Sianne Ngai

Christian Gauss Award ShortlistWinner of the ASAP Book PrizeA Literary Hub Book of the Year "Makes the case that the gimmick is of tremendous critical value. Lies somewhere between critical theory and Sontag's best work."- Los Angeles Review of Books "Ngai exposes capitalism's tricks in her mind-blowing study of the time- and labour-saving devices we call gimmicks."- New Statesman "One...

The zany, the cute, and the interesting saturate postmodern culture. They dominate the look of its art and commodities as well as our discourse about the ambivalent feelings these objects often inspire. In this radiant study, Sianne Ngai offers a theory of the aesthetic categories that most people use to process the hypercommodified, mass-mediated, performance-driven world of late capitalism, treating...

Envy, irritation, paranoia—in contrast to powerful and dynamic negative emotions like anger, these non-cathartic states of feeling are associated with situations in which action is blocked or suspended. In her examination of the cultural forms to which these affects give rise, Sianne Ngai suggests that these minor and more politically ambiguous feelings become all the more suited for diagnosing the...