Cultural Studies

This thesis explores access to feminist zine culture and community, specifically if, and how, access has been altered in the age of digital technologies and increased access to digital spaces. Results from a questionnaire completed by 8 young feminist zine-makers and readers of marginalized genders indicated that though the modern boundaries of what a zine is has been expanded to include e-zines, there remains a preference toward print zines in zine-making and reading practices. Results also revealed that while there is a preference toward accessing feminist zine culture and community in-person in theory, participants were more likely to access feminist zine culture and community online in reality. This project found that digital technologies and the Internet have affected feminist zine culture in multiple ways, ranging from the Internet creating a new access points to community, to the Internet making it easier to find, purchase, and distribute zines.

Author Keywords: Digital Media, Feminism, Feminist Zine Culture, Feminist Zines, Materiality, Print Media

My research examines the figure of the 'vagabond' as a case study to illustrate how 'modern'

perception of the 'vagabond' has depleted the diversities in its 'pre-modern' counterparts. It

argues that the paranoia towards the 'vagabond' was inherited from the west out of the

colonial contact leading to the birth of the nation-state and its liaison with 'instrumental

rationality' during the high noon of advanced industrial capitalism, while (quasi-religious)

itinerancy, on the contrary, had always been tolerated in 'pre-modern' India. The problems I

am addressing are: What is the line of thread that separates the 'traveler' from the 'vagabond', the 'explorer' from the 'wanderer'? How do we then politically account for the historic 'ruptures' in the vagabond having been tolerated in the ancient 'Indic' thought [cf. Manusmriti, Arthshastra], encouraged in early Buddhist discourse [cf. Samannaphala Sutta], revered as the 'holy Other' in the Middle Ages [cf. Bhakti-Sufi literature], and eventually marginalized in the 'modern'? While considering issues of cultural differences, my thesis points to how the epistemic shifts from the classical to the medieval, from the medieval to the modern radically alter the value system immanent in the figure of the 'vagabond'. The research argues that the cultural baggage that the expression 'vagabond' is generally associated with, is a product of a specific western/utilitarian value system, which is a distinct 'cultural' category of the 'modern' west that had no resonance in 'pre- modern' India, and hence cannot be necessarily universalizable. The project works in a number of registers: historical, archival, cultural, philosophical and representational, involves analysis of literary, filmic texts, also legislative documents, and is genuinely interdisciplinary in nature. As of discourse analysis, the project studies the politics of cultural representations both of and by 'vagabonds'.

Author Keywords: 1943 Bengal Famine, Homelessness, India, Vagabond, Vagrancy, Vagrancy Act

This dissertation traces the concept of transcendentalism from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781) to Michel Foucault's historical a priori and Pierre Bourdieu's field and habitus, with implicit reference to Deleuze's `transcendental empiricism,' and the influence this trajectory has had on contemporary theory and culture. This general conceptual framework is used as the basis for a critical analysis of a series of examples taken from popular culture to highlight their transcendental conditions of possibility and the influence this conceptual paradigm has had on today's theory. The examples include the NFL `concussion crisis,' South Park's problematization of the discourse surrounding it, as well as the literature of Charles Bukowski, as an exemplification of an immanent writer-written situation. It is further suggested that, not only is transcendentalism an epistemological framework for thought, but it also doubles as an ontological principle for the emergence of a constitutively incomplete and unfinished reality.

Author Keywords: Bukowski, Concussion, Foucault, Kant, South Park, transcendental

The dissertation explores and defends the theory and practice of a Western-Islamic public sphere (which is secular but not secularist and which is Islamic but not Islamist), within which a critical Islamic intellectual universe can unfold, dealing hermeneutically with texts and politically with lived practices, and which, moreover, has to emerge from within the arc of two alternative, conflicting, yet equally dismissive suspicions defined by a view that critical Islam is the new imperial rhetoric of hegemonic orientalism and the opposite view that critical Islam is just fundamentalism camouflaged in liberal rhetoric. The Western-Islamic public sphere offers a third view, arising from ethical commitment to intellectual work, creativity, and imagination as a portal to the open horizons of history.

Author Keywords: Critical Islam, critique, history, Islamic reformation, public sphere, secular

The modern sense of historicism developed over time that brought different textures at the intersection between history and fiction. The life of Jesus of Nazareth, prolifically researched after Herman Reimarus (1694-1768) right until today – a phenomenon known as The Quest for the Historical Jesus – provides an instructive case study for a wider discussion about the intersection between history and fiction in biography and autobiography. As a result of these centuries of Jesuanic research, one can identify a set predictable challenges which life-writing may need to confront. Furthermore, interesting historiographical criteria to detect factual authenticity versus factual inauthenticity for life-writing were also developed. Nevertheless, the depth of disagreement about a well-researched narrative such as the Jesuanic chronicle can eventually feel almost insurmountable. Pessimism, in fact, has become widespread. Thus, this dissertation raises the question: Is it but a vain attempt to search for truth by attempting to draw a sharp line between fiction and history? Hence, the discussion moves to Mikhail Bakhtin whose insistence on dialogism rather than truth seeking provides a more relational approach to appreciating the intersection between history and fiction in biography and autobiography.

