Afterlife of Discarded Objects, The , livre ebook

Parlor Press, LLC - Andrei Guruianu , Natalia Andrievskikh

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186 pages

English

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The Afterlife of Discarded Objects: Memory and Forgetting in a Culture of Waste
As one of its driving principles, The Afterlife of Discarded Objects: Memory and Forgetting in a Culture of Waste analyzes the double reconstitution of discarded items. In this afterlife, discarded objects might transform from a worthless object into a plaything or a work of art, and then to an artifact marking a specific historical time period. This transformation is represented through various forms of recollection—stories, photographs, collectibles, heirlooms, monuments, and more. Shaped by nostalgia and wishful thinking, discarded objects represent what is wasted, desired, and aestheticized, existing at the intersection of individual and collective consciousness.
While The Afterlife of Discarded Objects constitutes a version of revisionist historiography through its engagement with alternative anthropological artifacts, its ambition stretches beyond that to consider how seemingly immaterial phenomena such as memory and identity are embedded in and shaped by material networks, including ephemera. Guruianu and Andrievskikh create a written, visual, and virtual playground where transnational narratives fuse into a discourse on the persistent materiality of ephemera, especially when magnified through narrative and digital embodiment.
The Afterlife of Discarded Objects is printed in full color and includes references, an index, and over seventy hi-resolution color images.
“The Afterlife of Discarded Objects: Memory and Forgetting in a Culture of Waste uses contemporary theory, literature, popular culture, and personal narratives to investigate how we assign political, socio-cultural, and aesthetic meaning to objects. The book is unique in applying personal narratives and testimonies of contributors from around the world to provide insights and critiques of Western attitudes toward these objects. The Afterlife of Discarded Objects provides transformative social commentary through scrutiny and stories of discarded/found objects in Eastern Europe and in the West encouraging us to reflect more critically on our relationships with things. The stories and theories interwoven in Guruianu and Andrievskikh’s book turn memory into matter and aspire to teach through their exploration. It’s a lofty goal, and the book succeeds.” —Sohui Lee

Informations

Publié par	Parlor Press, LLC
Date de parution	18 décembre 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781643170527
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	10 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0050€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Visual Rhetoric
Series Editor: Marguerite Helmers
The Visual Rhetoric series publishes work by scholars in a wide variety of disciplines, including art theory, anthropology, rhetoric, cultural studies, psychology, and media studies.
Books in the Series
The Afterlife of Discarded Objects: Memory and Forgetting in a Culture of Waste by Andrei Guruianu and Natalia Andrievskikh (2019)
Type Matters: The Rhetoricity of Letterforms , ed. by Christopher Scott Wyatt
and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss (2018)
Inventing Comics: A New Translation of Rodolphe Töpffer’s Reflections on Graphic Storytelling, Media Rhetorics, and Aesthetic Practice , ed. and trans. by Sergio C. Figueiredo (2017)
Haptic Visions: Rhetorics of the Digital Image, Information, and Nanotechnology by Valerie L. Hanson (2015)
Locating Visual-Material Rhetorics: The Map, the Mill, and the GPS by Amy D. Propen (20 1 2)
Visual Rhetoric and the Eloquence of Design , ed. by Leslie Atzmon (2011)
Writing the Visual: A Practical Guide for Teachers of Composition and Communication , ed. by Carol David and Anne R. Richards (2008)
Ways of Seeing, Ways of Speaking: The Integration of Rhetoric and Vision in Constructing the Real , ed. by Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Sue Hum, and Linda T. Calendrillo (2007)

The Afterlife of Discarded Objects
Memory and Forgetting in a Culture of Waste
Andrei Guruianu and Natalia Andrievskikh
Parlor Press
Anderson, South Carolina
www.parlorpress.com

Parlor Press LLC, Anderson, South Carolina, USA
© 20 1 9 by Parlor Press
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.
S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9
Cataloging-in-Publication Data on File
978- 1 -643 1 7-049-7 (paperback)
978- 1 -643 1 7-050-3 (hardcover)
978- 1 -643 1 7-05 1 -0 (PDF)
978- 1 -643 1 7-052-7 (ePub)
1 2 3 4 5
Visual Rhetoric
Series Editor: Marguerite Helmers
Cover image: “Workshirt.” © Andrei Guruianu. Used by permission
Book Design: David Blakesley
Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paper, cloth and eBook formats from Parlor Press on the World Wide Web at http://www.parlorpress.com or through online and brick-and-mortar bookstores. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 30 1 5 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson, South Carolina, 2962 1 , or email editor@parlorpress.com.

Contents
Acknowledgments
To The Reader
1 Leopard Print Pumps and Other Instruments of Memory
2 Between Here and Then: A Material Understanding of Time and Space
3 Discarded Memory: History and Forgetting
4 Unbecoming Garbage: The Spectacle of the Archive
5 The Abject and Fear of Social Contamination
6 Recycling: Guilt, Fetish, or Necessity?
7 The Ludic Potential of Found Artifacts
8 Transgressive Art: The Aesthetics of Decay
9 Digital Erasures: New Media and Re-Enchantment With the Material World
10 A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Imminent Catastrophe
11 Personal Narratives: Selected Contributions to The Afterlife of Discarded Objects
Illustrations
Works Cited
Index to the Print Edition
About the Authors

Acknowledgments
W e would like to thank first and foremost David Blakesley for his patience and guidance in making this book possible, and for making the whole process easy to navigate from start to finish. We are also thankful to Marguerite Helmers for her suggestions during the revision process that led to a significantly stronger manuscript, and to Jared Jameson for his incredible copyediting skills and attention to the smallest detail.
We would also like to note that much of The Afterlife of Discarded Objects contains and is indebted to contributions from others who shared our vision. We extend our gratitude to the numerous artists who gave us permission to use their work as illustrations through the book: Peg Johnson, Wendy Stewart, Brent Williamson, Ruby Silvious, Dianne Hoffman, Alexandra Davis, Christopher Hynes, Olga Bakhareva, and Sandra Hopkins. Along with the artists featured in the book, there are also numerous others who’ve contributed to the online project, www.theafterlifeofdiscardedobjects.com, with their works helping to create an archive of both written and visual engagement with objects.
And, of course, we cannot forget the dozens of contributions of personal narratives without which this project would not have gotten off the ground, and which form the foundation for several of the chapters that follow. Whether as short as a paragraph, an entire essay, story, or poem, the stories that we’ve received over the past four years served as inspiration for the book and encouragement that the project touched upon something not only relevant to contemporary discourse on matter, but more importantly also highlighted how simple everyday objects point to the things that truly unite us.
With gratitude,
Andrei & Natalia

To The Reader
Storytelling is a form of recollection and a way of reconciling ourselves to the past—a way of knowing who and what we are in relation to the world. Hence story and history imbricate each other. The world we understand is a written world—a plurality, a multiplicity of narratives. Between the particularity of one’s natality and of the world lies the story: the mastering of a moment of the past, for a moment.
—Niran Abbas, Mapping Michel Serres
W hile we live in a world that produces material goods at an overwhelming rate, one thing that has not changed throughout history is the complexity of human relationship to the material world. In our increasingly consumerist and digitized culture, we still assign value beyond the immediate function of objects, an act that plays a crucial role in constituting memory and identity. The moment we decide to keep a used train ticket or a postcard instead of throwing it away, or an old favorite chipped plate reimagined as a coin dish, we invest it with sentimental value that replaces its expired functionality. As such, preserved and repurposed objects become vessels for projections of childhood fantasies or the nostalgic longing of adults.
The above premise is the broad foundation for this book and the guiding principle for the digital storytelling and archival project The Afterlife of Discarded Objects (www.theafterlifeofdiscardedobjects.com) . Both the book and the digital project emerged from our conversations about our shared post-communist past in Russia and Romania, abound with recollections of how the abrupt turn to consumerism during the 1 990s after decades of poverty and repression changed people’s perception of the material world around them. Inspired by these conversations, in 20 1 4 we launched The Afterlife of Discarded Objects , where we solicited and subsequently archived contributors’ memories about playing with, preserving, or making art from what we might broadly label as trash, waste, or unwanted, discarded items. Over the past two years, the responses from participants all over the world have provided rich ethnographic material for analysis; simultaneously, the themes that emerged from the submitted stories and the diversity of cultural perspectives gave us inspiration to probe some of the same territory in the following chapters. The Afterlife of Discarded Objects is an ongoing project, one that we hope will continue to grow and develop into a living archive alongside its print counterpart (a selection of contributors’ stories collected to date is available at the back of this book).
Whether our contributors came from Italy, Kuwait, the United States, Russia, or India, and whether they submitted poems, brief recollections or well-developed nonfiction narratives, one aspect of their shared memories stood out as common ground. While writing about their interaction and relationship with objects they seemed to reveal at the same time something about themselves: their own personal views toward material objects, the way value is constructed and attributed to things, and their particular society’s attitudes toward waste. In other words, through recalling discarded objects they were telling more than the story of a thing—they were reconstructing from memory moments of the past that were in some fundamental ways indicative and representative of themselves and larger social, political, and economic contexts behind their stories. The rhetorical function of such wide-ranging narratives is to create a more inclusive historical perspective, one that highlights the agency of ordinary objects as they serve as important cultural artifacts as well as the agency of those whose voices are otherwise excluded from an official accounting of history. As Abbas puts it above, story and history overlap, and the multiplicity of our personal stories told through image, text, and works of art create an intricate web of relations that we can seek to understand by addressing the role of material objects and artifacts in our lives.
* * *
Junk, trash, garbage, rubbish, detritus, or the all-encompassing stuff , are some other terms often invoked in discussions on the effects of waste on our world. And while this book is not only about waste per se but specifically concerns itself more with discarded and subsequently recovered objects, the terms—by proximity and by association—often go together; their connotations therefore offer fertile ground for thinking through both physical and emotional entanglements that arise in our encounters with such items. Regardless of