Michael Chanan

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Latest essays

Mind, Body, Memory: Making sense of my brother’s dementia
Free Associations, Number 92, Autumn 2024

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Artificial Stupidity: On the alienation of intelligence
Free Associations, Number 88, Spring 2023

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Latest book

Chanan’s rich historical investigations of the evolving technologies of artistic production provide a fascinating new basis for a politics of culture
Michael Hardt, author of ‘The Subversive 70s’

Drawing on nearly fifty years of writing and teaching about the media and making films, Michael Chanan presents us with a series overlapping histories of different media technologies, which is both authoritative and original.
Julian Petley, Honorary and Emeritus Professor of Journalism at Brunel University, London

Michael Chanan’s brilliant synthesis, replete with fascinating detail, both boggles the mind and deeply educates.
Claudia Gorbman, Professor Emerita of Film Studies at the University of Washington Tacoma

Podcast: Deutscher Prize Short List 2024 Conversation with Esther Leslie

Cuba: Living Between Hurricanes

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Cuba: Living Between Hurricanes is a film is about the elements – hurricanes and rain, the sea and the earth. About a fishing port on the north coast of Cuba which has seen better days: Caibarién, where Hurricane Irma – one of the most powerful ever to sweep the Caribbean – made landfall in September 2017. About the effects of climate across the centuries in a Caribbean island which was absorbed into global markets for its commodity crops – tobacco, coffee and above all, sugar. How sugar changed the landscape, through deforestation and soil exhaustion. About the collapse of sugar and the encroachment of a new market – tourism. And about the growing threat from climate change, and moves towards reforestation, eco-tourism and sustainable farming.

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