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"Transnational Muscle Cars" is the second book in Jeff Derksen's trilogy addressing critical geography and contemporary cultural and political theory.
A propos de l'auteur
Jeff Derksen is a poet, critic, and professor who lives in Vancouver and Vienna. His poetry books include
The Vestiges,
Transnational Muscle Cars, and
Down Time (Winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize). His critical books include
After Euphoria,
Annihilated Time: Poetry and Other Politics, and the folio
How High is the City, How Deep is Our Love. He works on artistic research projects with the collective Urban Subjects: their books include
The Militant Image Reader,
Momentarily: Learning from Mega Events, and
Autogestion: Henri Lefebvre in New Belgrade. As curators, they brought
The Vienna Model: Housing for the 21st Century to the Museum of Vancouver and curated the exhibition
If Time Is Still Alive at Camera Austria. He was a founding member of both the Kootenay School of Writing and Artspeak Gallery. Derksen works at Simon Fraser University and is a Fulbright Fellow and former research fellow at the Centre for Place, Culture, and Politics at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He lives in Vancouver and Vienna.
Résumé
Transnational Muscle Cars provides a withering critique of how it is that consumption, buying (into) something, buying anything, has become the prime mover in a transient global urbanism that now defines our everyday lives.
Written over the past ten years in a quartet of cities—Calgary, Toronto, New York and Vienna—Transnational Muscle Cars is the second book in Jeff Derksen’s trilogy addressing place, culture and capital, and draws on a wide array of North American post-war poetics—the declarative aspects of New American Poetry, the pop cultural details of the New York School, the reflexive politics of the Language Poets, the personal politics of the Kootenay School of Writing—and on contemporary cultural and political theory, critical geography, urban theory, and architectural concepts.
Whereas the first book in this trilogy, Dwell, tried to work out a poetics of place still tied to questions of national culture, Transnational Muscle Cars rescales these questions. Moving from the national to the global-urban, it draws on a wide range of cultural references, from Keanu Reeves to the Russian Constructivists, from the Gap to inflatable architecture.
While the politics of poetic form is still a key aspect of Derksen’s work, geography has overtaken language as its central focus. What are the politics of this new cultural landscape? And how do you drive across it? And why does this new imperialism behave so much like a classic muscle car—all brawn and horsepower, but with little braking power and an inability to negotiate curves?
