Leftist Constructs
by Diana Pho
Upcoming article for Overland Magazine
"Diana M Pho on steampunk and progressive politics" "Diana M Pho on steampunk and progressive politics"
Steampunk's Legacy: Collecting and exhibiting the future of yesterday
Forthcoming (2012) in Steaming into a Victorian Future: A Steampunk Anthology, Julie Anne Taddeo, Cynthia Miller and Ken Dvorak (eds). Lanham: Scarecrow Press
In creating a striking visual and material culture, set within an alternative historical timeline, steampunks are... more In creating a striking visual and material culture, set within an alternative historical timeline, steampunks are challenging traditional representations of history and what constitutes “authentic” heritage. This, potentially, contests the curatorial voice within Western museums. This chapter engages with these challenges through examining recent exhibitions of steampunk art and material culture and encounters between curators and steampunks, with the aim of furthering the understanding of the power relations between museums and counter-communities such as steampunks.
"Introduction: Spectacles and Things – Visual and Material Culture and/in Neo-Victorianism."
(with Nadine Boehm-Schnitker) Spectacles and Things: Visual and Material Culture and/in Neo-Victorianism. Neo-Victorian Studies 4.2. 1-23.
Shimmies and Sprockets: Analyzing the Use of Belly Dance in Steampunk.
by Diana Pho
Steampunk Magazine Anthology, Issues #1 – 7. Ed. Margaret Killjoy. AK Press. 2011.
Objectified and Politicized: The Dynamics of Ideology and Consumerism in Steampunk Subculture
by Diana Pho
Steaming into a Victorian Future. Ed. Julie Anne Taddeo, Cynthia Miller, and Ken Dvorak. Scarecrow Press. 2012.
Steampunk subculture, somewhat paradoxically given its admiration for pre-Industrial technologies, exists both as a... more
Steampunk subculture, somewhat paradoxically given its admiration for pre-Industrial technologies, exists both as a physical and as a virtual community. Thus, the steampunk subcultural identity is also a mediatized identity, emphasizing the fluidity between a fan's physically-present body and her online, disembodied self. Indeed, in a move that is literal, metaphorical, and virtual, “steampunk'd” objects are also incorporated to create a cyborg self; in creating character personas (or steamsonas), steampunks establish their fictional identities in a variety of ways, from wearing mechanical props into their outfits to establishing their fictional identity through virtual handles, blogs or websites.
The embrace of this hybrid fan identity can be connected to the subculture's philosophy, a reactive stance against the omnipresent, slightly menacing and mostly incomprehensible role of technology in the average person’s life today. It's not surprising, then, that in discussions about the purpose and meaning of technology in human lives, questions concerning steampunk subculture's political possibilities also arise. Furthermore, since the style is widely described as being “Neo-Victorian,” both subcultural participants and observers have questioned whether the use of the Victorian aesthetic is a form of political appropriation by progressives, a form of socially conservative nostalgia for a problematic sociopolitical era or something else in between. Thus, in order to examine the political dimensions of this community, I will focus on how one hotly-debated issue is addressed among steampunks: the commodification of steampunk objects.
Steampunk objects have great importance in the community, of course, acting as subcultural markers and sources of enjoyment for both in-group participants and outside observers. Indeed, steampunk objects as signifiers have often been conflated with the community's definition of steampunk itself. In previous scholarship, academics have discussed steampunk style as an applied aesthetic, with multiple definitions of steampunk proposed by various scholars and writers. A current consensus, however, is explained aptly by academic Stefania Folini: that steampunk is “about things – especially technological things – and our relationship to them.”
In examining individual responses over this relationship, I will expound on how the steampunk aesthetic acts as a performative promise according to Deborah Kapchan's concept of “lived aesthetics.” Hence, through new media cultural production, steampunk objects become more than just clever exercises in anachronism, but to some, promises the progressive mobilization of ideas, a prime example of Stephen Duncombe's “ethical spectacle”; contrastingly, to others the political potential of steampunk is deferred in favor of fulfilling artistic commercial aspirations. Various steampunk objects examined in this article include the virtual – blogs and websites – along with steampunk mediatic images, texts such as Steampunk Magazine and Steampunk Palin, and real-life rallies that have been virtually organized via Facebook. This chapter, then, will address how various ideologies concerning the treatment of steampunk objects are embraced, rejected, and proliferated in a post-industrial, information economy and how steampunk's postmodern, mediatized identity serves both in conjunction with and in reaction against anti-consumerist stances.
Steampunk: Stylish Subversion and Colonial Chic.
by Diana Pho
Co-authored with Jaymee Goh. Fashion Talks: Undressing the Power of Style Ed. Shira Tarrant & Marjorie Jolles. SUNY Press. 2012. (forthcoming)
The Power of Myth and Metal: Captain Nemo as the New Ancient Mariner in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume I
The missions undertaken by the ultimate ensemble of Victorian literary characters that completes Alan Moore and Kevin... more The missions undertaken by the ultimate ensemble of Victorian literary characters that completes Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neil’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume 1, are only made possible by the good grace of Captain Nemo and the scientific Steampunk wonder that is his Nautilus. In the first appearances of Nemo in League, Volume I, Moore wastes no time pointing out the obvious irony of a murderous postcolonial “pirate” in employment as the most unlikely of saviors of the English empire. As the novel progresses, the language and actions of Nemo suggest a grand mythological past, directly connected to the scientific present—and Nemo is the god of both. At times he speaks like the vengeful God of the Old Testament, and at other times like a mythological Titan, whose rightful place in the world was usurped and ruined by the aspirations of empire. In defiance of past helplessness and defeat at the hands of the crown, Nemo never relinquishes his power as the man behind the curtain, and he remains in total control of the ultimate success or failure of every League mission. When the mythos of Nemo’s character meets the metal of the anachronistic gilded age, he becomes a new, more violent type of prophet. Whereas Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, like the Wandering Jew, must endlessly tell his ghastly tale in order to relay the importance of the consideration of life and faith, Nemo is a modern example of wrath embodied—he not only serves as the purveyor of a tale of colonization, but of the aftermath that is sure to ensue and the ultimate balance that is achieved therein.
