Istanbul: Metis. 2012. ISBN: 9789753428699
592 pages. 32 illustrations in colour

This book aims to challenge heteronormativity, compulsory heterosexuality and homo/transphobic violence in Turkey by investigating local historical and cultural narratives, social practices and forms of relationality in creative, dissident and queer ways. It interrogates the possibilities of an alternative critical practice that defies heteronormativity and its “partners in crime”, namely neoliberalism, nationalism, militarism and religious conservatism in contemporary Turkey. The critical agenda of this study is not only informed by a liberal human rights discourse that relies on sexual identity categories and identity politics. It is also inspired by sexual multitudes and ambiguities inherent within the local and historical cultural texture. Invoking unique possibilities of the local, this project looks at the ways in which the global travel of Western sexual identity categories and theories transform and assimilate local cultural forms of sexual subjectivity. While it questions the validity and applicability of categories and theories, this book also argues that the critical stance towards global sexual identity categories should not turn into an “authenticity fetishism”. Global sexual identity categories and Western theories can be appropriated critically and strategically, for different purposes, in different contexts. Rather than seeing the travel of global theories and categories as a hierarchical, single-dimensional imposition, this collection of essays suggests a reciprocal interaction always changing and transforming both the local and the global.

New York ; London : Springer. 2011, ISBN 978-1-4419-8221-6
Hardcover. 342 p. 83 illus., 47 in color.

Museum collections are often perceived as static entities hidden away in storerooms or trapped behind glass cases. By focusing on the dynamic histories of museum collections, new research reveals their pivotal role in shaping a wide range of social relations. Over time and across space the interactions between these artefacts and the people and institutions who made, traded, collected, researched and exhibited them have generated complex networks of material and social agency.

In this innovative volume, the contributors draw on a broad range of source materials to explore the cross-cultural interactions which have created museum collections. These case studies contribute significantly to the development of new theoretical frameworks to examine broader questions of materiality, agency, and identity in the past and present.

Grounded in case studies from individual objects and museum collections from North America, Europe, Africa, the Pacific Islands, and Australia, this truly international volume juxtaposes historical, geographical, and cross-cultural studies.

This work will be of great interest to archaeologists and anthropologists studying material culture, as well as researchers in museum studies and cultural heritage management.

St Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. ISBN-10: 0816645655 ( ISBN-13 | 978-0816645657). 544 pages, 21 b&w photos, 32 b&w plates. Harback

Jean-François Lyotard is recognized as one of the most significant French philosophers of the twentieth century. Although nearly all of his major writing has been translated into English, one important work has until now been unavailable. Discourse, Figure is Lyotard’s thesis. Provoked in part by Lacan’s influential seminars in Paris, Discourse, Figure distinguishes between the meaningfulness of linguistic signs and the meaningfulness of plastic arts such as painting and sculpture. Lyotard argues that because rational thought is discursive and works of art are inherently opaque signs, certain aspects of artistic meaning such as symbols and the pictorial richness of painting will always be beyond reason’s grasp.

A wide-ranging and highly unusual work, Discourse, Figure proceeds from an attentive consideration of the phenomenology of experience to an ambitious meditation on the psychoanalytic account of the subject of experience, structured by the confrontation between phenomenology and psychoanalysis as contending frames within which to think the materialism of consciousness. In addition to prefiguring many of Lyotard’s later concerns, Discourse, Figure captures Lyotard’s passionate engagement with topics beyond phenomenology and psychoanalysis to structuralism, semiotics, poetry, art, and the philosophy of language.

Catania : Bonnano Editore, 2010. ISBN 9788877965219. 216pp. Paperback

The particular case of the double work of art in the production of the Pre-Raphaelite poet-painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti is the specific object of Lettere in cornice that brings to the fore some of the most striking aspects of Rossetti’s dual art. Here, the sonnet and the painting – the two most important artistic media used by Rossetti– show themselves as inseparable and physically interconnected. An extensive part is dedicated to the descriptions of Rossetti’s paintings both through his sonnets and his letters, while other chapters focus on the importance of the materiality of Rossetti’s works, in other words the frame, the canvas and the book meant as objects.

