http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/32833 2026-06-24T07:29:30Z 2026-06-24T07:29:30Z Paramana, K Kompatsiaris, P Argyropoulou, G Pais, A Sengupta, U http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/33485 2026-06-23T02:00:28Z 2026-06-10T00:00:00Z

Title: Space-Making and Practices of Resistance Authors: Paramana, K; Kompatsiaris, P; Argyropoulou, G; Pais, A; Sengupta, U Editors: Paramana, K Abstract: In the current climate of geopolitical upheaval (from Ukraine, to Gaza, Iran, Venezuela, and Greenland), the articles in the “Political Economy and the Arts” special section of this issue illuminate what arts do to produce resistance at a micro level by re-writing problematic narratives, visibilizing marginalized communities, imagining alternative models and futures, and working towards equitable space-making. The emerging themes of space-making and practices of resistance among them, grounded in each article’s particular geographies, contribute to conversations in the “Political Economy and the Arts” Special Section and beyond on the interrelationships between political economy, arts, power, and resistance. Their different (inter)disciplinary perspectives in approaching and understanding this interrelationship further these conversations. Description: Contents of the Special Section of Lateral, the Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, Volume 15, issue 1, 2026, edited by Katerina Paramana.

2026-06-10T00:00:00Z Paramana, K http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/33484 2026-06-22T02:00:30Z 2026-05-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Political Economy and the Arts: Introduction – Space-Making and Practices of Resistance Authors: Paramana, K Abstract: Here, Katerina Paramana introduces the articles in the “Political Economy and the Arts” special section of this issue. In the current climate of geopolitical upheaval (from Ukraine, to Gaza, Iran, Venezuela, and Greenland), the articles illuminate what arts do to produce resistance at a micro level by re-writing problematic narratives, visibilizing marginalized communities, imagining alternative models and futures, and working towards equitable space-making.

2026-05-01T00:00:00Z Paramana, K http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/33483 2026-06-22T02:00:29Z 2026-06-17T00:00:00Z

Title: On Affective Objects: Martyro, Veronique Doisneau, and the Production of (im)Material Objects Authors: Paramana, K Abstract: Differing perspectives on the ephemerality of performance have led to debates since the 1980s regarding its ontology. Sondra Fraleigh and Peggy Phelan, for example, believe that performance’s ‘only life is in the present’. Others have disagreed. For example, Rebecca Schneider believes that performance remains in the body of the spectator in a complicated manner and Miranda Joseph, drawing on Marxist theory, argues that performance is in fact material because it produces social relations which have material effects: they affect our thinking and behaviour. In alignment with Joseph, this text begins with the presupposition that performance, and, specific to this text, the object we might call dance performance—the dance performance event and its particular contours, in other words, the performance event as an entity which emerges in the space-time where/when the onlooker and the work meet—is material because it is social. I discuss two dance performance objects, my work Martyro (2011) and Jérôme Bel’s (2005) Veronique Doisneau, as (im)material affective objects. I examine each work individually, providing first a thick description of each in order to communicate how they used affect to connect to their spectators and to critique the contexts of their presentation, the worlds in which the Subject in each of these performances worked. Drawing on understandings and theories of affect (from Deleuze and Guattari, Gilbert Simondon, and Brian Massumi to Lauren Berlant) and political economy (including David Harvey, Cedric Robinson, Jeremy Gilbert, Ashok Kumar, and Katerina Paramana), I then argue that both works used affect to remind their audiences, their witnesses, of the power of revealing one own’s experience of ‘suffering’ as Subjects, whilst simultaneously critiquing the wider economies in which these works, these affective objects and their Subjects, are embedded. It is this production of affect, I suggest, that potentiated action for change, by affecting others’ perspectives and behaviours. Description: Data Availability Statement: Data sharing is not applicable. No new data were created or analyzed in this study.

2026-06-17T00:00:00Z Dümm, Brianna http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/33433 2026-06-18T14:35:48Z 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: The literary inheritance of paradise lost in the nineteenth-century domestic novel Authors: Dümm, Brianna Abstract: This dissertation examines how nineteenth-century women novelists rework Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) within the domestic novel, particularly by reframing the Fall through the courtship plot. The central narrative conditions of the Fall—temptation, error, exile, and reconciliation—are not simply inherited or resisted but transformed within the social worlds of marriages, households, and provincial communities. In doing so, writers such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot reshape the Fall narrative into a lens for exploring ethical choice and relational conflict, making the domestic novel a vital vehicle for Milton’s nineteenth-century afterlife. For many nineteenth-century readers, Milton’s retelling of Genesis—with its psychological depth and rhetorical intensity—shapes the imaginative reception of the biblical Fall. Novelists adapt Miltonic motifs into new narrative forms: Austen refigures error as ironic misjudgement in Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Mansfield Park (1814); Brontë expands temptation into Gothic and communal ordeals in Jane Eyre (1847) and Shirley (1849); Eliot disperses the Fall across provincial causality in Adam Bede (1859) and Middlemarch (1871–2), presenting error and partial reconciliation as conditions of ordinary life. Taken together, these novels domesticate Milton’s epic by resituating its theological drama within the intimate ethical concerns of everyday existence. The project situates its readings within broader currents of feminist literary criticism and debates on influence, engaging especially with scholarship on domestic fiction as a site where gender, power, and narrative authority are continually negotiated. By highlighting the transposition of Milton’s Paradise Lost into the domestic novel, the thesis demonstrates how epic motifs are repurposed to shape new genres and narrative practices. In this process, women writers transform Milton’s narrative arc, redirecting a dominant literary inheritance into the sphere of courtship, marriage, and everyday ethical life. The result is a distinct form of domestic theology, in which the cosmic drama of the Fall is reimagined through the intimate terms of the nineteenth-century novel. Description: This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University London

2026-01-01T00:00:00Z