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Blogs

Why Only Art Can Save Us: An Interview with Santiago Zabala

by Leonardo Franceschini | 04.19.2018

On the vital role of the arts and hermeneutics in the current political climate.

White People in Pictures: Forgetting Histories and Kazuo Ishiguro’s "The Buried Giant"

by Holly Crocker | 04.02.2018

By seeing how heroic masculinity passes on a legacy of hatred and violence that continues old injustices, what comes to the fore is the vital need to acknowledge our own personal connections to histories of violence.

Whence Newton in the Seventeenth-Century Afro-American Tropics?

by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra | 03.22.2018

Maligned in popular conceptions of the history of medicine, Afro-American religious healers in early modern Cartagena played a constructive role in the development of an science that privileged empiricism over dogma in Pablo Gómez's new study, The Experiential Caribbean.

Hiding Spaces: on Aki Kaurismäki's "The Other Side of Hope"

by Lindsay Turner | 03.06.2018

A Finnish film about the inhumanity and pervasive danger of a system that functions to deny asylum and force deportation, even if that film is warm-hearted, should also be deeply unsettling to US viewers in 2018.

Privileging your checks

by William Flesch | 02.27.2018

When playing chess, what do you mean when you say "check"? Per Wittgenstein, perhaps we communicate in ways that have surprisingly little to do with what we actually say.

Walking Along Newtown Creek

by Steve Mentz | 02.12.2018

Rather than ignoring the toxic legacies of our industrial past, what if we engaged with remnants such as Newtown Creek to imagine a more fluid and dynamic Antropocene that moves away from green fantasies towards assessing troubling but necessary realities?

Distant Reading After Moretti

by Lauren Klein | 01.29.2018

It is not a coincidence that distant reading does not deal well with gender, sexuality, or race. But if we re-commit ourselves to the project of exposing and interrogating power, we arrive potentially at a form of distant reading that is much more inclusive.

How to Watch "Get Out" Again

by David Shih | 01.09.2018

When watching the film "Get Out," what if white people and non-black people of color saw their responsibility as more than nodding knowingly at microaggressions or bits of cotton stuffing? What if they realized that "Get Out" can also be about what it feels like to be themselves in America?

"Lady Bird," the Iraq War, and Not Quite Nostalgia

by Lindsay Turner | 01.03.2018

What’s unique about the film "Lady Bird" is that its nostalgia for the USA of 2002-2003 isn’t quite nostalgia. With a strange gentleness, the film builds itself around the feeling of recognizing the scary present in a past you can still manage to love.

If You Can't Say Unqualified, Say Ungrateful

by David Shih | 11.30.2017

Donald Trump did not invent the ungrateful black athlete stereotype, but he made it familiar. The stereotype recasts professionals at the top of their game as that black person who doesn’t know how to do their job. Maxine Waters. Frederica Wilson. La David Johnson. Barack Obama. “Ungrateful” is only the latest way to say that a black worker is unworthy because they are black.