76 views
Seen by:
Download (.docx) A Plague of Discontent: Russian Dystopia and the 1905 Revolution
Term Paper for Cole Woodcox, Science Fiction by Gaslight, Spring 2009
Blending Genres, Bending Time: Steampunk on the Western Frontier
Co-authored with Cynthia J. Miller.
Published in Journal of Popular Film and Television 39.2 (2011), 84-92.
Reprinted in Westerns: The Essential Journal of Popular Film and Television Collection, ed. Gary Edgerton and Michael Marsden (Routledge, 2012).
Railroad tracks, telegraph lines, and barbed wire fences all symbolized Progress in the nineteenth-century West. Their... more
Railroad tracks, telegraph lines, and barbed wire fences all symbolized Progress in the nineteenth-century West. Their relentless spread across the stark, unending landscape was both a blessing and a curse. Technology tamed once-wild lands, enabling them to fulfill one promise (of unimagined opportunities) even as it destroyed another (of unimagined freedoms). It facilitated the opening of the West to civilization, and heralded the inevitable closing of the frontier.
Typically, these technologies are relegated to the backgrounds of film and television Westerns, even those that address the theme of Progress directly. A handful of Westerns, however, such as Jonah Hex (2010), The Adventures of Brisco County (1993), and the Wild, Wild West (1965/1999), fill the foreground with powerful machines that blend twentieth-century capabilities with a nineteenth-century aesthetic of iron and brass, exposed gears and billowing steam. They transpose the "steampunk" subgenre of science fiction onto the frontier, turning the Western into a temporal hybrid where future and past collapse into a blend of the exotic and the familiar.
This article examines the ways in which Western steampunk uses fantastic images of technology-out-of-time to create critical commentary on the notion of progress and the inherent tension between "civilization" and nature. As a hybrid subgenre it uses the steampunk aesthetic to introduce technology-as-spectacle -- breathtaking, larger than life, focus rather than backdrop, and traffics in fetishism, making technology the stuff of fantasy and obsession. Through the steampunk Western, we see the working out of the tension between popular fascination and fear in relation to technology and the Machine Age -- a commentary on the loss of wildness, independence, and freedom of the frontier West.
Engagement and Performance: created identities in steampunk, cosplay and re-enactment
2012, in The Cultural Moment in Heritage Tourism: New perspectives on performance and engagement. Laurajane Smith, Emma Waterton, Steve Watson (eds). London: Routledge.
This paper explores the dynamics of created identities in historical and fictionalised realities and the role of... more
This paper explores the dynamics of created identities in historical and fictionalised realities and the role of museums in those constructed realities. By engaging with the challenges posed at the intersection of museums, heritage tourism and costumed communities, this research will make a significant contribution to the understanding of the moments of encounter and the power relations between institutions and communities.
How do proponents of ‘steampunk’, ‘cosplay’, and historical re-enactments construct their identities and what is the impact of these ‘fabricated histories’ on museums’ notions of heritage tourism? What are the differences and similarities between museums’ understanding of heritage and that of costumed communities?
Butter-Spades, Footnotes, and Omnium: The Third Policeman as ’Pataphysical Fiction
The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Special Centenary Issue: Flann O’Brien, guest editors Neil Murphy & Keith Hopper, XXXI (Fall 2011)
Butter-Spades, Footnotes, and Omnium: The Third Policeman as Pataphysical Fiction
Anthony Adams
Anthony Adams
From a chance and momentary perusal of the Policeman’s notebook it is possible for me to give here the relative figures for a week’s readings. For obvious reasons the figures themselves are fictitious. (The Third Policeman 103, n.7)
An anthology devoted to small boxes, such as chests and caskets, would constitute an important chapter in psychology. These complex pieces that a craftsman creates are very evident witnesses of the need for secrecy, of an intuitive sense of hiding places. (Bachelard, Poetics of Space 81)
A third of the way through Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, a reader might be encouraged to attempt the anthology Bachelard envisions; by its close, if not before, the same reader will be considerably dissuaded. Discouragement comes with the knowledge that such little boxes, which represent a psychological rather than a physical threshold, serve both to intrigue and mislead; The Third Policeman contains such elaborate boxes of misdirection that one might despair of ever finding the keys again. The novel tantalizes with its evocation of a brilliantly self-referential world filled with a most crazed sanity, and written in a relentlessly reflexive language. This style has encouraged readers to declare the novel an early exposition of the postmodern awareness that reality is not given, but written. Especially unnerving is a manifest distrust toward any language that threatens to describe reality, combined with a thrill in the madcap constructs of those who make the effort to do so. If the bulk of the action takes place in a hellish afterlife, or at least an intellectual purgatory, then The Third Policeman presents a curiously confusing hell in which inventiveness and verbosity pose greater dangers than any corporal punishment.