Author: Mel Chen File Type: pdf In Animacies, Mel Y. Chen draws on recent debates about sexuality, race, and affect to examine how matter that is considered insensate, immobile, or deathly animates cultural lives. Toward that end, Chen investigates the blurry division between the living and the dead, or that which is beyond the human or animal. Within the field of linguistics, animacy has been described variously as a quality of agency, awareness, mobility, sentience, or liveness. Chen turns to cognitive linguistics to stress how language habitually differentiates the animate and the inanimate. Expanding this construct, Chen argues that animacy undergirds much that is pressing and indeed volatile in contemporary culture, from animal rights debates to biosecurity concerns. Chens book is the first to bring the concept of animacy together with queer of color scholarship, critical animal studies, and disability theory. Through analyses of dehumanizing insults, the meanings of queerness, animal protagonists in recent AsianAmerican art and film, the lead in toys panic in 2007, and the social lives of environmental illness, Animacies illuminates a hierarchical politics infused by race, sexuality, and ability. In this groundbreaking book, Chen rethinks the criteria governing agency and receptivity, health and toxicity, productivity and stillnessand demonstrates how attention to the affective charge of matter challenges commonsense orderings of the world. **Review Animacies is a book about reworldings, as Mel Y. Chen traces the myriad ways that objects and affects move through and reshape zones of possibility for political transformation and queer resistance to neoliberal biopolitics. At the same time, Animacies itself generates such transformations grounded in a generous, expansive understanding of queer of color and disabilitycrip critique, Chens study reworlds or reorients disability studies, gender and sexuality studies, critical race theory, animal studies, affect studies, and linguistics. In all of these critical spaces, Animacies might be described as the breathtaking and revivifying book we have been waiting for. (Robert McRuer, author of Crip Theory Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability) This ambitious transdisciplinary analysis of the relations between humans, nonhuman animals, and matter charts a compelling and innovative rethinking of the biopolitics of animacy. Mel Y. Chen animates animacy, a concept of sentience hierarchy derived in linguistics, to offer a far-ranging critique that implicates disability studies, queer of color critique, and postcolonial theory. The generative result is a timely and crucial intervention that foregrounds the oft-occluded import of race and sex in the rapidly growing fields of posthumanist theory, new materialisms, and animal studies. (Jasbir K. Puar, author of Terrorist Assemblages Homonationalism in Queer Times) This work is a bricolage demonstrating the dexterity of cultural studies today in its explorations of the limits of live- liness. Although the work speaks primarily to queer theory and Asian American studies, it will stir anthropologists of multiple subfields. (Rheana Salazar Parrenas American Anthropologist) To read Mel Chens book Animacies is both a challenge and a pleasure [it] offers critical positions that will be of interest to Asian Americanists. (Neel Ahuja Journal of Asian American Studies) Chens book touches upon many topics in Animacies and provides channels for further investigation and expansion for those who wish to study linguistics, disability studies, race, animal studies, gender, and sexuality studies. (Marissa Malady Feminist Legal Studies) Animacies provides us with fresh, provocative insights into the queer possibilities of kinship and intimacies with some of the most overlooked forms of material existence. Readers will find much to admire in this book. (Cynthia Wu Transgender Studies Quarterly) . . . the lucidity of Chens histories of each of the intersecting fields of study makes these [first] chapters worth reading and teaching. The latter half . . . stands out as innovative work that advances new potentialities for cultural studies sensitive to the multivalent dimensions of relationality. (Christine Yao College Literature) Chens prose is animate it leaps off the page and sparks in the reader both respect in Chens outstanding linguistic ability and wonder in the flow of her prose, her mastery of theoretical sources, and the flux of her intense, immense subject. . . . Animacies is a significant addition to disability theory, gender theory, linguistic theory, queer theory, cultural theory, postcolonial studies, and feminist theory, and is the first book, in my mind, to perform a transnational, transhistorical, and interdisciplinary investigation into the concept of animacy. It is a work that would be at home in both the undergraduate and the graduate classroom (certain chapters, at least), and should be read by any scholar of feminist, queer, disability, linguistic, or postcolonial bent. In this book, Chen has perfected the impossible art of writing a book that is, somehow, all things to all peopleor at least, it should be. There is something for everyone here. Animacies is a groundbreaking work of interstitial scholarship. . . (Erin Kingsley H-Disability, H-Net Reviews**) Throughout the book, Chen interweaves the topics and implications of society, race, biopolitics, sexuality, disability, and queer studies as it relates to linguistics, animacy, and animacy hierarchy. Chen utilizes an immense amount of examples through pictures, historical events, and theories to cover a large amount of material. Chens book touches upon many topics in Animacies and provides channels for further investigation and expansion for those who wish to study linguistics, disability studies, race, animal studies, gender, and sexuality studies. (Marissa Malady Sexuality and Disability) Animacies is an erudite mapping of the coerciveness of cosmological hierarchies of being, of the ontological classifications that deny life to the people, phenomena, and things that they sort into impossible solitudes. (Jeffrey Jerome Cohen GLQ) About the Author Mel Y. Chen is Assistant Professor of Gender and Womens Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Author: David Folkenflik File Type: pdf Rupert Murdoch is the most significant media tycoon the English-speaking world has ever known. No one before him has trafficked in media influence across those nations so effectively, nor has anyone else so singularly redefined the culture of news and the rules of journalism. In a stretch spanning six decades, he built News Corp from a small paper in Adelaide, Australia into a multimedia empire capable of challenging national broadcasters, rolling governments, and swatting aside commercial rivals. Then, over two years, a series of scandals threatened to unravel his entire creation. Murdochs defenders questioned how much he could have known about the bribery and phone hacking undertaken by his journalists in London. But to an exceptional degree, News Corp was an institution cast in the image of a single man. The companys culture was deeply rooted in an Australian buccaneering spirit, a brawling British populism, and an outsized American libertarian sensibilityat least when it suited Murdochs interests. David Folkenflik, the media correspondent for NPR News, explains how the man behind Britains take-no-prisoners tabloids, who reinvigorated Roger Ailes by backing his vision for Fox News, who gave a new swagger to the New York Post and a new style to the Wall Street Journal, survived the scandalsand the true cost of this survival. He summarily ended his marriage, alienated much of his family, and split his corporation asunder to protect the source of his vast wealth (on the one side), and the source of his identity (on the other). There were moments when the global news chief panicked. But as long as Rupert Murdoch remains the person at the top, Murdochs World will be making news. **