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Rebecca Liu
Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

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There are only girls on the internet

Book Review

August 2022

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2022

I remember the first time I saw it, like a freshly alert hare alarmed by movement in the distant grasslands. It was 2013. Model...

Book Review

September 2020

Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Bland Fanatics’

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

September 2020

The Anglo-American commentariat is full of lofty egos. Pankaj Mishra has developed a reputation as their great deflater. ‘Watch...

Over the past fifteen years, Sianne Ngai has created a taxonomy of the aesthetic features of contemporary capitalism: the emotions it provokes, the judgements it elicits, and the technologies with which it simultaneously saves and takes up more of our time Her first book, Ugly Feelings (Harvard University Press, 2005), was a pioneering work in what has come to be known as affect theory, or the analysis of the role of emotions and feeling in art, politics, and the constitution of the self It anatomised a range of ‘unprestigious’ emotions like envy and irritation, sensing within them, as well as within the works of art which express these feelings, the muffled sounds of political resistance Her second, Our Aesthetic Categories: Cute, Zany, Interesting (Harvard University Press, 2012) showed the way in which everyday aesthetic judgements – that dress looks cute! that exhibition was… interesting – are also judgements about the way capitalism has changed, at least in the Global North, since the 1970s: a transformation wherein workers are compelled into precarious shift work relying on emotional labour, while the circulation of information has replaced off-shore industrial manufacturing   Her most recent book, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgement and Capitalist Form (Harvard University Press, 2020), once again turns its attention to the kinds of offhand comments we make about works of art Who hasn’t called a novel or an art installation a bit gimmicky, when they feel it’s too obvious or try-hard? But who has realised that the same dismissal of, say, TikTok’s lip sync feature as just another technological gimmick is registering an uncertainty about the amount of effort, and therefore time, that should go into creating works of art and technology alike? What exactly is the right amount of work that should go into a painting, a novel, or a play? Figuring out why we instinctively ask these questions, Ngai suggests, is key to unlocking and revitalising the Marxist critique of labour for our contemporary iteration of capitalism   I first met Sianne Ngai in 2014 at a summer school in Cornell University known as ‘theory camp’: each year, graduate students

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Jia Tolentino’s ‘Trick Mirror’

Book Review

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2019

Talk about the fates of young professional women today and you will often alight on two themes: the anxieties that come with living in...

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October 2013

The Good Soldier

Jess Cotton

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October 2013

Two hundred names are inscribed in a totemic list that opens Alice Oswald’s Memorial. The deaths of the Greek heroes,...

Interview

March 2017

Interview with Bae Suah

Deborah Smith

Bae Suah

Interview

March 2017

The Essayist’s Desk, published in 2003 and written when its author Bae Suah had just returned from an 11-month...

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April 2017

The White Review Short Story Prize 2017 Shortlist (UK & Ireland)

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April 2017

  click on the title to read the story   A Journey Through Famous by Kanye West by Liam...

 

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