Author Keywords: biography, Copernicanism, dialogism, fiction, historicism, monologism

The central scholarly contribution of this dissertation develops through bringing the theories of Michel Foucault to bear in a sociolegal study of rave culture's criminalization by the United Kingdom's 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act. My methodology develops rave as a cultural keyword. This keyword navigates through a quasi-materialist definition of rave as a cultural codification of sound system technologies. I theorize the way in which sociocultural discourse indexes aestheticized representations and the cultural mythologies that rave sound system's technical mediation generate. These ideas trace the facticity of the legal documentation of rave's criminalization. I inform this sociolegal history by situating Foucault's work on the genealogy of liberalism as a practical toolkit for associating the legal discourse on rave culture with the genealogy of festival. This opens up a dialogue with the work of Mikhail Bakhtin's theorizing of the festival's ambivalent political climate. Such ideas are useful in documenting rave as an enduring mimicry of the tension between State and civil society. Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 1559 painting, "The Fight Between Carnival and Lent", captures this tension beautifully. The aptness of reading rave's criminalization in relation to Bruegel's portrayal of landscape is accomplished by returning to Foucault, who defines liberalism's political technologies in relation to Judaeo-Christian precedents. I explore how these political technologies, pastoral power in particular, are helpful in tracing rave's genealogical relation to the festival's sociotechnical cartography.

Author Keywords: Bakhtin, Carnival, Christianity, Festival, Liberalism, Materialism

This dissertation is a critical review of the discursive formation of Islamic art in the twentieth century and the continuing problems that the early categorization of this discipline carries. It deals with the impact of these problems on the conceptualization of another category, Persian art. The subject is expounded by three propositions. First, the category of Islamic art was initially a product of Orientalism formulated regardless of the indigenous/Islamic knowledge of art. Second, during the early period when art historians examined different theoretical dimensions for constructing an aesthetic of Islamic art in the West, they imposed a temporal framework on Islamic art in which excluded the non-traditional and contemporary art of Islamic countries. Third, after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iranian scholars eventually imposed academic authority over the discipline of Persian/Islamic art, they adopted the same inadequate methodologies that were initially used in some of the early studies on the art of the Muslims. These propositions are elaborated by examples from twentieth-century Iranian movements in painting, The Coffeehouse Painting and The School of Saqqakhaneh, and the incident of swapping Willem de Kooning's painting Woman III with the dismembered manuscript of the Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp in 1994. The conceptualization of Islamic art as a discipline is also discussed in relation to the twentieth-century cultural context of Iran. The argument is divided into three chapters in relation to three important historical moments in the history of contemporary Iran: The Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911), the modernization of Iran (1925-1975), and the Islamic Revolution (1979-onward). The formation of the discourse of Islamic art is the fruit of nineteenth-century Orientalism. Out of this discourse, Persian art as a modern discourse addressing the visual culture of Pre-Islamic and Islamic Iran came into being. I claim that after the Islamic Revolution, Iranian academics demonstrate a theoretical loyalty to the early theorizations of Islamic/Persian art. By this token, visual signs are given a meta-signified in the narrative of Islamic art. The ontological definition of this meta-signified is subjected to the dominant ideology, which determines how different centers of meaning should come into being and disappear. In the post-Revolution academia, the center is construed as the transcendental signified. Such inherence resulted in a fallacy in the reading of the Persian side of Islamic art, to which I refer as the "signification fallacy." The dissertation draws on the consequences of this fallacy in the critique of Islamic art.

Keywords: Persian art, Islamic art, Iranian art; Persian classical literature, Narrative. Image, Representation, Aniconism, Abstraction, Modernity, Tradition, Orientalism, The Constitutional Revolution, Modernization, The Islamic Revolution. Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp, The Coffeehouse Painting, The School of Saqqakhaneh; Modernism: Woman III.

Author Keywords: Iranian Art, Islamic Art, Orientalism, Persian Art, The Constitutional Revolution, The Islamic Revolution

Untitled (dissertation 4.2) offers a performative take on the political implications of digital archives. I argue that technological developments and their increasing ubiquity has not resulted in more reliable archives; it has facilitated the exacerbation of what Jacques Derrida calls mal d'archive—or archive fever—which refers to the institutionally supported passion to preserve that is perpetually threatened by the inevitably of loss. A performative perspective, specifically derived from the work of contemporary performance theorists and artists, affords a contemporary archival practice that not only accepts, but is informed by mal d'archive because it shifts the focus from what is preserved to how it has become and continues to be preservable through archival acts. This is important in our contemporary moment because the ubiquity of digital technologies has exacerbated the symptoms of mal d'archive: a rapid increase in both the formal and informal production of preservable content, and consequently, as Derrida reminds us, archival violence.

