Colloquies

Welcome to Colloquies, a dynamic index to current themes that run through Arcade’s field of literature, the humanities, and the world. For each Colloquy, a curator selects from a variety of intellectual work in different modes — journal articles, book chapters, multimedia recordings, and blog posts — to assemble a conversation. These topical clusters draw upon the best material that circulates through places where intellectual work is cultivated, including humanities centers, journals, presses, and other digital venues for scholarship and commentary, as well as Arcade's rich content.

Colloquies are built for interaction: they evolve as new material appears, while the older ones are archived and remain available. Visitors to Arcade are invited to submit their own contributions to open Colloquies for consideration by the curator. Of course, all Colloquies encourage comments.

How can readers become curators? All Colloquies, as well as everything published on Arcade, may be remixed into a discrete anthology, which we call "My Colloquies." The black button under the title of each item permits readers to create their own collections, which may be shared with friends, a class, or a reading group, or maintained for personal reflection.

Featured Colloquies

New

Animals, Animacy, and the Moving Image

Curator

Moira Weigel

Animals attract moving images. They always have. more

New

Thing Theory in Literary Studies

Curators

Sarah Wasserman, Patrick Moran

That things capture our imagination is hardly news. As Andrew Cole wrote in a 2016 issue of October, "materialism is as old as the hills." Cole claims that new approaches to studying things allow us to find similarities where we have too often found difference, and that this method dates back at least to Hegel and Marx. more

New

Postcolonial Spatialities

Curator

Ato Quayson

On one reading postcolonial studies seem to be riveted more firmly on temporal as opposed to spatial questions. This may be traced partly to the effect of the temporalizing "post-" in the term postcolonialism, which has allowed an insistence on various dates as inaugurating the epochal postcolonial relation. more

Imagining the Oceans

Curator

Margaret Cohen

The oceans cover three-quarters of the globe. They sustain life on land and shape societies across history and culture. The ocean environment at the same time is forbidding and remote, hostile to human physiology and beyond the lived experience of most people, even today. more

Updated

Shakespeare and Cervantes Then and Now

Curator

Roland Greene

An early modern transatlantic world in which information moved slowly could hardly have noticed the date, but 401 years later it registers for us: on April 23, 1616 in the Julian and the Gregorian calendars, about eleven natural days apart, something ended. And perhaps something else began. more

Tropicalismo Fifty Years Later

Curator

Christopher Dunn

Tropicália is the name of a cultural moment in late 1960s Brazil that was manifest in nearly all realms of artistic production, especially in popular music, but also the visual arts, theater, film and literature. more

Updated

21st-Century Marxisms

Curator

Adam Morris

From the pages of The New York Times and The Nation to those of the American Spectator, social commentators advanced, debunked, and fretted over the claim that 2014 marked a comeback year for Marxist thought. more

Americans in Paris

Curator

Natalia Cecire

There is perhaps something perverse in returning to Paris in a moment of transnational studies that has aimed to diminish the metropolitan center’s hold on critical attention. Yet the case of Americans in Paris in particular offers insight into the gravitational interactions between empires . . . more

Precariousness and Aesthetics

Curators

Benjamin Bateman, Elizabeth Adan

This Colloquy assembles an interdisciplinary group of voices that consider the relationships between aesthetics and precariousness. more

Updated

Elena Ferrante

Curator

Barbara Alfano

The success of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels has sparked worldwide buzz in and out of academia, in literary journals, and in book clubs. Ferrante is the author of seven novels, a collection of papers related to her work as a writer, and a children’s book, The Beach at Night. more

Updated

Locating Contemporary Asian American Poetry

Curators

Brian Reed, Kornelia Freitag

In 1996, Juliana Chang observed that there were a "disproportionately small number of critical essays" on the topic of Asian American poetry and poetics. Asian American literary and cultural study might have grown rapidly as an area of scholarly specialty since the 1970s, but academics still seemed to approach verse with near "fear and loathing." more

Poetry after Language

Curators

Marijeta Bozovic, Walt Hunter

The diverse practices associated with the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school of poetry marked a shift—or a return to avant-garde practices and leftist politics—in American poetry in the 1970s. more