“The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages”—a two-part article—questions the widely held belief in critical race theory that “race” is a category without purchase before the modern era. Surveying a variety of cultural documents from the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries—chronicles, hagiography, literature, stories, sculpture, maps, canon l…[Read more]

“Becoming-animal” is a term used by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their work, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia which at times can designate a movement towards denigration. With a “becoming,” a threshold is, invariably, crossed and the boundaries that have existed between the animal and the human become blurred. Moreover…[Read more]

Dietrich, like Madonna, has been called gender‐bending and androgynous, but Dietrich’s on‐ and off‐screen fluidity of gender identity, as reflected in her adoption of the “double drag,” upsets the traditional dichotomy encoded more generally as that of male or female and more particularly as that of the butch or femme.

At the height of their popularity, performing animals appeared in over half of all big-time vaudeville bills and were highly significant to its business model. They were booked to draw children and their mothers to matinee performances and, as consistent sources of novelty, to create crucial word-of-mouth interest in the bill’s weekly line-up. V…[Read more]

An examination of crime and criminality in colonial and postcolonial India through life-writing and the examples of Thugs and Phoolan Devi, the Bandit Queen.

Johannesburg, Chicago of South Africa
Chicago, Johannesburg by the Lake

Like other forms of treachery, translation can be either concealed or exposed. Though most literary translators work in the dark and some embrace invisibility as an ideal, all translations can be situated along the continuum of illusionist-anti-illusionist or domesticating-foreignizing. A variety of paratexts lay bare the devices of translation.…[Read more]

The Modern Language Association (MLA) and the Columbia University Libraries / Information Services’ Center for Digital Research and Scholarship (CDRS) have been working together on a prototyped user interface that connects a library-quality repository system (Humanities Commons Open Repository Exchange, or CORE, modeled on Columbia’s Academic Com…[Read more]

.Using the concept of “third culture” from social theory, this article examines Charles Kingsley’s use of displacement in his children’s book The Water Babies (1863). In trying to portray the site of moral formation, Kingsley displaces his central character Tom – the new, interstitial “third culture” subject. Through Tom’s displacement, Kingsle…[Read more]

This article examines Allen Say’s use of cultural displacement in his books Tree of Cranes and Grandfather’s Journey. Allen Say is an award-winning, Japanese-American, picture book author and illustrator.