This collection brings together transdisciplinary scholarship on sounds, images, words, and experiences to reflect on extremity’s polysemic and polymorphic characteristics.

On Extremity: From Music to Images, Words, and Experiences brings together transdisciplinary scholarship on sounds, images, words, and experiences (human and non-human) to reflect on the polysemic and polymorphic characteristics of extremity and the category of the extreme. The editors and authors aim to contribute to a living, breathing, and expanding definition of extremity that helps us understand what we gain, or lose, when we interact with it, create it, and share it with, or force it upon, others. The volume calls for the emergence of “extremity studies” as an area of perusal to help us navigate our current global condition.

Chapter 1 - On Extremity: A Manifesto

Nelson Varas-Díaz, Niall Scott, and Bryan Bardine

SOUNDS

Chapter 3 - Essential Musicality: Extreme Music and the Sounds of Everyday Life

Ross Hagen

Chapter 4 - Extremities within Extremity: Sisterhood as Strategies of Resistance in the UK Underground Metal Scene

Jasmine Hazel Shadrack

Chapter 5 - Voices for the Voiceless: Animal Rights and Extremity in Extreme Music

Edward Banchs and Anna Chilewska

Chapter 6 - No Satisfaction: Aihiyō after The Rolling Stones

Robin Purves

IMAGES AND WORDS

Chapter 7 - Extremity – Art – Decoloniality: Lessons for Survival in the Work of Puerto Rican Artist Rafael Trelles

Nelson Varas-Díaz

Chapter 8 - The Limits of Extremity: The Disappearance and Return of Extremity in Late Capitalism
Jason J. Wallin

Chapter 9 - Seeking the Banality in the Extreme: Prescient Identifiers of Vapid Narcissism in an Era of Post-Truth

Vivek Venkatesh

Chapter 10 - Quixotism and Extremity: Cervantes on Authenticity, Delusion, and Reality Literacy in Early and Late Modernity

Bradley J. Nelson

Chapter 11 - Devil Running Wild: Satan and his Minions in Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen

Bryan Bardine

EXPERIENCES

Chapter 12 - Rethinking Extremity through Gender Detransition

Sheilla R. Madera and Alíxida Ramos Pibernus

Chapter 13 - Para’o: Exotic Wake, Extreme Performance and Marginality in San Juan, Puerto Rico

Luis Javier Cintrón Gutiérrez

Chapter 14 - Pushing the Limits of the “Darkest” Dark Tourism in the Age of Extremity

Jeffrey S. Podoshen