I recently published a chapter in the new book Shakespeare in Canada: Remembrance of Ourselves, edited by Dr. Irena A. Makaryk and Dr. Kathryn Prince, published by University of Ottawa Press. My chapter is entitled "Race, National Identity, and the Hauntological Ethics of Slings & Arrows." My chapter is about the hit Canadian television series Slings & Arrows, and the ways in which it negotiates national identity, multiculturalism, and our Canadian cultural debt to Shakespeare via its comedic take-off of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival.

I have a chapter in a new book just published. My chapter, "Melted in to Media: Reading Julie Taymor's Film Adaptation of The Tempest in the Wake of 9/11 and the War on Terror"  is on post-9/11 cinema and film adaptations of Shakespeare.

Hey there. Haven't posted in a while, and was surprised to see people had actually visited the site! How encouraging! Well, so much has happened in the year since my last post, I won't try to fill in the details. Here are some highlights, though: co-organized a conference on Post-9/11 Critical Theory at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario Canada in October. It was called "Beyond Ground Zero: 9/11 and the Futures of Critical Thought." It was, in my humble opinion, a great success, and in the fall of 2008, my co-organizer (Karen Espiritu) and I will edit a special double-issue of The Review of Pedagogy, Education, and Cultural Studies (Routledge) which will feature highlighted articles from the conference. We're very excited!
Music wise, I recorded guitar and backup vocals on Mary Knickle's latest CD: Weave, which is being distributed through CD Baby, as well as Sonic Entertainment, her Halifax management company. Other music projects I'm working on is a new CD with Nathaniel Deshpande, a pop, rock, emo artist out of Guelph. Check out his Purevolume site: http://www.purevolume.com/yourlastexcuse.
Well, that's it for now. Back to marking papers! /Schooly Don, ovrnout.

Schooly Don

Schooly Don

Well, just got back from a very successful, very exciting trip to Belgium and the Rhetoric, Politics, Ethics conference at the University of Ghent. This event featured 5 or 6 of the biggest names in the history of deconstructive theory, including J. Hillis Miller, Derek Attridge, Carol Jacobs, Hayden White, and featuring a refreshingly (if not well thought-out) against-the-grain presentation by Dominic Di Capra. I presented on a panel entitled Power and Emprise, consisting of myself and Marc Redfield. Our papers were "Ethics in Empire: The Ethical Rhetoric of 9/11" (mine) and "War on Terror" (Redfield's). The conference papers will be published as a collection, so you can read all of the highlights when it comes out! One of those highlights was Carol Jacobs' de Manian reading of Plato's _Republic_. It was really marvelous, and featured one of the most accutely modern readings of the problem of Ethics, Politics and Rhetoric, illuminated through the most ancient text dealt with in the conference.

BOOKLIST...

Here is my pick for good book of the month that everyone should read:
Judith Butler's Undoing Gender. Butler has recently turned to the question of "humanity" and what qualifies as livable life, themes that dominate both this book and her other concommitant release Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence. In fact, there are blatantly plagarized sections between the two. The former, however, is focused on how the question of gender is a vector through which the negotiation of who qualifies as "human" takes place, while the other one looks at the politics of obituary writing after 9/11 as such a site for negotiation mournable humanity. I loved both. Of course, I'm a theory-head.