Keywords In Subversive Film/Media Aesthetics

Keywords in Subversive Film/Media Aesthetics offers an exciting conversational journey through the overlying terrains of politically engaged art and artistically engaged politics. At once scholarly and entertaining, the book combines a major statement on subversive aesthetics, a survey of radical film strategies, and a comprehensive lexicon of concepts.

Keywords in Subversive Film/Media Aesthetics defines, creates, and illustrates over a thousand terms and concepts, drawing its examples from a wide range of media. Moving beyond political modernism, the book dramatically expands the definition of political cinema at a time when radical film might not mean a feature or a documentary but rather a music video, a Colbert episode, or a digital mash-up. Each chapter explores a different "current" within the broad range of alternative aesthetics, covering an Aesthetic of the Commons; the Carnivalesque and Festive-revolutionary Practices; Political Modernism and post-Brechtian Performance; the Transmogrification of the Negative, the Hybridization of Documentary and fiction; the Fractured Chronotope, and the Musicalization of Cinema.

An invaluable text for anyone interested in contemporary politics, aesthetics, and the media, Keywords in Subversive Film/Media Aesthetics offers a cornucopia of old and new strategies available for use by critics as well as by artists.

Robert Stam is University Professor at New York University. He has authored, co-authored, and edited 17 books on film, cultural theory, national cinema, and postcolonial studies. His books include Francois Truffaut and Friends (2006), Literature through Film (2005), Film Theory: An Introduction (2000), and Tropical Multiculturalism (1997). He is co-author, with Ella Shohat, of Race in Translation (2012), Flagging Patriotism (2006), and Unthinking Eurocentrism (1994).
Richard Porton is the author of Film and the Anarchist Imagination (1999) and editor of Dekalog 3: On Film Festivals (2009). One of the editors of Cineaste magazine, his work on film has appeared in Cinema Scope, Sight & Sound, and The Daily Beast.
Leo Goldsmith is a PhD candidate in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. He is the film editor of The Brooklyn Rail.