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"Humanities Retooled" aims to provide a forum to advance our critical thinking about literature, music, film, art, and other cultural phenomena. Since the time of our Upper Paleolithic ancestors we have evolved both as biological and social beings. We have evolved by simultaneously reproducing biologically and producing culturally ourselves. We have not only evolved a "higher minded" self (as a result of our ability to exist holographically in a past, present, and future as well as our universal capacity for grammar and empathy or Theory of Mind, for example) and along with this we have refined our senses and physical ability that in turn allow us to continually refine, revise, and create anew works of art and a capacity to enjoy them. Rather then turn to esoteric and speculative analytical rubrics, "Humanities Retooled" turns to those tools provided by the many disciplines--history, literature, economics, cognitive science, to name a few--that will be most useful and reasoned in pouring a solid foundation for building a knowledge of the many cultural forms we create and engage with today.
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Back to the Subject of the Self By Frederick Luis Aldama
I want to reassess at length some assumptions about the basic property of our existence: the constitution of self. Here, I do not aim to have the last word on defining the self and its constitutive ethnic, sexual, and gendered elements, nor do I seek to replay those au courant abstract and obscurantist metaphysical formulations.
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The Empire's New Clothes By Frederick Luis Aldama
I read with great enthusiasm Timothy Brennan's timely, and informative essay, "The Empire's New Clothes" (Critical Inquiry. Vol. 29, no. 2, 2003). First, Brennan's essay on Negri and Hardt's academic best-selling Empire leaves almost no stone unturned. He shows how these two alchemists use their best rhetorical shots to persuade their readers that the fight against capitalism and all its monstrous consequences is no longer necessary because capitalism--as Brennan phrases it--has already provided us with an "inchoate communism."
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Puro Border: Dispatches, Snapshots & Graffiti from La Frontera,Luis Humberto Crosthwaite, John William Byrd, Bobby Byrd.
The proverbial tortilla curtain is that very real boundary etched across lands that divide North American and Mexican peoples. It is also a place of complex experience and multiform cultural expression. The dozens of photo-journalistic, investigative, and personal essays along with testimonials and fictional vignettes that make up Puro Border reflect such a lived borderland space.
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