Critique Rosemarie Buikema examines both a main argumentation and detailed case studies concerning the ways in which contemporary literature and art revisit history and revolt against its multiple modes of violence. These cultural critical expressions seek to make the as yet unformed and unseen, visible and thus, open for discussion, and for imagining a different future. Revolt as method and as theme. She focuses on multi-layered interaction between message and medium, materiality and form, that enacts revolt as a process of resistance against clear-cut truths. The revolt that she unpacks for all of us who crave insights into what art can be and do, encompasses a poetics of recycling, an unfolding of folds, and an inquiry into how matter matters, how forms morph, and how time leaps out of its classically assumed linearity. The art discussed demands an active involvement in the erasure and reconstruction of the violated world. -- Mieke Bal, Professor Emerita in Literary Theory, University of Amsterdam

Author Bio

Rosemarie Buikema is professor of art, culture and diversity at Utrecht University. She chairs the UU Graduate Gender Programme and is the scientific director of the Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies