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Anthony J Ballas

University of Colorado Denver, Literature, Graduate Student

University of Colorado Denver, Philosophy, Alumnus

Northern New Mexico College, Humanities and Social Sciences, Adjunct

University of Colorado Denver, Philosophy and English, Alumnus

University of Colorado Denver, English, Alumnus

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English MA, University of Colorado at Denver

Work: race, class & internationalism, literature of the Americas, Caribbean studies, Haitian Studies, cinema, architecture, jazz and hip hop studies, politics, philosophy, rhetoric and composition.

languages: English, French, Greek

Research interests: 19th Century American Literature; Haiti & the Haitian Revolution; Literature of the Americas & the Caribbean; Reconstruction; Internationalism; Cold War Studies; Eastern European and Russian Literature; Global Cinema; Hip Hop & Jazz Studies; Hegel; Marx & Marxism; Architecture and Space; Utopia; History of the Postal Service; Labor History
Address: Denver, Colorado, United States

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Papers by Anthony J Ballas

How Hollywood’s Black Friday Strike Changed Labor Across America

Zócalo Public Square, 2023

Colonialism, Cinema and Revolution Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall's Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games

Caribbean Quarterly, 2022

CINEMA IS NOT ALWAYS REVOLUTIONARY, BUT REVOLUTION is always cinematic. Countless episodes from r... more CINEMA IS NOT ALWAYS REVOLUTIONARY, BUT REVOLUTION is always cinematic. Countless episodes from revolutionary history have been captured on celluloid for decades and populated with the familiar cast of star-studded and star-spangled 'great men' elevated in both Hollywood and the Euro-American mythos: Jeff Daniels as Washington, Nick Nolte as Jefferson, Paul Giamotti as Adams, and so on. This is a cinema, in other words, brimming with land speculators, slave-owners, their legal counsels, faux radicals and rapists. In all their alabaster glory, such vaunted and apparently regal figureheads have been celebrated if not outright worshipped on the silver screen over cinema's longue durée; their powder-wigged visages regularly plastered on promotional posters in multiplexes and monumentalised in digital monochrome on streaming platforms worldwide. In Hollywood in particular, the visual history of the 'Age of Revolutions' unfolds as though it were an unbroken, decades-long tracking shot spanning the history of settler colonialism, Western imperialism and its jingoistic march through twentieth-and twenty-first-century cinema-shot in both HD and out of the barrel of a gun. Although films based on the so-called Age of Revolutions are anything but scarce in Hollywood and European cinema, it may come as a surprise for many to learn that the Haitian Revolution is conspicuously absent from the big screen historically as today. Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games 1 is Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall's meticulous exploration of the visual legacy of the Haitian Revolution in Hollywood and throughout the Western world, offering a corrective to the decades of cinematic and scholarly neglect of the revolution and its historical import.

Fatherhood and Obscenity in The Ren and Stimpy Show" A Lacanian Reading

Fatherhood and Obscenity in The Ren and Stimpy Show" A Lacanian Reading, 2022

Uncorrected chapter, to be published in an edited collection in 2023

The events of January 6 are intimately entangled with contemporary political struggle in America; Anthony Ballas tells ILNA

Iranian Labour News Agency, 2022

Review of Cinema/Politics/Philosophy

CINEJ Cinema Journal

Review of Nico Baumbach, Cinema/Politics/Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. 2... more

Review of Cinema/Politics/Philosophy

CINEJ Cinema Journal

Review of Nico Baumbach, Cinema/Politics/Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. 2... more

Film Theory after Copjec

Canadian Review of American Studies, 2021

The importation of Lacanian psychoanalysis into film theory in the 1970s and 1980s ushered in a n... more The importation of Lacanian psychoanalysis into film theory in the 1970s and 1980s ushered in a new era of cinema scholarship and criticism. Figures including Raymond Bellour, Laura Mulvey, and Christian Metz are often considered the pioneers of applying Lacanian psychoanalysis in the context of film theory, most notably through their writings in Screen Journal. However, where French and British scholarship on Lacan and film reached its limits, American Lacanianism flourished. When Joan Copjec’s now classic essay “The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan” was published in 1989, the trajectory of Lacanian film theory would become radically altered; as Todd McGowan recently put it, the “butchered operation” on Lacan committed by Mulvey and (quoting Copjec) the “Foucaultianization” of Lacan under the auspices of Screen Journal were finally indicted in one gesture through Copjec’s critique. Copjec and McGowan’s unique American view of Lacan marks a pivotal point in the convergence of psychoanalytic theory and cinema studies; by seeking to wrest Lacan from historist/deconstructionist theories of the subject, and by revisiting Lacan beyond the mirror stage, Copjec and McGowan can be said to have instantiated a resuscitation or even a renaissance of Lacanian theory in film studies in particular and in American scholarship more generally. In this essay, this renaissance of Lacanian theory is examined, focusing on the innovations these two American thinkers brought to psychoanalytic film theory and the multiple paths carved out into other disciplines that followed. First, a detailed summation of the contentions between screen theory and Copjec’s position is introduced, as well as McGowan’s assessment thereof. Then, the trajectory of psychoanalytic film theory after Copjec’s arrival is the focus, including the major innovations in her thought from cinematic subjectivity to sexual difference (most notably from Read My Desire) and the way her position spread to philosophy, ontology, and even race theory. Finally, the article identifies the limitations of Copjec’s and McGowan’s thought and seeks new possibilities through which we may continue to apply psychoanalysis to the cinema in the wake of these two important thinkers.

VIOLENCE IN ‘TITUS ANDRONICUS’: A BENJAMINIAN APPROACH

by Hanane EL Aissi and Anthony J Ballas

Sinestesieonline/Il Parlaggio, 2020

This paper offers an interpretation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus from the vantage of Walter ... more This paper offers an interpretation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus from the vantage of Walter Benjamin's concept of «divine violence», which he theorized in his early work A Critique of Violence (1921). Titus is well known for its over-the-top, gruesome violence, which is perhaps what led to the play's waning popularity during the 17 th , 18 th , and 19 th centuries. The gore of the play is punctuated by the violent legal apparatus operative within, the Roman Law of equal retribution, lex talionis. Lex talionis ensures that the play's characters seek retribution in the form of extreme violence, ushering in what Benjamin refers to as mythical violence, a never ending cycle of bloody, violent acts sustained by the legal system itself. What has yet to be considered is the presence of divine violence in the play, as Benjamin puts it, as a form of violence that is «lethal without spilling blood». This paper considers how Aaron the Moor's self-reflexive villainy, and radical act of grace (when he saves his son from certain death at the hands of Tamora and her nurse) suspend the dialectic of mythical violence and thereby threaten the hegemonic legal order of lex talionis in terms consonant with Benjamin's description of the function of divine violence. There is an undeniable economy of bodies operative in Titus Andronicus. Sons' lives are violently exchanged for others in retribution, body parts severed and traded, and daughters brutalized all in service of revenge, and all under the tacit acceptance of the law of equal retaliation. By having Alarbus murdered in retribution for the loss of his sons, Titus commences the dialectic of revenge between the Romans and the Goths that is central to the play. This dialectic is precisely what Walter Benjamin described as mythical violence: a law-making and law-preserving violence that keeps intact the cyclical 'tit for tat' between the two groups, upholding lex talionis as though it were natural law. Though Benjamin posits the possibility of divine violence as that which expiates the law, most attempts to account for this second order of violence are generally doomed to a kind of weak messianism, and thus never quite materialize practically. In this essay, I attempt just this: to materialize a cogent account of divine violence through the exemplary actions of a villain, Aaron the Moor.

Review Essay: "Traversing the Class Boundary: Gone Girl as Failed Remake"

Middle West Review, 2019

Review essay from Middle West Review

“My Log has a Message For You,” or, Vibrant Matter and Twin Peaks: On Thing-Power and Subjectivity

Critical Essays on Twin Peaks: the Return by Antontio Sanna, 2019

Jane Bennett’s neo-vitalism and Lynch’s strange materialism pose a problem for philosophy, namely... more Jane Bennett’s neo-vitalism and Lynch’s strange materialism pose a problem for philosophy, namely what is to be done with the human subject? This chapter examines Twin Peaks: The Return for the purpose of locating and explicating the tension between subjectivity as espoused by psychoanalytic theory and the human-nonhuman assemblages of object-oriented ontology. The visual and narrative elements of The Return offer a conflicting discourse on both the potency and impotency of subjectivity, navigating the difficult terrain between human and non-human actants and the traditional correlationist subject/object model. By analyzing The Return, it is possible to articulate an object-oriented cinema that has hitherto been unidentified in film theory. However, rather than simply appealing to the object-oriented ontology, Lynch’s universe demonstrates its many theoretical shortcomings.

Eyes On Julie Buffalohead and Eyes On Shimabuku Denver Art Museum.pdf

Journal of Visual Art Practice, 2019

Review of the works of Julie Buffalohead and Shimabuku from the 'Eyes On' series at the Denver Ar... more

Hip Hop and Monumentality: Lupe Fiasco's Re-Narrativization of the Lorraine Motel

L'analisi Linguistica e Letteraria, 2018

This paper employs Mario Gooden’s diagnoses of African American museums, Henri Lefebvre’s critiqu... more This paper employs Mario Gooden’s diagnoses of African American museums, Henri Lefebvre’s critique of monumental architecture, and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s notion of Signifyin(g) toward the examination of American rap artist Lupe Fiasco’s re-narrativization of architectural space, specifically the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. The Lorraine Motel has since been transformed into the Civil Rights Museum, and poses an architectural and aesthetic problem according to Gooden, who is critical of the spatial strategies implemented at the site, using the museum as an example of what he refers to as the “problem with African American museums,” calling for a re-imagination of monumental spaces paying tribute to the Civil Rights movement and black identity. Fiasco’s lyrical constructions in his songs “Brave Heart” and “Audubon Ballroom,” refer generally to architectural space, and particularly to the Lorraine Motel, emphasizing the materiality of the signifier while modulating the meaning of these spaces through metaphor and chiasmus, which Gates Jr. identifies as the unique proclivity belonging to black vernacular. This paper concludes that Fiasco’s lyrical narrative of the Lorraine Motel demonstrates the potential of Signifyin(g) to modulate perception of the static architecture of the site which keeps black identity mired to the past.

Basquiat Before Basquiat: East 12th Street, 1979 –1980, Curated by Nora Burnett Abrams

Journal of Visual Art Practice, 2017

Collision. Hip Hop and Event

Evental Aesthetics, 2018

This essay examines hip hop as an aesthetic practice capable of transcending the ideological fant... more This essay examines hip hop as an aesthetic practice capable of transcending the ideological fantasies of race and racism existing today. White supremacy and the hegemonic structure of the social order are too often considered inevitable and without viable alternatives. By confronting death as the wound caused by the continual reproduction of white supremacy in American society, Kendrick Lamar demonstrates a radical aesthetic rendering of Alain Badiou’s theory of points and evental subjectivity insofar as he focalizes the subject as agent of change, turning the listener toward the void of death beyond the limits of the social order and thus beyond the seeming inevitability of its reduplication. By understanding the sonorous and spatial features of Lamar’s “These Walls,” and the song’s affinity with Bernini’s use of space in The Ecstasy of St. Teresa, this essay takes hip hop as a spatio-aesthetic practice of liberation, highlighting the interface between the subject and the objective world and the role jouissance plays in modulating the social order. Aesthetically, hip hop is capable of producing a rupture in the social order analogous to Walter Benjamin’s description of divine violence; although to an outsider this rupture might appear violent, to those engaged in the struggle, aesthetic praxis as a means of intervention contains an undeniable truth necessary for the continuation of anti-racist movements against the static truths governing subjectivity in the present.

Book Reviews by Anthony J Ballas

Review: "Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets" by Todd McGowan

Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, 2019

Review: "Pixar with Lacan: The Hysteric's Guide to Animation" by Lilian Munk Rösing

Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, 2019

Learning from the Curse: Sembene’s Xala

African Studies Quarterly, 2019

Richard Fardon and Sènga la Rouge (illus.). 2017. Learning from the Curse: Sembene's Xala. London... more

Caribbean Quarterly A Journal of Caribbean Culture Thieving Three-Fingered Jack: Tales of a Jamaican Outlaw, 1780-2015

Caribbean Quarterly, 2019

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television Jazz and Cocktails: Rethinking Race and the Sound of Film Noir

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 2019

The Black Skyscraper

Comparative Literature Studies, 2018

How Hollywood’s Black Friday Strike Changed Labor Across America

Zócalo Public Square, 2023

Colonialism, Cinema and Revolution Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall's Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games

Caribbean Quarterly, 2022

CINEMA IS NOT ALWAYS REVOLUTIONARY, BUT REVOLUTION is always cinematic. Countless episodes from r... more CINEMA IS NOT ALWAYS REVOLUTIONARY, BUT REVOLUTION is always cinematic. Countless episodes from revolutionary history have been captured on celluloid for decades and populated with the familiar cast of star-studded and star-spangled 'great men' elevated in both Hollywood and the Euro-American mythos: Jeff Daniels as Washington, Nick Nolte as Jefferson, Paul Giamotti as Adams, and so on. This is a cinema, in other words, brimming with land speculators, slave-owners, their legal counsels, faux radicals and rapists. In all their alabaster glory, such vaunted and apparently regal figureheads have been celebrated if not outright worshipped on the silver screen over cinema's longue durée; their powder-wigged visages regularly plastered on promotional posters in multiplexes and monumentalised in digital monochrome on streaming platforms worldwide. In Hollywood in particular, the visual history of the 'Age of Revolutions' unfolds as though it were an unbroken, decades-long tracking shot spanning the history of settler colonialism, Western imperialism and its jingoistic march through twentieth-and twenty-first-century cinema-shot in both HD and out of the barrel of a gun. Although films based on the so-called Age of Revolutions are anything but scarce in Hollywood and European cinema, it may come as a surprise for many to learn that the Haitian Revolution is conspicuously absent from the big screen historically as today. Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games 1 is Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall's meticulous exploration of the visual legacy of the Haitian Revolution in Hollywood and throughout the Western world, offering a corrective to the decades of cinematic and scholarly neglect of the revolution and its historical import.

Fatherhood and Obscenity in The Ren and Stimpy Show" A Lacanian Reading

Fatherhood and Obscenity in The Ren and Stimpy Show" A Lacanian Reading, 2022

Uncorrected chapter, to be published in an edited collection in 2023

The events of January 6 are intimately entangled with contemporary political struggle in America; Anthony Ballas tells ILNA

Iranian Labour News Agency, 2022

Review of Cinema/Politics/Philosophy

CINEJ Cinema Journal

Review of Nico Baumbach, Cinema/Politics/Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. 2... more

Review of Cinema/Politics/Philosophy

CINEJ Cinema Journal

Review of Nico Baumbach, Cinema/Politics/Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. 2... more

Film Theory after Copjec

Canadian Review of American Studies, 2021

The importation of Lacanian psychoanalysis into film theory in the 1970s and 1980s ushered in a n... more The importation of Lacanian psychoanalysis into film theory in the 1970s and 1980s ushered in a new era of cinema scholarship and criticism. Figures including Raymond Bellour, Laura Mulvey, and Christian Metz are often considered the pioneers of applying Lacanian psychoanalysis in the context of film theory, most notably through their writings in Screen Journal. However, where French and British scholarship on Lacan and film reached its limits, American Lacanianism flourished. When Joan Copjec’s now classic essay “The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan” was published in 1989, the trajectory of Lacanian film theory would become radically altered; as Todd McGowan recently put it, the “butchered operation” on Lacan committed by Mulvey and (quoting Copjec) the “Foucaultianization” of Lacan under the auspices of Screen Journal were finally indicted in one gesture through Copjec’s critique. Copjec and McGowan’s unique American view of Lacan marks a pivotal point in the convergence of psychoanalytic theory and cinema studies; by seeking to wrest Lacan from historist/deconstructionist theories of the subject, and by revisiting Lacan beyond the mirror stage, Copjec and McGowan can be said to have instantiated a resuscitation or even a renaissance of Lacanian theory in film studies in particular and in American scholarship more generally. In this essay, this renaissance of Lacanian theory is examined, focusing on the innovations these two American thinkers brought to psychoanalytic film theory and the multiple paths carved out into other disciplines that followed. First, a detailed summation of the contentions between screen theory and Copjec’s position is introduced, as well as McGowan’s assessment thereof. Then, the trajectory of psychoanalytic film theory after Copjec’s arrival is the focus, including the major innovations in her thought from cinematic subjectivity to sexual difference (most notably from Read My Desire) and the way her position spread to philosophy, ontology, and even race theory. Finally, the article identifies the limitations of Copjec’s and McGowan’s thought and seeks new possibilities through which we may continue to apply psychoanalysis to the cinema in the wake of these two important thinkers.

VIOLENCE IN ‘TITUS ANDRONICUS’: A BENJAMINIAN APPROACH

by Hanane EL Aissi and Anthony J Ballas

Sinestesieonline/Il Parlaggio, 2020

This paper offers an interpretation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus from the vantage of Walter ... more This paper offers an interpretation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus from the vantage of Walter Benjamin's concept of «divine violence», which he theorized in his early work A Critique of Violence (1921). Titus is well known for its over-the-top, gruesome violence, which is perhaps what led to the play's waning popularity during the 17 th , 18 th , and 19 th centuries. The gore of the play is punctuated by the violent legal apparatus operative within, the Roman Law of equal retribution, lex talionis. Lex talionis ensures that the play's characters seek retribution in the form of extreme violence, ushering in what Benjamin refers to as mythical violence, a never ending cycle of bloody, violent acts sustained by the legal system itself. What has yet to be considered is the presence of divine violence in the play, as Benjamin puts it, as a form of violence that is «lethal without spilling blood». This paper considers how Aaron the Moor's self-reflexive villainy, and radical act of grace (when he saves his son from certain death at the hands of Tamora and her nurse) suspend the dialectic of mythical violence and thereby threaten the hegemonic legal order of lex talionis in terms consonant with Benjamin's description of the function of divine violence. There is an undeniable economy of bodies operative in Titus Andronicus. Sons' lives are violently exchanged for others in retribution, body parts severed and traded, and daughters brutalized all in service of revenge, and all under the tacit acceptance of the law of equal retaliation. By having Alarbus murdered in retribution for the loss of his sons, Titus commences the dialectic of revenge between the Romans and the Goths that is central to the play. This dialectic is precisely what Walter Benjamin described as mythical violence: a law-making and law-preserving violence that keeps intact the cyclical 'tit for tat' between the two groups, upholding lex talionis as though it were natural law. Though Benjamin posits the possibility of divine violence as that which expiates the law, most attempts to account for this second order of violence are generally doomed to a kind of weak messianism, and thus never quite materialize practically. In this essay, I attempt just this: to materialize a cogent account of divine violence through the exemplary actions of a villain, Aaron the Moor.

Review Essay: "Traversing the Class Boundary: Gone Girl as Failed Remake"

Middle West Review, 2019

Review essay from Middle West Review

“My Log has a Message For You,” or, Vibrant Matter and Twin Peaks: On Thing-Power and Subjectivity

Critical Essays on Twin Peaks: the Return by Antontio Sanna, 2019

Jane Bennett’s neo-vitalism and Lynch’s strange materialism pose a problem for philosophy, namely... more Jane Bennett’s neo-vitalism and Lynch’s strange materialism pose a problem for philosophy, namely what is to be done with the human subject? This chapter examines Twin Peaks: The Return for the purpose of locating and explicating the tension between subjectivity as espoused by psychoanalytic theory and the human-nonhuman assemblages of object-oriented ontology. The visual and narrative elements of The Return offer a conflicting discourse on both the potency and impotency of subjectivity, navigating the difficult terrain between human and non-human actants and the traditional correlationist subject/object model. By analyzing The Return, it is possible to articulate an object-oriented cinema that has hitherto been unidentified in film theory. However, rather than simply appealing to the object-oriented ontology, Lynch’s universe demonstrates its many theoretical shortcomings.

Eyes On Julie Buffalohead and Eyes On Shimabuku Denver Art Museum.pdf

Journal of Visual Art Practice, 2019

Review of the works of Julie Buffalohead and Shimabuku from the 'Eyes On' series at the Denver Ar... more

Hip Hop and Monumentality: Lupe Fiasco's Re-Narrativization of the Lorraine Motel

L'analisi Linguistica e Letteraria, 2018

This paper employs Mario Gooden’s diagnoses of African American museums, Henri Lefebvre’s critiqu... more This paper employs Mario Gooden’s diagnoses of African American museums, Henri Lefebvre’s critique of monumental architecture, and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s notion of Signifyin(g) toward the examination of American rap artist Lupe Fiasco’s re-narrativization of architectural space, specifically the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. The Lorraine Motel has since been transformed into the Civil Rights Museum, and poses an architectural and aesthetic problem according to Gooden, who is critical of the spatial strategies implemented at the site, using the museum as an example of what he refers to as the “problem with African American museums,” calling for a re-imagination of monumental spaces paying tribute to the Civil Rights movement and black identity. Fiasco’s lyrical constructions in his songs “Brave Heart” and “Audubon Ballroom,” refer generally to architectural space, and particularly to the Lorraine Motel, emphasizing the materiality of the signifier while modulating the meaning of these spaces through metaphor and chiasmus, which Gates Jr. identifies as the unique proclivity belonging to black vernacular. This paper concludes that Fiasco’s lyrical narrative of the Lorraine Motel demonstrates the potential of Signifyin(g) to modulate perception of the static architecture of the site which keeps black identity mired to the past.

Basquiat Before Basquiat: East 12th Street, 1979 –1980, Curated by Nora Burnett Abrams

Journal of Visual Art Practice, 2017

Collision. Hip Hop and Event

Evental Aesthetics, 2018

This essay examines hip hop as an aesthetic practice capable of transcending the ideological fant... more This essay examines hip hop as an aesthetic practice capable of transcending the ideological fantasies of race and racism existing today. White supremacy and the hegemonic structure of the social order are too often considered inevitable and without viable alternatives. By confronting death as the wound caused by the continual reproduction of white supremacy in American society, Kendrick Lamar demonstrates a radical aesthetic rendering of Alain Badiou’s theory of points and evental subjectivity insofar as he focalizes the subject as agent of change, turning the listener toward the void of death beyond the limits of the social order and thus beyond the seeming inevitability of its reduplication. By understanding the sonorous and spatial features of Lamar’s “These Walls,” and the song’s affinity with Bernini’s use of space in The Ecstasy of St. Teresa, this essay takes hip hop as a spatio-aesthetic practice of liberation, highlighting the interface between the subject and the objective world and the role jouissance plays in modulating the social order. Aesthetically, hip hop is capable of producing a rupture in the social order analogous to Walter Benjamin’s description of divine violence; although to an outsider this rupture might appear violent, to those engaged in the struggle, aesthetic praxis as a means of intervention contains an undeniable truth necessary for the continuation of anti-racist movements against the static truths governing subjectivity in the present.

Review: "Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets" by Todd McGowan

Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, 2019

Review: "Pixar with Lacan: The Hysteric's Guide to Animation" by Lilian Munk Rösing

Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, 2019

Learning from the Curse: Sembene’s Xala

African Studies Quarterly, 2019

Richard Fardon and Sènga la Rouge (illus.). 2017. Learning from the Curse: Sembene's Xala. London... more

Caribbean Quarterly A Journal of Caribbean Culture Thieving Three-Fingered Jack: Tales of a Jamaican Outlaw, 1780-2015

Caribbean Quarterly, 2019

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television Jazz and Cocktails: Rethinking Race and the Sound of Film Noir

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 2019

The Black Skyscraper

Comparative Literature Studies, 2018

The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, 2018

The Erotics of History

Allegra Lab, 2018

Religion and Film

Reading Religion, 2018

Suture and Narrative: Deep Intersubjectivity in Fiction and Film

ASAP/J, 2018

University Press, 2017.

Cain, Abel, and the Politics of God: An Agambenian Reading of Genesis 4:1-16

Berkeley Journal of Religion and Theology, 2018

Jazz as Visual Language: Film, Television and the Dissonant Image, by Nicolas Pillai.

Alphaville, 2019

Review of Nicolas Pillai's Jazz as Visual Language from Alphaville Journal

In Praise of Theatre

and Nicholas Truong at the 2012 Festival D'Avignon, this book details the significance of the the... more and Nicholas Truong at the 2012 Festival D'Avignon, this book details the significance of the theatre in both Badiou's personal life and his philosophy. This work captures both the uniqueness of Badiou's philosophical thought as well as the unique transformative capacity of the theatre as an artform unlike any other.

Psychoanalytic Film Theory and ‘The Rules of the Game’

Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, 2018

Whether infiltrating philosophy, media studies, literature, culture, or politics, psychoanalytic ... more Whether infiltrating philosophy, media studies, literature, culture, or politics, psychoanalytic theory leaves no academic stone unturned. Although considered passé by the sciences, and sophistic from the vantage of analytic philosophy, psychoanalysis continually provokes, prods, and presents a thorn in the side of many academic disciplines. Despite having been partially eclipsed by the legacies inherited from Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, psychoanalysis has gained traction in recent decades under the auspices of Slavoj Žižek, Joan Copjec, and Alain Badiou, and can be thought of as undergoing yet another renaissance today; although luminaries of the American philosophical tradition such as Noam Chomsky have long maintained that Jacques Lacan was, "an amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan," psychoanalytic theory -the Lacanian vein in particular -is perhaps more influential today than ever before. Todd McGowan's Psychoanalytic 1 Film Theory and "The Rules of the Game" offers a refreshing counterpoint to these and other hasty dismissals of psychoanalytic theory, providing a much-needed catalogue of the crucial concepts of psychoanalytic thought and their application to the study of film.

Organic Cinema .pdf

The Orientation of Future Cinema: Technology, Aesthetics, Spectacle

CineJ, 2017

Encyclopedia of The Black Arts Movement, 2019

Sun Ra (Herman Blount)

Encyclopedia of The Black Arts Movement, 2019

Encyclopedia of Sexism in American Film (forthcoming)

A brief overview of Hitchcock's "Psycho," the film's feminist critics, reception of the film, an... more A brief overview of Hitchcock's "Psycho," the film's feminist critics, reception of the film, and a selection of the theory produced on the film. This paper is intended for instructional use to introduce Hitchcock, sex and gender in film, gendered violence, and feminist film theory, psychoanalytic film theory, and concepts such as the monstrous-feminine.

Mulholland Drive

Encyclopedia of Sexism in American Film (forthcoming)

A brief overview of David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive," the film's feminist critics, reception of t... more A brief overview of David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive," the film's feminist critics, reception of the film, and a selection of the theory produced on the film. This paper is intended for instructional use, for the purposes of introducing Lynch, gendered violence, sex, gender, and sexism in film, feminist film theory, and psychoanalytic film theory.

Review: Lacan: Anti-philosophy 3

Extended version of a shorter review forthcoming from Marx and Philosophy Review of Books.