Between Form and Content: Narrative Typology, Metafiction and Ideology in The Thousand and One Nights

With few exceptions, narrative theory does not ordinarily consider the self-reflexive capacity of The Thousand and One Nights beyond its canonical instance of framing, and Arabic literary scholarship does not ordinarily engage with its narratological aspects. This article proposes a narratological approach for a systematic breakdown of story cycles through abstraction, partly by making use of computer programming language, in order to demonstrate the narrative typology in the Nights. It argues that repetitions, transpositions, substitutions, and reversals testify to tensions between the overt ideology of the text and the counter discourse that unsettles this logic, concealed in its poetics. The article thereby aims to bring some of the core concepts of narrative theory into dialogue with the Nights scholarship, and to contribute to a theoretical conversation about ideological critique in narrative analysis, particularly within the pre-modern storytelling tradition.

Data and oil: Metaphor, materiality and metabolic rifts

‘Data is the new oil’ is a phrase that is frequently employed to indicate that digital technologies and data extraction have supplanted fossil fuels and geological extractivism as the central driver of the global economy. While this metaphor has been subject to discursive and ideological critique within media, communication and cultural studies, this article conducts a materialist analysis of the connections between data and oil. While claims that data is the new oil typically assume digital technologies to be clean, renewable and sustainable, an infrastructural approach reveals the vast quantities of oil and other fossil fuels necessary for digital capitalism, therefore repudiating claims that data can grow exponentially with no material costs. Consequently, the article explores how metabolic rifts and degrowth offer productive frameworks for outlining the contours of a sustainable and equitable digital future.

The Decolonial Reduction and the Transcendental-Phenomenological Reduction

This paper offers a philosophical exploration of Nelson Maldonado-Torres’s formulation of the “decolonial reduction” as an instrument of phenomenology and ideological critique. Comparing the decolonial reduction to Edmund Husserl’s notion of the transcendental-phenomenological reduction or epoché, I argue that working through the demands of rigor for either mode of reduction points to areas of overlap: the work of transcendental phenomenology is incomplete without the performance of the decolonial reduction and vice versa. I then assess Maldonado-Torres’s anchoring of the decolonial reduction in the spirit of the “decolonial attitude” and criticism of the Husserlian theoretical attitude. I conclude that foreclosing the theoretical attitude as a framework from which to perform the decolonial reduction implies significant limitations and pitfalls for the decolonial project.

The Neoliberal Disciplining of LeBron James and Kevin Durant: Sports Media Discourse on NBA Free Agency as Ideological Critique

Through content analysis of sports media commentary focusing on the high-profile free agencies of NBA stars LeBron James and Kevin Durant, the author demonstrates how commercial sports media discourse responding to these critical exigencies strategically reinforces neoliberal ideology and parlays its disciplinary rhetoric into a derogatory ideological critique of James, Durant, and their contemporaries. The analysis demonstrates how media discourse surrounding James and Durant covertly but significantly reinforces cultural myths of rugged individualism, self-sufficiency, and competition as concomitant with success and self-worth while exalting idealized constructions of the prior generation of basketball icons, particularly Michael Jordan, whose mythic self-reliance is metonymic of an influx of nostalgic discourse which framed today’s players as constitutionally inferior to the stars of the 1980s and 1990s.

Capitalism as Affective Atmosphere: The Noir Worlds of Massimo Carlotto

This chapter interrogates the relationship between the novels of the Italian crime writer Massimo Carlotto and the ills of capitalism in its neoliberal phase. But crucially it is not an ideological critique where character and action can be fully explained according to the logic of capitalism as a social and economic system. Rather, Carlotto's noir universe is chaotic and unpredictable, and his characters do not understand themselves or their actions beyond a basic inclination toward financial gain and self-interest. As such, I argue that affect understood as an autonomic or bodily response to one's environment better explains Carlotto's noir world; and that 'noir affect'—which takes and inverts the positive potential of affect identified by Massumi and others—acts on populations to negatively imbricate or subsume action and character in the unruly violence of the 'free' market.

Posture

This chapter begins a new trio of chapters that turn from modes of exposure and ideological critique to ask how the atrocities and violent consequences of empire can be perceived through erotic and reparative engagements. Playing with Eve Sedgwick’s concepts of “texture” and “touch,”this chapter examines how games position player bodies into postures ready for expression, reaction, and reception. It juxtaposes the 2016 “Men Against Fire” episode of the television show Black Mirror and the strikingly similar 2008 video game Haze to compare the mode of visual techno-paranoia with the various postures of gameplay. It then explores how the game Alien: Isolation disrupts our “plunge” postures, transforming them into postures of vulnerability and dread, which enforce new understandings of the social anxieties stoked by political and social marginalizations.

Neuro-Crime Fiction: Detecting Cognitive Difference

This paper seeks to understand how crime fiction connects with the neuroscientific turn occurring in society and culture today. It argues the genre has inherent ties to the science, technology, and biopolitical imperatives underpinning the neuroscientific turn, and is thus uniquely suited to exploring and challenging the ethical considerations arising from it. The paper highlights the symbiotic relationship between crime fiction and neuroscientific models, in which the particularities of the genre are employed by science while science influences the forms of crime fiction. Looking particularly at recent crime novels focussing on types of dementia, it explores how they affect expected generic endings to mount an ideological critique of a strictly medical and material model of identity formation. It does this through a re-working of today's hegemonic model of brain health, dominated by discourses of ‘neuroplasticity,’ looking in particular at how crime fiction can help us to think differently about cognitive differences and diseases.

Threat Assessment

While the term neoliberalism is commonly used to explain libertarian and conservative economic perspectives, its rapidly expanding contexts influence every aspect of our cultural environment, even the contexts of higher education. This article explores how neoliberal ideology affects the contemporary teaching environment for women of color teaching ideological critique.