The Politics of Everyday Fear

Larded with obscurely academic language but including some eclectic offerings, this volume focuses on, as the editor writes, ``the saturation of social spaces by fear.'' In a first section on border experiences, Guillermo Gomez-Pena offers a bilingual performance poem that traces the cultural misunderstandings between Latinos and Anglos, Catholics and Protestants. A section on ``mutations of domination'' includes mass murderer Charles Manson's bizarre, mesmerizing court testimony and a lengthy analysis, by Steven Shaviro, of David Cronenberg's visceral films. In a section on ``dominations of mutation,'' there is an excerpt from Todd Haynes's film script Poison , as well as an absorbing essay by Sandra Buckley on the tortured politics of writing about pornographic Japanese comic books. Other essays take on technological risk, the aberrations of shopping, violence toward women in American television and the anxiety expressed in Australian cinema. Because the book is organized around such a loose theme, its value comes from some components rather than its whole. Massumi teaches in the Graduate Program in Communication at McGill University. (Dec.)