The lag between surface reading’s gestation in the late 2000s and its critical uptake/interrogation in the early 2010s roughly corresponds to the time between Kenneth W. Warren’s delivering the W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures at Harvard in 2007 and his publication of the book based on those talks in 2011.
Read MoreIt was in large part the systematization of nature, in generally avowedly artificial classifications, that led to the emergence of racial realism in the modern period. It was quite enough to devise complicated schemata or groupings-together of all natural beings, including human beings and their purported subtypes, to reify the categories of race that so…
Read MoreI know that to both sexes elevated understandings, and the reverse, are common. But, suffer me to ask, in what the minds of females are so notoriously deficient, or unequal.
Read MoreThe earliest roots of the intelligence agency, as having a bone and mortar identity, began with the establishment of the British Intelligence Bureau, in Shimla, in 1878.
Read MoreDuring the last few weeks, the overall silence, or, at most, one-sided coverage of the Albanian media vis-à-vis the national economic situation in relation to Greece’s was contrasted by an echo chamber of “regular” EU media chastising Greece’s “bad behavior” and empty calls to “get your act together.”
Read MoreWhen I recently visited Berlin, it quickly became clear the extent to which Germany had created a fantasy story about Greece.
Read MoreOn 21 December, 2012, I had the privilege of introducing J.M. Coetzee to an expectant audience at the University of Cape Town; he was about to read from his new, as yet unpublished work, The Childhood of Jesus.
Read MoreItalian Futurism created the template of the avant-garde manifesto adopted by all the ‘isms’ that followed, and violence was in it from the start. “Violence and precision”, the Futurist leader Marinetti proclaimed, is the recipe for a successful manifesto.
Read MoreThe drain on the bathtub had a crack in it so I’d rigged up a system involving a lid from a Chinese take-out container and a rock.
Read MoreI am a serious person and my mind is of a philosophic bent. My vocation is the study of finance.
Read More‘Literature in modern Russia,’ writes historian Orlando Figes in A People’s Tragedy, his vast chronicle of the Russian Revolutions, ‘always was a surrogate for politics.’
Read MoreAt the end of the seventeenth century a new literary genre or subgenre emerged in England, one that might be characterized as the nocturnal picaresque.
Read MoreIn his 2011 monograph Thomas Pynchon & the Dark Passages of History, David Cowart groups The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Inherent Vice into a single, convenient category of “California novels.”
Read MoreI try not to weigh in on ephemeral online outrages, but there’s one thing I just can’t resist the urge to bring up in connection with the recent flare of fascination with Rachel Dolezal’s inner life and its outer expression.
Read MoreYes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice
Read MoreAt first sight the negotiations between Greece and the Troika seem to be simply a battle about resources: how much of the pie that is Greek national income their creditors should receive.
Read MoreThis is an essay to be taken with a child’s, or Gilles Deleuze’s, naïveté. To those who fail to find such thinking sufficiently serious, take heed—you may well find yourself neatly aligned with The Lego Movie’s antagonist, Lord Business.
Read Moreby Justin E. H. Smith I’ve just completed the first lesson of L. N. Kharitonov’s Self-Teaching Manual of the Yakut Language (Third Edition, Moscow, 1987). What satisfaction! At this early stage the vocabulary is very similar to Turkish, though to be precise the true relation is the reverse: modern Turkish is a distant descendant of…
Read MoreTamara O’Hara woke at noon to see an envelope lodged in her letterbox, overshadowing the boots, corsets, whips and chains piled by the door to her studio flat after a video shoot.
Read MoreI did survive communism and even laughed. But I’ve stopped laughing many times since. First of all, of course, because in the former Yugoslavia, the collapse of the old system brought wars.
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