Murat Aydemir is Associate Professor ( universitair hoofddocent ) in Comparative Literature and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam.
He teaches in the bachelor and master Comparative Literature ( Literatuurwetenschap ), as well as in the research master in Cultural Analysis.
He also serves as the program director of NICA, the Dutch national research school for cultural analysis, studies, and theory.

• BA Literatuurwetenschap

• MA Literatuurwetenschap

• MA Cultural Analysis

• NICA

Indiscretions: At the Intersection of Queer and Postcolonial Theory

In the West, once apparently progressive causes such as sexual equality and lesbian and gay emancipation are increasingly redeployed in order to discipline and ostracize immigrant underclass subjects, primarily Muslims. Gender and sexuality on the one hand and race, culture, and/or ethnicity on the other are more and more forced into separate, mutually exclusive realms. That development cannot but bear on the establishment of queer and postcolonial studies as separate academic specializations, among whom relations usually are as cordial as they are indifferent.
This volume inquires into the possibilities and limitations of a parceling out of objects alternative to the commonscheme, crude but often apposite,in which Western sexual subjectivity is analyzed and criticized by queer theory, while postcolonial studies takes care of non-Western racial subjectivity. Sex, race: always already distinguished, yet never quite apart. 
Roderick A. Ferguson has described liberal pluralism as an "ideology of discreteness" in that it disavows race, gender and sexuality's mutually formative role in political, social, and economic relations. It is in that spirit that this volume advocates the discreet, hence judicious and circumspect, reconsideration of the (in)discrete realities of race and sex. 
Contributors : Jeffrey Geiger, Merill Cole, Jonathan Mitchell and Michael O'Rourke, Jaap Kooijman, Beth Kramer, Maaike Bleeker, Rebecca Fine Romanow, Anikó Imre, Lindsey Green-Simms, Nishant Shahani, Ryan D. Fong, and Murat Aydemir

• Indiscretions

Images of Bliss: Ejaculation, Masculinity, Meaning

From Holbein to hard-core porn, a critical exploration of male orgasm in Western culture. Aristotle believed semen to be the purest of all bodily secretions, a vehicle for the spirit or psyche that gives form to substance. For Proust's narrator in Swann's Way, waking to find he has experienced a nocturnal emission, it is the product of "some misplacing of my thigh." The heavy metal band Metallica used it to adorn an album cover. Beyond its biological function, semen has been applied with surprising frequency to metaphorical and narratological purposes. 
In Images of Bliss, Murat Aydemir undertakes an original and extensive analysis of images of male orgasm and semen. In a series of detailed case studies-Aristotle's On the Generation of Animals;Andres Serrano's use of bodily fluids in his art; paintings by Holbein and Leonardo; Proust's In Search of Lost Time; hard-core pornography (both straight and gay); and key texts from the poststructuralist canon, including Lacan on the phallus, Bataille on expenditure, Barthes on bliss, and Derrida on dissemination-Aydemir traces the complex and often contradictory possibilities for imagination, description, and cognition that both the idea and the reality of semen make available. 
In particular, he foregrounds the significance of male ejaculation for masculine subjectivity. More often than not, Aydemir argues, the event or object of ejaculation emerges as the instance through which identity, meaning, and gender are not so much affirmed as they are relentlessly and productively questioned, complicated, and displaced.
Combining close readings of diverse works with subtle theoreticalelaboration and akeen eye for the cultural ideals and anxieties attached to sexuality, Images of Bliss offers a convincing and long overdue critical exploration of ejaculation in Western culture. 
"Images of Bliss is marked by a wry sense of humor and a commitment to cultural dissection of literary and artistic works." -Bitch Magazine

