In 1983, Andre Schiffrin and Sara Bershtel, then of Pantheon Books, asked me to write a book on poverty for a new series on the politics of knowledge. The intended audience was non-specialist readers and college students. Reading extensively on the topic, I was struck by the repetitive quality of the literature: discussions of poverty revolved around the same themes stated and combined in different ways leaving the impression that there did not seem much new to say.
Read More‘Willemskerke, Surabaya’. From Java, Sumatra and Other Islands of The Dutch East Indies by A. Cabaton, 1911 by Jenny Watson The Dutch colonial novel The Hidden Force by the fin de siècle author Louis Couperus is regarded as one of the most significant works of Dutch colonial literature. Despite this, it has garnered relatively little…
Read MoreAbahlali Assembly, Foreman Road Settlement by Richard Pithouse Cities have emerged as a key site of popular struggle in post-apartheid South Africa. But with the ANC responding to independent organisation in an increasingly violent and repressive manner the future of these struggles is deeply uncertain. On the 26th of June, James Nxumalo, the African National…
Read MoreFigure 1: The Painter and his model, Rembrandt, c. 1639 by Bernard Baas There always was a gaze behind. But this is the most subtle point, where does this gaze come from? — Jacques Lacan Although the myth of Pygmalion is well known, let us recall the principal elements of Ovid’s account: Pygmalion, who had never…
Read MoreWilfred Owen by Claire Bowen To read Wilfred Owen as anything other than an English war poet might seem like sheer, anachronistic willfulness. Yet Owen’s generational self-understanding develops as a corollary to his assertion that “English poetry” is un-“fit” to speak of war. Owen makes that assertion outright; it’s the top priority of his Preface…
Read More[No Title], From Moonstrips Empire News, Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, 1967 by Siegfried Zielinski Introduction [The Argument] The first decade of the twenty-first century was basically nothing more than an extension of what had gone before. When I began writing this book in the autumn of 2010, I had the feeling that we were still in…
Read MoreLena Pillars. Photograph by Maarten Takens by Greg Downey The Bull of Winter weakens In 2003, after decades of working with the Viliui Sakha, indigenous horse and cattle breeders in the Vilyuy River region of northeastern Siberia, anthropologist Susan Crate began to hear the local people complain about climate change: My own “ethnographic moment” occurred…
Read MoreJean Bethke Elshtain by Katherine B. Jones Political philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain died on August 11, 2013 in Nashville, Tennessee at the age of 72. A controversial public intellectual and prolific scholar whose works covered the gamut from defending the role of religion in politics to providing justifications for war and engaging controversies about and…
Read MorePhotograph by Walter Rojo by Gregory Jusdanis Having devoted the last couple of years to the study of empathy and the need to stand in someone else’s shoes, I tried to imagine how our host felt as we appeared unannounced in her courtyard. Jacinta lives with her husband and six children in San Juan, a…
Read MoreAtrium of Nazarbayev University. Photograph by Liz Jones by Jim Sleeper U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Robert O. Blake performed the diplomatic equivalent of gold-medal figure skating last April in a meeting at the authoritarian central Asian nation of Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev University when a student asked him about warnings by American critics and human-rights monitors…
Read MoreThe Manhattan Transcripts Project, New York, New York, Episode 4: The Block, Bernard Tschumi, 1980-81 by Albert Rolls Bleeding Edge, by Thomas Pynchon, Penguin Press, 496 pp. Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, Bleeding Edge, the third Pynchon has published since 2006, will likely be received as one of his lighter offerings. The plot follows the now…
Read Moreby Mike Chasar The January 2013 issue of PMLA has a pretty cool article (“Whitman’s Children“) by Bowdoin College English Professor Peter Coviello that takes as its starting point a couple of babies born after the U.S. Civil War that were named Walt—a nominal tribute that two veterans paid to Walt Whitman after receiving Whitman’s…
Read MoreI think some of the purported arguments for secularism are in one way or another bad arguments. Here, I attempt to prod secularists into some critical reflection on their ideas…
Read MoreFrom Monsters University, Walt Disney Pictures, 2013 by Roland Greene The MOOC era has dawned with a rush of utopian and dystopian bombast, much of which is bound to be wrong. A platform for enabling high-quality instruction over the internet will probably be a boon for higher education at large, even if it drastically changes…
Read MoreFrom FINAL FANTASY VII, Square, 1997 by Simon Ferrari and Ian Bogost Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games, by Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 320pp. In Games of Empire, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter expand an earlier study of “the video game industry as an aspect…
Read MoreTo the touch, Misha Maslennikov, 2010 15 years old. Military service. “Well, look at you taking up the whole fucking bench. Come on, move your ass.” As sturdy as a brick, the boy plonked himself down next to me and spread his legs wide, straining his grey boxer shorts. He was evidently from our neighbouring…
Read MoreRay, 1956 He feared drowning. He fell asleep on the bus, sleeping past his stop, and on down to Redondo Beach, the waves breaking, hard on hearing. He slept past the beach break at El Porto, his head bouncing against the beach-side window, his tools jiggling in his toolbox at his feet, past the Manhattan Beach Pier,…
Read MoreTrainsition IIII, Richard Hamilton, 1954 by David Beer It has become an accepted motif of the day, perhaps even a cliché, that data about our lives are captured and harvested in multifarious ways. The rise of powerful new media infrastructures has made this escalation of data harvesting possible. These infrastructures have become the backdrop to…
Read MoreWe need a legal and political understanding of the right of the refugee, whereby no solution for one group produces a new class of refugees…
Read MorePiece originally published at Public Domain Review. A series of woodcuts from an 18th century chapbook entitled The World Turned Upside Down or The Folly of Man, Exemplified in Twelve Comical Relations upon Uncommon Subjects. As well as the amusing woodcuts showing various reversals (many revolving around the inversion of animal and human relations) there…
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