Untitled (dissertation 4.2) also includes a performative engagement with mal d'archive through two interludes. The first interlude features what I am calling "glitch-utterances," which refers to the visual representations of technological mishaps. The documents in the second interlude—an iteration of the exhibition catalogue that resulted from my 2020 artist residency at the Art Gallery of Peterborough—engage with the productive function of the archive because they performatively constitute the exhibition as having happened regardless of whether or not it actually occurred, which, significantly, it did not.

I conclude Untitled (dissertation 4.2) with a look at the ecological impact of digital archives—perhaps an "ecological fever." It is not my intention to offer a solution for this "ecological fever," nor address its full impact. My aim is to conclude this dissertation with a supplement of sorts: a look at the ecological impact of digital archives because I feel it is irresponsible not to given their increasing ubiquity. With this in mind, the glitch-utterances featured in both interludes can perform an important role in calling attention to the technological materialities and computational processes that are rendered invisible by Big Tech companies via metaphors—the ethereal Cloud metaphor, for example. These glitch-utterances point to the very material substrates that support the virtual, and can thus act as an important reminder of the ecological consequences of digital archives, which, like archival practices, are tied to institutional agendas.

Author Keywords: Archive , Curation , Digital Archive, Documentation, Multimedia performance, Performativity

This dissertation presents the work of the American science fiction writer Neal Stephenson as a case study of mediations between literature and science by mobilizing its resonances with contemporary science studies and media theory. Tracing the historical and thematic trajectory of his consecutively published novels Snow Crash (1992), The Diamond Age; or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (1995), Cryptonomicon (1999), Quicksilver: The Baroque Cycle I (2003), The Confusion: The Baroque Cycle II (2004), and The System of the World: The Baroque Cycle III (2004), it approaches Stephenson's fiction as an archaeology of the deep history of science that leads from late twentieth-century cyberculture, to world-war-two cryptography, and the seventeenth-century rise of the Royal Society. Refracted through a parallel reading of Stephenson's novels and the theoretical work of Michel Serres, Bruno Latour, Friedrich A. Kittler, Isabelle Stengers, Donna Haraway, and others, this dissertation offers a literary discussion of the relations among cybernetics, complexity theory, information theory, systems theory, Leibnizian metaphysics, and Newtonian alchemy. Recognizing these hybrid fields as central to contemporary dialogues between the natural sciences and the humanities, Stephenson's work is shown to exhibit a consistent engagement with the feedback loops among physical, artistic, narratological, and epistemological processes of innovation and emergence. Through his portrayal of hackers, mathematicians, natural philosophers, alchemists, vagabonds, and couriers as permutations of trickster figures, this dissertation advances a generalized notion of boundary transgressions and media infrastructures to illustrate how newness emerges by way of the turbulent con-fusion of disciplines, genres, knowledge systems, historical linearities, and physical environments. Uninterested in rigid genre boundaries, Stephenson's novels are explored through the links among artistic modes that range from cyberpunk, to hard science fiction, historiographic metafiction, the carnivalesque, and the baroque. In a metabolization of the work performed by science studies, Stephenson's fiction foregrounds that scientific practice is always intimately entangled in narrative, politics, metaphor, myth, and the circulation of a multiplicity of human and nonhuman agents. As the first sustained analysis of this segment of Stephenson's work, this dissertation offers a contribution to both science fiction studies and the wider field of literature and science.

Author Keywords: Complexity Theory, Cyberpunk, Michel Serres, Neal Stephenson, Science Fiction, Science Studies

Independent music venues are important hubs of social activity and cultural

production around which local punk scenes are both physically and conceptually

organized. Through interactions with participants over extended periods of time, these

spaces become meaningful places that are imbued with the energy, history and memories

of local music scenes. When a venue is shut down, local punk scenes experience a

temporary disruption as participants struggle to begin the process of re-establishing a new

autonomous social space free from outsider interference. Therefore, moving from the

local, to the national, to the international, from the small and personal to the vast and

global, as well as from the physical to the virtual, this dissertation illustrates the actual,

everyday practices of local scenes across Canada, addressing the larger issue of the loss

of alternative music venues occurring on a global scale and the resulting impact on punk

scene participants. Through the use of ethnographic research methods such as participant

observation, photographic documentation, interviews and surveys, this dissertation

engages with contemporary punk scene participants in order to give voice to those often

ignored in grand narratives of punk history. As such, traditional concepts of punk as a

utopic countercultural space are challenged to reveal the complexity and diversity that

exists within contemporary local punk scenes, where participants often experience equal

amounts of cooperation, competition, tension and struggle. By choosing to engage with

contemporary experiences and interpretations of punk culture, this research addresses the

changing landscape of local scenes, as punk participants attempt to carve out spaces of

representation for themselves in an exceedingly mediated world.

Author Keywords: Canada, music venues, punk, scene, social space, subculture