Abstract
The Sudanese-born author Leila Aboulela describes the position of the non-western Anglophone writer as a translator by default, moving ‘back and forth’ between languages and cultures. This essay argues that Aboulela’s novel The Translator (1999) calls into question conceptualizations of translation that grow out of western relig…[Read more]

As the entire world now knows, Dr. David Dao is the passenger who was dragged off a United Airlines Flight on April 9th, 2017 by Chicago security police who broke his nose, gave him a concussion and smashed two of his teeth. Some media have treated this as a horror perpetrated by a single airline that bullies passengers, or by a business model…[Read more]

As the entire world now knows, Dr. David Dao is the passenger who was dragged off a United Airlines Flight on April 9th, 2017 by Chicago security police who broke his nose, gave him a concussion and smashed two of his teeth. Some media have treated this as a horror perpetrated by a single airline that bullies passengers, or by a business model…[Read more]

Agamben’s self-professed epigonism underwrites his entire project, serving as an even more fundamental methodological concept than the signature, paradigm, and archeology. In Infancy and History, Agamben maintains that transcendental experience is no longer a viable source of philosophical insight; philosophers go astray referring their thinking b…[Read more]

The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing.

The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing.

The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing.

Coloniality is a complex heritage encapsulating complex cultural challenges confronting the performance artist. Nigerian musical production appears to have been operating in a world without borders since the advent of colonialism. There have been non-indigenous forms brought into the cultural landscape which have challenged the performers. The…[Read more]

This is an essay on the relation of images and text. It is part of a larger research project online at writingwithimages.com. See that site for the context; the the project’s purpose is to theorize the possibilities of fiction and poetry that are presented alongside images.

This is an essay on the relation of images and text. It is part of a larger research project online at writingwithimages.com. See that site for the context; the the project’s purpose is to theorize the possibilities of fiction and poetry that are presented alongside images.

An analysis of the politics of sound and noise in Kafka’s “Der Bau.”

The following paper attempts a philosophically rigorous interpretation of H.C. Andersen’s tales. Through a radically conceived sentimentality — the unmediated juxtaposition of the abjection of things, conceived as a paradoxical “desire for desire” having no place in the world, with a cruel, apathetic gaze — Andersen challenges the exist…[Read more]

This is an essay on the relation of images and text. It is part of a larger research project online at writingwithimages.com. See that site for the context; the the project’s purpose is to theorize the possibilities of fiction and poetry that are presented alongside images.

“analyses the spectral presence of the phonograph within a digital omnipresence: its afterlife as a material echo of the past… Analyzing audiophilia— basically a desire for material presence — in the apparently disembodied age of the digital, Adler shows how the former is as it were animated as aura by the effects of the latter (infinite…[Read more]

The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing.

The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing.

The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing. All c…[Read more]

Debates over safe spaces and trigger warnings have become a regular part of campus discourse, especially in context with discussions over free speech, intellectual freedom, and the role that universities play in the social formation. In particular, the University of Chicago entered into the public fray surrounding safe spaces in the fall of 2016…[Read more]

Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty confirms that the fiction of the second generation Caribbean diaspora has indeed arrived on the international scene, if indeed any confirmation was required after the phenomenal success of Smith’s first novel
White Teeth. The status of Smith’s fiction in the Euro-American academy, which is also the setting of O…[Read more]