After the conquest, Tenochtitlan became Mexico, but the city remained predominantly indigenous. As a viceregal capital and global commercial hub, Mexico City underwent profound changes as ethnic newcomers from Oaxaca to Manila elbowed out the Nahua from their barrios, and Aztec systems of water management survived even as dikes and canals were modified.
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.
Christian cultural practice in the Iberian Peninsula belies a lingering paganism in the Peninsula well after we assume the total defeat of organized pagan religion: you just have to know where to look.
The mainstream popularity of black culture today does not erase centuries of racial violence and oppression.
Name your favorite historical master narratives!
"Family connexions are part of the poetry of history," Noel Annan asserted in "The Intellectual Aristocracy", one of the most famous essays ever written on British culture. Fortunately or unfortunately, it would be fair to embellish Annan's point by adding that sometimes "family connexions are part of the history of poetry." That, at least, is what this post seeks to demonstrate.
This is a response to Joshua Landy’s post “What’s wrong with narrative?” I'm coming late to this discussion; more to the point, I'm an art historian, and not a scholar of literature, and therefore am familiar with a different range of critical writing than some of you. I'm also a Sinologist and not a scholar of Western culture.
A whole new generation of minority writers has come to prominence whose work signals a radical turn to a "postrace" era in American literature.
On the sweltering Tuesday evening of September 15, 2009, an exuberant forty-six year old man stood on a stage in Tel-Aviv, Israel and asked a stirred audience, “Are you ready to kill some Nazis?” An enthusiastic “Yeah!” was the response. The name of the man, you may have guessed, is Quentin Tarantino.