• Images of Bliss

• Google Books preview

Migratory Settings: Transnational Perspectives on Place

Thamyris/Intersecting: Place, Sex, Race Edited by Alex Rotas andMurat Aydemir 
A clunky and oxymoronic phrase, 'migratory settings' raises more questions than it answers. 'Migratory' indexes migration, the movement of people from one place on the planet to another. 'Setting' denotes emplacement, the manner or framework in which something, especially a jewel, a play, or a narrative, is mounted orset into place. Hence, 'migratory' alludes to movement, 'settings' to emplacement; the former indicates the 'real' political, social, and economic world, the latter an assembled scenery: fictional, staged, imagined, perceived, or aesthetic in some other way. How then can'settings' and 'migratory' be relevantly combined with each other and productively inform one another?
Our combined titular phrase, we propose, invites a shift in perspective from migration as movement from place to place to migrationas installing movement within place. Migration does not only take place between places, but also has its effects on place, in place. In brief, we suggest a view on migration in which place is neither reified nor transcended, but 'thickened' as it becomes the setting of the variegated memories, imaginations, dreams, fantasies, nightmares, anticipations, and idealizations that experiences of migration, of both migrants and native inhabitants, bring into contact with each other. Migration makes place overdetermined, turning it into the mise-en-scène of different histories.
Extending from migration, migratory traces the 'life' of migration in culture. Simultaneously, the migratory remains intimately tethered to particular settings. The oxymoronic tension between the two terms prevents the transcendence as well as the reification of either. Movement does not lead to placelessness, but to the intensification and overdetermination of place, its 'heterotopicality.' Place does not unequivocally authenticate or validate knowledge, but, shot-through with the transnational and the transcultural, exceeds it ceaselessly.
Our contributions take us to the migratory settings of a fictional exhibition; a staged political wedding; a walking tour in a museum; African appropriations of Shakespeare and Sophocles; Gollwitz, Germany; Calais, France; the body after a heart transplant; refugees' family portraiture; a garden in Vermont; the womb.
"... a complex and subtle idea that challenges assumptions about the security of place as the starting point for cultural analysis and production. ... the insights are fascinating and the book offers much for those who identify with the shift in the role that place has in the cultural and social investigation." - Chris Speed, Leonardo Online, April 2010.
"Aydemir and Rotas' introduction provides an eloquent fleshing out of migratory settings as both a theoretical and aesthetic approach. ... The explorations of aesthetic projects described in this collection move effortlessly between theme, theory, and aesthetic, so that 'theme becomes theorized and theory embodied,' creating a deeply sensate understanding in the reader of the experiences and subjective consequences of migration." - Zoë O'Reilly, Social and CulturalGeography 12: 1 (February 2011), 99-100.

• Rodopi: Migratory Settings

• Leonardo Online review by Chris Speed

A Reaction to the Fruchtl/Bal Debate

"An interdisciplinary research practice, cultural analysis lacks an established archive. .... Therefore, [it] takes recourse to various archives, philosophy's and others, forging new relationships between elements in them in the attempt to account for an object that, for the sake of analysis, is permitted not to belong, or not belong completely, or not belong easily. It tries to invent a new archive for each of the objects, canonical or marginal, new or long established, that it encounters."
-- Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy, 2008, no. 2.

• Article

• Krisis

Piecemeal Translation

ABSTRACT: Mieke Bal and Shahram Entekhabi's Glub (Hearts) of 2004, comprising an art film and a video installation, inquires into the Middle Eastern and North African practice of eating roasted sunflower, pumpkin and other seeds as it has taken hold in the city of Berlin. Bal has called the work an instance rather than an object of 'cultural analysis', the term that she has espoused for her critical practice. Cultural analysis engages its object in relation to theoretical concepts and socio-cultural contexts without, however, reducing it to a case or illustration of either. This essay builds on the cultural analysis that Glub carries out by addressing the practice of seed-eating, described by one commentator as a 'social event and an art form', in a number of frames. These frames overlap but do not amount to a comprehensive description of the work, adding to the density or 'thickness' of the object at stake. Initially, the work is considered in the context of Bal's recentacademic work. Further, there is discussion of Glub's peculiar and strategic rendering of Berlinian 'street life', which both suspends and reinforces the recognizability of the contemporary Western metropolis. Finally, the article addresses the ways in which the work engages with the possibilities and pitfalls of the cross-cultural translation ofan everyday cultural detail.

• Art History

What's Queer Here?

Initiators: Murat Aydemir, Jaap Kooijman. The advertising slogan for the 1998 exhibition From the Corner of the Eye at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, "What's Queer Here?" brings to the fore the deployment of queer as a political signifier that refuses to identify or represent. The phrase seeks out a what rather than a who: some or other thing, phenomenon, inclination, tendency, or potential. Moreover, it binds that what to a here, suggesting that what's queer here may not necessarily be queer there, and vice versa. The cover of the exhibition catalogue shows Ugo Rondinone's Don't Live Here Anymore (1997), a photograph of a wispy guy who looks away from the camera and outside the frame, as if to displace the identifying gaze to elsewhere; or, as if to focus attention on something more interesting that is happening just outside our, but not his, field of vision. Prevalent and contested in activism and academia since the late 1980s in variegated guises, 'queer' questions and suspends the fateful bonds between what and who we like and who we are, and perhaps most productively refuses to decide in advance what is and what is not politically and/or epistemologically 'serious.' Thisprojectwill continue, critique, and extend the legacies of what has become known as 'queer theory,' critically appropriate these for our ongoing research projects, as well as propose and try out new priorities, affiliations, objects, and concerns for the field. Those may include a renewed focus on sexuality in relation to class and labor, to the state and civilsociety, to activist practices and alternatives, to postcolonial migration, tourism, and globalization, to the biopolitical discipline of the (re)production of 'healthy'bodies and minds, andtothe liberal politics of identity that enshrines, some have argued, a new 'homonormativity' in the West. Our goals are to facilitate exchange and debate between scholars working with queer theory (comfortably or uncomfortably), both within and beyond The Netherlands; to organize a future edition of ASCA's yearly Soiree meetings; and to reflectintently on what's queer here, now, in the Netherlands, in Amsterdam.

• Geen nevenwerkzaamheden