<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Horror video games create an enhanced sense of fear compared to film and television of the same genre due to their use of ludic elements. These ludic elements, specifically haptic game design mechanics, play conditioning, and the coding of the games themselves all bypass the screen and controller to impact the body of the player. Understanding affect as the relationship of the body to the world, video games are therefore a strong affective medium for the horror genre.
Three aspects enable video games to have this strong impact: haptic game design mechanics, play conditioning, and game coding. Using the controller as a threshold object, video games physically interact with players to create a horror experience that compels the body to mirror the fear on screen. Additionally, horror games condition players to play them in a specific way to heighten tension and deny control. Finally, the coding of horror games can create obstacles that deny player control and create an environment of fear.
The aim of the essay is to explore the effective use of all these elements and mechanics in three games: the 2015 game <italic>Until Dawn</italic>, the 2016 horror game <italic>Amnesia: The Dark Descent</italic>, and the 2014 game <italic>Alien: Isolation</italic>. (VH)
</abstract>

The Ludic Impact of Horror Games on the Body: <italic>Until Dawn, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, </italic>and <italic>Alien: Isolation</italic>

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This essay seeks to revisit the curious case of the “Asiatic Black Man” by demonstrating how this identity, inherent in the collective unconsciousness and shared by Muhammad Ali, W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Paul Robeson, could be consolidated as an “imagined community” through the microhistory of African Americans experiencing Soviet Asia. The essay proposes Afro-American Eurasianism as a transcontinental approach to converge the transnational, transatlantic, and transpacific perspectives in the Eurasian landmass, wherein the consilience of the Soviet overarching ambition of becoming the only world power as well as various themes that connected the micro-narrative of African Americans with the big history1 of Asia rendered Eurasianism as a shared political ideology, to be exploited by each side as a grand strategy in ending global racial politics. By positioning the twin cases of Du Bois and Hughes, this paper aims to show how the Soviet Union’s divergent endeavors of the “world revolution”—with Hungary and China as their primary targets for exporting revolutions in order to control the Eurasian “heartland”—and “socialism in one country”—with Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan as the in-the-making products of the Soviet nation-building experiments so as to convey the raceless image of Potemkin villages through Central Asia’s window to the world—could draw them away from their initial embrace of Black nationalism and shape their radical thoughts toward the Soviet cause. Moreover, this study posits that Soviet Asia functioned as a psychogeographical and geopolitical conduit that facilitated the elaboration of the Afro-American “Asiatic Black Man” fantasy and imagination of the communistic utopia as an alternative international order, while it unexpectedly resulted in a new “double-consciousness,” compelling Du Bois and Hughes to oscillate between Moscow and Beijing/Tashkent. (YZ)
</abstract>

“Asiatic Black Man”: W. E. B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes in Soviet Asia--Part I—The Shifting “Double-consciousness” of Du Bois

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Since the first decade of the twenty-first century, Britain has witnessed the emergence of a new literary movement called “new nature writing.” This paper aims to call attention to new British nature writing as an emergent genre marked by its practitioners’ will to replace anthropocentrism with ecocentrism, present an all-embracing understanding of nature, and interweave the personal with the ecocritical. To this end, it offers insights into selected memoirs of contemporary British writers, including Kathleen Jamie’s essay trilogy <italic>Findings</italic>, <italic>Sightlines,</italic> and <italic>Surfacing;</italic> Amy Liptrot’s <italic>The Outrun;</italic> and Carol Donaldson’s <italic>On the Marshes: A Journey into England’s Waterlands.</italic> Such non-fiction first person narratives, labeled as eco-memoirs, may provide an eco-centered approach to the natural world in the Anthropocene, and thus cherish hopes for a livable future for our planet. (HBM)
</abstract>

New British Nature Writing, or an Emergent Hope

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This essay explores the outlines of the “quarantine subject,” a construct that has formed along the borderlines of viral, immunological, psychopolitical, and biopolitical metaphors. The focus is grounded in media archeology and media anthropology. Under media anthropology lies a basically German philosophical anthropological tradition that explores the convergence of biological and cultural dimensions. Helmuth Plessner and Arnold Gehlen have only recently been rediscovered in the English-speaking world.1 Hans Belting, for one, has elaborated a triple image anthropology that uses the triad of picture–medium–body in the interpretation of various aesthetic paradigms. This essay maps the convergence between the three dimensions emphasized by Belting and the digital-virtual turn driven by, among other factors, the COVID–19 pandemic and the ensuing lockdowns. The goal is the elaboration of a speculative “quarantine subjectivity model,” one that is determined by geographical and social factors, such as Internet access and technological integration, as well as a relatively “moderate” degree of quarantine measures. (MZN)
</abstract>

Going Viral: The Media Anthropology of the “Quarantine Subject” in the Context of Biopolitics and Psychopolitics