Lettere in cornice contributes to the study of the relationship between text and image in the Victorian age.

Jérôme Game (ed) Porous Boundaries Texts and Images in Twentieth-Century French Culture.

Oxford : Peter Lang. 2007. (Series: Modern French identities. Vol. 44)
ISBN 978-3-03910-568-7 | US-ISBN 978-0-8204-7595-0. 164 pp. Paperback

After the key moments of the livre d'artiste (from Manet/Mallarmé to Picasso/Reverdy) and Surrealist art, how did the text/image relationship evolve in twentieth-century French culture? By what epistemological and aesthetic frameworks was it determined and, in turn, what new signs and practices, what new meanings did it produce? This book offers a series of answers to these questions by looking at several case studies including Marguerite Duras' filmic rewriting, Pierre Klossowski's shift from writing to painting, contemporary video-poetry, Gilles Deleuze's philosophical engagement with Bacon and Giacometti, and CD-Rom aesthetics. What brings the various essays in this volume together is a challenging new reading of the text/image relationship as a porous boundary through which texts and images no longer merely illustrate or stand by each other but interpenetrate, hybridise or restructure one another.

Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan. 2007.
ISBN-10: 0230517064 | ISBN-13: 978-0230517066. 288pp. Hardback.

In the study of European politics and society, ever-greater importance is attached to the role of ideational factors such as identity and discourse. The editor brings together specialists from critical discourse analysis and critical approaches to communications, history, literature, cultural studies, media, sociology, politics and International Relations to discuss the discursive construction of ethnic, national and regional identities and analyse how specific identity discourses condition and constrain knowledge and action with regard to various socio-political issues in Europe.

Oxford : Oxbow Books. 2006. ISBN-13: 978-1-904350-62-0 | ISBN-10: 1-904350-62-3. 180pp. Hardback.

Between 1945 and 1975, both France and Greece developed an interplay between literature and popular music, each making a new 'national canon'. Literature provided the aesthetic criteria, the cultural prestige and the institutional basis for what aspired to be a higher form of popular song. Published poems were turned into popular songs, while a critical discourse, in return, celebrated songwriters not only for being 'as good as poets' but for being 'singing poets' in their own right. In France, there were Georges Brassens, Leo Ferre and Serge Gainsbourg; in Greece, the presitigious title of 'tragoudopoios' (maker of songs) was awarded to Mikis Theodorakis, Manos Hadjidakis and Dionysis Savvopoulos. This challenging and stimulating study draws on a wealth of materials, from theoretical writings by poets, through their lyrics, to the record sleeves and posters used to promote them.

Norwich : Norvik Press. 2006. ISBN: 1870041631. 245pp. Paperback

Northern Constellations features new work from leading cinema studies scholars and Scandinavian specialists from the UK, the US and the Nordic world. Engaging with contemporary film and cultural theory this book explore the potential of cinema to map space, body, and community.

London : UCL Press. 2005. ISBN: 1844720284., 200pp. Paperback

This volume brings together, and contributes to, the debates concerning the power of the media and the whole media-identity relationship. In so doing, this study claims a place in the newly emerging field of media anthropology and represents the next generation of audience research. The book is characterised by its methodological sophistication, analysing the media as texts (the news) and as technologies; detailed audience ethnography takes full account of reception and context.

Cairo : Supreme Council of Culture of the Government of Egypt. 2005. Egyptian National Library reference 2005/15728. 110pp. Paperback

A new critical edition, in Arabic, of the first Egyptian translation of William Shakespeare's Hamlet made by Tanyus Abdu in 1902, and until recently considered lost. It has now been re-edited and re-issued with a new introductory essay.

Paris: Inventaire. 2004. ISBN-10: 2914412371 | ISBN-13: 978-2914412377. 44pp. Paperback

In Jérôme's own words "j'ai vu lu tout vu. et sans (sous le texte sous les yeux. je ne me souviens plus de rien plus".