Browsing by Author "Holm N"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Everyone's a Critic (So What Comes Next?)
    (Simon Dawes, Centre d’histoire culturelle des sociétés contemporaines (CHCSC), Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ), 2023-09-18) Holm N
    What is the fate of critique – especially media critique – in a social context that widely and enthusiastically embraces criticism and critical approaches? Starting from the position that critique has become a widespread intellectual orientation across both intellectual work and popular cultural engagement, this article discusses how media critique might produce meaningful and productive knowledge when a critical attitude towards the media is widely considered common sense. Arguing against perspectives that would make postcritique the enemy of critique, it suggests that critique would be better able to illuminate the current conjuncture if the aggression of critical suspicion were replaced with a more democratic and reflexive form of critical doubt.
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    ‘I am in Great Pain, Please Help Me’: Nihilism, Humour, and Rick and Morty
    (SAGE Publications, 2024-11-20) Holm N; Donian J
    One of Cartoon Network’s most successful shows ever, Rick and Morty (2013–present) has established a cult following for its blend of dark humour and existential themes. However, the show is more than just a representation of popular nihilism; through its sustained engagement with nihilistic themes, it also demonstrates how nihilism can be embraced, exhausted, and potentially eventually surpassed in a popular context. Drawing on Richard Hoggart’s model of “social hermeneutics,” this article analyses key episodes as a means to think through the broader trajectory of nihilism as an influential element of twenty-first century popular culture.
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    No time for fun: the politics of partying during a pandemic
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 2021-05-04) Holm N
    In 2020, in the face of the unparalleled epidemiological threat posed by Covid-19, multiple governments around the world sought to contain the spread of the virus by imposing strict lockdown measures that dramatically limited the movement and gathering of citizens. Not only did these restrictions severely curtail the regular patterns of economic, political and cultural life, they also made it very hard to have fun. While this last point may appear flippant, this article proposes that a proper accounting for fun is absolutely necessary if we are to understand not just the challenges passed by lockdown measures, but also the legal and biomedical risks people were willing to take to engage in activities like hosting parties, surfing and attending raves, during a pandemic. Arguing against the idea of fun as a form of displaced political practice, I instead suggest that fun is best understood as an example of contingent, non-transcendent aesthetic value that is absolutely central to everyday desire and the appeal of popular culture. Often easy to overlook, the experience of lockdown brought the appeal and importance of fun into sharp relief in ways that point towards the powerful role fun plays in shaping our lives both during a pandemic and (hopefully) after.
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    The aesthetics of creative activism: Introduction
    (Oxford University Press, 2023-06-01) Holm N; Tilley E
    In this introduction to The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism special issue on the aesthetics of creative activism, we canvas influential scholarship of political aesthetics to sculpt a broad typology of six interconnected mechanisms by which art might intervene in the world. We label these: Documentation, Disruption, Recognition, Participation, Imagination, and Beauty. Each has a compelling tradition of theory and application, augmented, extended, and sometimes challenged by the thirteen fresh and provocative contributions in the special issue. Yet, we ask, if both politically minded artists and culturally minded activists are convinced of the power of art to provoke social change, and if we live a world that by almost all measures is now saturated with politically inclined, aesthetically informed practices, interfaces, objects, and texts, why does art not seem to be making a difference? Clearly, we need to think harder about the relationships between art and action, a task the articles assembled here call upon us to take seriously.
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    The limits of satire, or the reification of cultural politics
    (SAGE Publications, 15/02/2023) Holm N
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    Trevor Noah and the contingent politics of racial joking
    (Cracow Tertium Society for the Promotion of Language Studies, 2021-11-01) Donian J; Holm N
    This article takes up the transnational comedy career of Trevor Noah as a way to explore how the political work of racial comedy can manifest, circulate and indeed communicate differently across different racial-political contexts. Through the close textual analysis of two key comic performances –“The Daywalker” (2009) and “Son of Patricia” (2018), produced and (initially) circulated in South Africa and the USA, respectively – this article explores the extent to which Noah’s comic treatment of race has shifted between the two contexts. In particular, attention is paid to how Noah incites, navigates and mitigates potential sources of offence surrounding racial anxieties in the two contexts, and how he evokes his own “mixed-race” status in order to open up spaces of permission that allow him to joke about otherwise taboo subjects. Rejecting the claim that the politics of Noah’s comedy is emancipatory or progressive in any straightforward way, by means of formal analyses we argue that his comic treatment of race does not enact any singular politics, but rather that the political work of his racial humour shifts relative to its wider political contexts. Thus, rather than drawing a clear line between light entertainment and politically meaningful humour, this article argues that the political valence of racial joking can be understood as contingent upon wider discourses of race that circulate in national-cultural contexts.