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
In the age of the Anthropocene, capitalism’s expansion and damage to the planet can ultimately be seen as “becoming extinction” (McBrien). This essay discusses post-neoliberal structurations of space, time, and consciousness by examining the “desert timescapes” featured in Don DeLillo’s philosophical novel, <italic>Point Omega</italic> (2010). The desert, placed at the novel’s heart, is analyzed as a prominent religious, aesthetic, and philosophical topos of the crisis of human subjectivity. Furthermore, the investigation of the conceptions in the novel of the “Omega Point” (as the ultimate point of consciousness toward which the universe is heading) reveals an interplay of transcendence and immanence about matter and human evolution and offers a geological perspective of “becoming-mineral.” Finally, this paper claims that the “desert timescapes” polychronic perspective challenges anthropocentrism and the ontopolitics of the neoliberal state, and paves the way for reflection on “geontopower” (Povinelli), Life and NonLife in a geophilosophical mode of planetary thinking. (PK)
</abstract>

Becoming-Mineral: Desert Timescapes and Post-Neoliberal Geontopower in Don DeLillo’s <italic>Point Omega</italic>

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
From 2017 on, the #MeToo movement has resulted in a set of new perspectives and narratives in cinema; narratives, which, so far, have only ever been presented from and for the point of view of the male gaze. A special case in this process is Emerald Fennel’s 2020 directorial debut, <italic>Promising Young Woman.</italic> This essay argues that the film not only capitalizes on rape-revenge genre clichés, but it also relies on the tropes of romantic comedy traditions to give a sharp critique of the cultural climate that tolerates, denies, and normalizes rape. The subversion of the male gaze, the centrality of morality in revenge, and the avoidance of the spectacle of female suffering align <italic>Promising Young Woman</italic> with the rape-revenge genre. At the same time, the film’s take on the Hollywood myth of the likeable and harmless “good guy” highlights the role of classical romantic comedy conventions in perpetuating rape culture. (ZSOR)
</abstract>

Film Genres after #MeToo: <italic>Promising Young Woman</italic> as a Rape-Revenge Film and a Rom-Com

Reviews: Visiting the Louvre

Reviews: Acknowledging Shakespeare’s Others as Ours

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
The essay reads <italic>Winter</italic> (2017), the second volume of Ali Smith’s “Seasonal Quartet,” as a novel that engages with Brexit by revitalizing the metaphor of the body politic. Focusing on the role of landscape, the novel’s use of art objects and its intertextual conversation with Shakespeare’s late romance <italic>Cymbeline</italic> (ca. 1610), the essay also addresses the ways in which the reimagining of the body politic is entangled with Smith’s poetic strategies, arguing that matters of form and aesthetics are indistinguishable from the novel’s ethical and political concerns. Exploring parallels with post-’45 British landscape painting and art, especially Barbara Hepworth’s works, the analysis is concerned with two striking intrusions of the irrational in the novel: a hallucinated lump of landscape hovering above the characters and a child’s head floating in the air; both are crucial to the revitalization of the metaphor of the body politic as well as in the conversation the novel conducts with British art and with <italic>Cymbeline</italic>, a play that is an exploration of the idea of the body politic and of sovereignty in the context of the end of Britain’s relations with Europe. (TB)
</abstract>

Figures and Grounds: Art and the Body Politic in Ali Smith’s <italic>Winter</italic>

Reviews: Fantasies of Unveiling Flesh and Freedom: Post-9/11 Desires for Truth and Security

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This essay looks at some of the American film noir that focus on traumatized veterans in the post-World War II era, up to the twenty-first century and argues that noir thrillers centering on mentally disturbed veterans of World War II allow for both commemoration and criticism of the global interventionism that American exceptionalism legitimized during the Cold War and the Wars on Terror. Paradigmatic noirs construct traumatized veterans to investigate their symptoms of amnesia and paranoia as responses to historical interventions. While the analysis of Fred Zinnemann’s <italic>Act of Violence</italic> (1948) challenges idolizations of members of the Greatest Generation as morally superior immediately after their return home, that of Alan Parker’s <italic>Angel Heart</italic> (1987) probes into how the projection of a Faustian tale upon amnesia connects a post-World War II identity conflict to an anti-communist climate ripe with social tensions. The third veteran noir, the post-9/11 film <italic>Shutter Island</italic> (2010) by Martin Scorsese, conclusively reveals how two paranoid narratives overlap in the films under scrutiny, aiming to deconstruct the patriotic trope of American heroism in their subtexts. (AG)
</abstract>

American Veteran Noirs: Investigating Exceptionalism and Its Post-World War II Trauma

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
The unfolding ecological crisis is often blamed on an excerpt from the bible, according to which humans should “[b]e fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen 1:28). This command is repeatedly contrasted with another, saying that “[t]he LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it” (Gen 2:15). Could the current climate change have been avoided if the “second” command had carried more weight? Darren Aronofsky directed two films that deal with this question. In <italic>Noah</italic> (2014), it is the “second,” “eco-friendly” command that seems to reflect the intent of God; therefore, the secular techno-capitalist development of humankind, which is leading to an ecological disaster, is a revolt against this command and a manifestation of the Fall. As opposed to this, <italic>mother</italic>!, made three years later, suggests that it is the intertwining of the Christian tradition with patriarchy and anthropocentrism that lies behind the destruction of the environment, which in turn implies that the disaster can actually be interpreted as an adherence to the “first” command. (AH)
</abstract>

Aronofsky’s Two Visions of the Ecological Fall

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