Duke University Press On the Inconvenience of Other People LAUREN BERLANT
Eric Thayer, “Sorry for the Inconvenience We Are Trying to Change the World,” November 2, 2011.
September 2022 264 pages, 18 illustrations Social theory/Cultural studies/Affect theory Rights: World
In On the Inconvenience of Other People Lauren Berlant continues to explore our affective engagement with the world. Berlant focuses on the encounter with and the desire for the bother of other people and objects, showing that to be driven toward attachment is to desire to be inconvenienced. Drawing on a range of sources, including Last Tango in Paris, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Claudia Rankine, Christopher Isherwood, Bhanu Kapil, the Occupy movement, and resistance to anti-Black state violence, Berlant poses inconvenience as an affective relation and considers how we might loosen our attachments in ways that allow us to build new forms of life. Collecting strategies for breaking apart a world in need of disturbing, the book’s experiments in thought and writing cement Berlant’s status as one of the most inventive and influential thinkers of our time. Lauren Berlant (1957–2021) was George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago and the author and coauthor of many books, including The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, The Female Complaint, Cruel Optimism, Sex, or the Unbearable, and The Hundreds, all also published by Duke University Press.
Search
why we can’t have nice things Add a comment...
Social Media’s Influence on Fashion, Ethics, and Property Minh-Ha T. Pham
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things
Social Media’s Influence on Fashion, Ethics, and Property
MINH-HA T. PHAM In 2016, social media users in Thailand called out the Paris-based luxury fashion house Balenciaga for copying the popular Thai “rainbow bag,” using Balenciaga’s hashtags to circulate memes revealing the source of the bags’ design. In Why We Can’t Have Nice Things Minh-Ha T. Pham examines the way social media users monitor the fashion market for the appearance of knock-off fashion, design theft, and plagiarism. Tracing the history of fashion antipiracy efforts back to the 1930s, she foregrounds the work of policing that has been tacitly outsourced to social media. Despite the social media concern for ethical fashion and consumption and the good intentions behind design policing, Pham shows that it has ironically deepened forms of social and market inequality, as it relies on and reinforces racist and colonial norms and ideas about what constitutes copying and what counts as creativity. These struggles over ethical fashion and intellectual property, Pham demonstrates, constitute deeper struggles over the colonial legacies of cultural property in digital and global economies.
September 2022 184 pages, 15 illustrations Fashion/Social media/Legal studies Rights: World
Minh-Ha T. Pham is Associate Professor in the Graduate Program in Media Studies at the Pratt Institute and author of Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet: Race, Gender, and the Work of Personal Style Blogging, also published by Duke University Press.
1
Duke University Press dukeupress.edu
