Book Launch: Alberto Toscano & Clint Burnham
Wednesday, February 8, 7pm
Djavad Mowafaghian World Art Centre
149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver
Join authors and critics Alberto Toscano (London) and Clint Burnham (Vancouver) as they talk about their new books, A Test of Powers: Writings on Criticism and Literary Institutions (by Franco Fortini, translated by Toscano: Seagull Books) and Fredric Jameson and The Wolf of Wall Street (Burnham: Bloomsbury Books).
Toscano's translation brings us the work of a crucial figure in the Italian cultural and political scenes of the 1960s and 1970s, Fortini, a communist poet and critic who advocated for a "modular culture and language" that combined activism with an ecology of languague. Toscano's translation marks the first appearance in English of much of Fortini's critical work, and joins his earlier translation of Dogs of the Sinai, Fortini's book on the Palestine-Israel conflict.
Burnham's book, which draws on Toscano's work in cultural studies (the book he co-wrote with Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute), using the Marxist theories of Fredric Jameson to understand Martin Scorsese's 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street. In that film, Burnham argues, we have a critique of finance capitalism masquerading as a gangster film (or is it the other way around?).
Alberto Toscano has edited and translated Franco Fortini's The Dogs of the Sinai, and translated Fortini's A Test of Powers: Essays 1948-1968, for the Italian List at Seagull Books, which he edits. He is the author of Fanaticism (2010) and Cartographies of the Absolute (2015, with Jeff Kinkle). He is an editor of the journal Historical Materialism, and teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Clint Burnham's recent books include Pound @ Guantánamo (poetry, 2016) and Fredric Jameson and the Wolf of Wall Street (criticism, 2016). His essays on contemporary art have appeared in The Globe and Mail, Artforum, Canadian Art, and Espace Art Actuel. He teaches in the department of English at Simon Fraser University.
Co-presented by SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement, SFU Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, the SFU Department of English, the SFU Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology, SFU Galleries, and the SFU Centre for Global Political Economy.
This event takes place on the unceded traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples.