I just read Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq and wrote a few lines #bookreviews
Category: Book reviews
The inevitability of What’s App
As What’s App becomes the standard chat app, I ponder on the app inevitability based on a few McLuhan’s insights.
What I have been writing (2)
After my PhD, part of my 2018 was dedicated to ensuring that all the research I did in the last three years could come to life.
Between methods and “inner experience”: The challenges of studying sexuality
In “Eroticism”, Georges Bataille discusses the need for methods and even science when approaching sex and sexuality. He argues that studying such subjective phenomenon, one could quit objective resources: data, methods, and traceability. One could, instead, use as scientific research oneself’s “inner” experience. As human beings, we have all experienced some erotic situation. In this case, it […]
Reading Stuart Hall as an immigrant: A review of Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands
Stuart Hall’s considerable influence in the UK and abroad stems from his cultural, sociological and political trajectories (Back & Moreno Figueroa, 2014; Roman, 2015; Zhang, 2017), as these areas perfectly articulated throughout his life (Solomos, 2014). Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands (Penguin, 2017) is an excellent opportunity to glance over them in both […]
Reading Stuart Hall in 2017
Two fresh publications feature the life and work of academic and postcolonial thinker Stuart Hall: Familiar Stranger (Allen Lane) and Selected Writings (Duke University Press). Both were reviewed by Tony Jefferson for a recent edition of Theory, Culture, and Society. On Familiar Stranger we find: “Originally conceived more than 20 years ago as a short dialogue outlining Hall’s intellectual trajectory, it […]
Book review: Activism on the web – Everyday struggles against digital capitalism by Veronica Barassi
As we witness phenomena such as Momentum, Labour’s digital assemblage that pushed for Jeremy Corbyn in the 2017 General Election, we might want to remove digital activism out of commonplace. Beyond the rhetorics of the “phenomenon”, “social media-led change”, scholars have challenged the actual ICTs penetration in these activist realms by contrasting their relationship with […]
Book review – British Representations of Latin America, Luz Elena Ramirez
While not officially part of the British Empire, interactions between Britain and Latin America have existed in reports, literary accounts, and detail-rich descriptions. Reading a variety of 19th century British writers, we find similarities in reports from many distinct countries that constitute what we call by Latin America; countries as distinct from each other as […]