Stephen Best
Biographic Data
| ID | 3595158 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Stephen Best |
| GIVEN NAMES | Stephen |
| FAMILY NAME | Best |
| SIGNATURE | BEST S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Michigan |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 10 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 425 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 10 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Meme Aesthetics
To present a special issue of Representations on “meme aesthetics” may seem funny, irreverent, a lot of heft for something slight, veering on gimmicky, #cringe. But if so, this also describes the current cultural zeitgeist, because the meme has proven to be one of the more illustrative signs (and shapers) of our time. The meme certainly belongs to what Byung-Chul Han, following Vilém Flusser, calls “non-things”: “We are today experiencing the tra…
Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (1982)
Walter Ong published Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word in 1982, synthesizing his career-long concern with the impact of the shift from orality to literacy on various cultures. Scholars of African American literary and cultural studies were coming to redefine their field around the terms orality and literacy at around the same time that Ong published his book; but where Ong stressed historical change or the fall from orality to …
None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life
It passes for an unassailable truth that the slave past provides an explanatory prism for understanding the black political present. In None Like Us Stephen Best reappraises what he calls "melancholy historicism"-a kind of crime scene investigation in which the forensic imagination is directed toward the recovery of a "we" at the point of "our" violent origin. Best argues that there is and can be no "we" following from such a time and place, that…
Building a Better Description
Universally practiced across the disciplines, description is also consistently devalued or overlooked. In this introduction to the special issue "Description Across Disciplines," Sharon Marcus, Heather Love, and Stephen Best propose that description is a critical practice more complex (and less contradictory) than its detractors have taken it to be. They argue that turning critical attention toward description's nuances gives us access to the way…
Come and Gone
Huey Copeland's Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America can be categorized as the most recent in a long line of scholarly investigations into what has come to be called "the afterlife of slavery"-the general preoccupation with establishing the authority of the slave past in contemporary black life-and the first to explore that subject in the field of contemporary art. Best notes that when we reverse the t…
On Failing to Make the Past Present
A good deal of recent scholarship into the slave past proclaims that the past’s political significance resides in its continuity with our present, finding both ethical moment and critical motivation in a recovery imperative that seeks to continue, reanimate, or complete the political projects of those who were defeated by history. This ethic of recovery has at times gone by the name “melancholy historicism,” and its paragon text has been Toni Mor…
Neither Lost nor Found: Slavery and the Visual Archive
Research Article| February 01 2011 Neither Lost nor Found: Slavery and the Visual Archive Stephen Best Stephen Best Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Representations (2011) 113 (1): 150–163. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2011.113.1.150 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions…
Surface Reading: An Introduction
In the text-based disciplines, psychoanalysis and Marxism have had a major influence on how we read, and this has been expressed most consistently in the practice of symptomatic reading, a mode of interpretation that assumes that a text's truest meaning lies in what it does not say, describes textual surfaces as superfluous, and seeks to unmask hidden meanings. For symptomatic readers, texts possess meanings that are veiled, latent, all but absen…
Fugitive Justice
Linking teacher and student learning to improve professional development in systemic reform
Surface Reading: An Introduction
In the text-based disciplines, psychoanalysis and Marxism have had a major influence on how we read, and this has been expressed most consistently in the practice of symptomatic reading, a mode of interpretation that assumes that a text's truest meaning lies in what it does not say, describes textual surfaces as superfluous, and seeks to unmask hidden meanings. For symptomatic readers, texts possess meanings that are veiled, latent, all but absen…
Linking teacher and student learning to improve professional development in systemic reform
Fugitive Justice
Building a Better Description
Universally practiced across the disciplines, description is also consistently devalued or overlooked. In this introduction to the special issue "Description Across Disciplines," Sharon Marcus, Heather Love, and Stephen Best propose that description is a critical practice more complex (and less contradictory) than its detractors have taken it to be. They argue that turning critical attention toward description's nuances gives us access to the way…
Neither Lost nor Found: Slavery and the Visual Archive
Research Article| February 01 2011 Neither Lost nor Found: Slavery and the Visual Archive Stephen Best Stephen Best Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Representations (2011) 113 (1): 150–163. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2011.113.1.150 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions…
Linking teacher and student learning to improve professional development in systemic reform
Fugitive Justice
Surface Reading: An Introduction
In the text-based disciplines, psychoanalysis and Marxism have had a major influence on how we read, and this has been expressed most consistently in the practice of symptomatic reading, a mode of interpretation that assumes that a text's truest meaning lies in what it does not say, describes textual surfaces as superfluous, and seeks to unmask hidden meanings. For symptomatic readers, texts possess meanings that are veiled, latent, all but absen…
Neither Lost nor Found: Slavery and the Visual Archive
Research Article| February 01 2011 Neither Lost nor Found: Slavery and the Visual Archive Stephen Best Stephen Best Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Representations (2011) 113 (1): 150–163. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2011.113.1.150 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions…
On Failing to Make the Past Present
A good deal of recent scholarship into the slave past proclaims that the past’s political significance resides in its continuity with our present, finding both ethical moment and critical motivation in a recovery imperative that seeks to continue, reanimate, or complete the political projects of those who were defeated by history. This ethic of recovery has at times gone by the name “melancholy historicism,” and its paragon text has been Toni Mor…
Come and Gone
Huey Copeland's Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America can be categorized as the most recent in a long line of scholarly investigations into what has come to be called "the afterlife of slavery"-the general preoccupation with establishing the authority of the slave past in contemporary black life-and the first to explore that subject in the field of contemporary art. Best notes that when we reverse the t…
Building a Better Description
Universally practiced across the disciplines, description is also consistently devalued or overlooked. In this introduction to the special issue "Description Across Disciplines," Sharon Marcus, Heather Love, and Stephen Best propose that description is a critical practice more complex (and less contradictory) than its detractors have taken it to be. They argue that turning critical attention toward description's nuances gives us access to the way…
Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (1982)
Walter Ong published Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word in 1982, synthesizing his career-long concern with the impact of the shift from orality to literacy on various cultures. Scholars of African American literary and cultural studies were coming to redefine their field around the terms orality and literacy at around the same time that Ong published his book; but where Ong stressed historical change or the fall from orality to …
None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life
It passes for an unassailable truth that the slave past provides an explanatory prism for understanding the black political present. In None Like Us Stephen Best reappraises what he calls "melancholy historicism"-a kind of crime scene investigation in which the forensic imagination is directed toward the recovery of a "we" at the point of "our" violent origin. Best argues that there is and can be no "we" following from such a time and place, that…
Meme Aesthetics
To present a special issue of Representations on “meme aesthetics” may seem funny, irreverent, a lot of heft for something slight, veering on gimmicky, #cringe. But if so, this also describes the current cultural zeitgeist, because the meme has proven to be one of the more illustrative signs (and shapers) of our time. The meme certainly belongs to what Byung-Chul Han, following Vilém Flusser, calls “non-things”: “We are today experiencing the tra…
Art (7 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · History (5 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Epistemology (4 works) · Literature (4 works) · Political science (4 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (3 works) · History (3 works)