Home : Book details : Book description

Description of  Fairies, Ghosts, and Santa Claus: Tinted Glasses, Fetishes, and the Politics of Seeing

Investigating the politics of seeing and its effects, this book draws on Slavoj ieks notion of fetish and Walter Benjamins notion of the optical unconscious to offer newer concepts: tinted glasses, through which we see the world unit-thinking, which renders the world as consisting of discrete units and coherants, which help fragmented experiences cohere into something intelligible. Examining experiences at a Japanese heritage language school, a study-abroad trip to Sierra Leone, as well as in college classrooms, this book reveals the workings of unit-thinking and fetishism in diverse contexts and explores possibilities for social change. Read more