Lightening Talk: Brown Skin, White Masks: Predictive Technology, Colonial Histories, and Queer Sexuality Today

Thanks to Karl Marx’s references in his political treatises, Shakespeare held a significant place in a number of communist and other left-authoritarian countries, including China and the USSR. And although there were themes in Shakespeare that turned out to be inconvenient for communist ideology, other Shakespearean plays were put into service. I…[Read more]

Bringing together theoretical writing on objects, testimony, and trauma to develop the category of the “nonhuman witness,” this essay considers the narrative, ethical, and ecological work performed by peripheral objects in J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands (1974). Coetzee’s insistent object catalogues acquire narrative agency and provide material for a c…[Read more]

Henrietta Rose-Innes’s novel Nineveh (2011) catalogs the activities of a humane pest expert as she discovers, on an estate under construction outside Cape Town, how human and insect actors undermine the spatial expectations of post-apartheid South Africa. Rose-Innes advances a vision of interspecies connection by recasting controversial themes…[Read more]

Originally founded by Tarana Burke in 2006, the “Me Too Movement” seeks to help survivors of sexual violence, particularly women of color, “to help find pathways to healing” (“metoomvmt.org/about/). Then, in the fall of 2017, the #MeToo hashtag reverberated throughout the Internet, on the front pages of newspapers, and in the public square as…[Read more]

In the Haitian religious tradition of Vodou, Gede is the lwa, or spirit, concerned with the
beginning of life and the passage into the afterlife, death and regeneration. Gede is often
regarded as the spirit of the people in Haiti because he has a direct connection to every living
being, everyone may call on Gede for protection. Gede’s appeal a…[Read more]

In the last two decades since the publication of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Caribbean historical studies has undergone an ‘archival turn.’ Indeed, archives and formal institutions of knowledge have always been and continue to be an integral part of historical work, but Trouillot’s work has cal…[Read more]

« La mémoire est un droit » écrit Christiane Taubira dans sa contribution au débat ‘La Mémoire de l’esclavage et ses dérives’ en 2006 pour la revue philosophique Cités. Étant donné que la mémoire est un droit, qu’est-ce que l’on entend par mémoire ? La mémoire de qui et de quoi ? Pourquoi faut-il s’en souvenir ? Quel est le but de la mémoire ? P…[Read more]

“The New American Scholar” by John Hansen

George Peele’s The Old Wives Tale (published 1595) was performed by the Queen’s Men in the 1580s. Initially, the play has been dismissed by several critics as a vulgar and cheap entertainment without much value. Yet, the metadramatic techniques employed in the play sheds light to how humour could be effectively triggered in the respective per…[Read more]

From 1756 until his death in the early 1790s, Primus Fowle, an enslaved African American, performed typographical and press work involved the in the publication of The New-Hampshire Gazette and other materials printed at the press owned by Daniel Fowle. With the archive of print Primus Fowle created as its object of study, this essay historicizes…[Read more]

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Italian intellectuals participated in Italy’s reconstruction
with an ideological commitment inspired by the African-American struggle for equal rights in the
United States. Drawing on the work of many of the leading figures in postwar Italian culture,
including Italo Calvino, Giorgio Caproni, Cesare P…[Read more]

This essay will examine the multiple performance texts that exist in Ivo Van Hove’s transcultural and transmedial performance event, The Roman Tragedies (which toured worldwide from 2007 to 2013) to suggest that, in today’s “spreadable” culture (to borrow from Henry Jenkins), appropriative use becomes the bridge that can unify ‘work’ and ‘event.…[Read more]

In this essay Queen Margaret’s curses in Richard III become part of a feminist ethics on the early modern stage. As a parrhesiast, in Foucault’s terms, Margaret speaks truth to power and claims a right of citizenship. That Margaret elicits universal revulsion from the other characters while also holding a unique, though not untroubled, pos…[Read more]

Bryony Lavery is an important figure in British feminist drama. She has been noted by critics for her unconventional theatrical methods and themes. Her Frozen (1998) is an anti-paedophiliac play that deals with a psychiatrist who tries to investigate the motives of a paedophile. Investigations into the past of the sexual predator blur the lines…[Read more]

The matter of Troilus and Criseyde had been dealt in both England and Scotland in similar yet different ways from the late 14th to the early 17th century. In Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1385), the conflict between worldly and heavenly love is depicted in a controversial way. Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid (ca. 1480) seems to give a Sco…[Read more]