Canon, tradition, and origin anchor developmental accounts of Black literary history, describing the forward movement from a singular beginning in terms of birth, maturation, and inheritance. This model delimits a specialized field of study, but also obscures texts, practices, and archives that do not cohere with it. In the study of slave…[Read more]

Canon, tradition, and origin anchor developmental accounts of Black literary history, describing the forward movement from a singular beginning in terms of birth, maturation, and inheritance. This model delimits a specialized field of study, but also obscures texts, practices, and archives that do not cohere with it. In the study of slave…[Read more]

El año de la pandemia no murieron cuatro millones de personas. Murieron casi 60 millones, de diversas causas, entre ellas un número indeterminado por Covid-19. Las grandes cifras engañan mucho, y más si están intervenidas y subvencionadas.

English abstract: A vindication of the wide-ranging perspective of Herbert Spencer’s theories of cosmic evolutionism, as an intellectual enterprise far more ambitious and comprehensive than that of his contemporary Charles Darwin. (A retropost from 2011). _________________________________________________________________________________ Spanish…[Read more]

Building on the film philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière, this essay develops a queer naturalist account of film form centered on the ontogenetic dimensions of Lars von Trier’s film Nymphomaniac (2013).

Building on the film philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière, this essay develops a queer naturalist account of film form centered on the ontogenetic dimensions of Lars von Trier’s film Nymphomaniac (2013).

If we affirmatively answer Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw’s invitation to think beyond the ‘fetishization of the modern city’ as the pinnacle of human-centered progress and achievement in order to consider the urban as both a process of transformed nature and the metabolic and social transformation of nature through human labor, the city becom…[Read more]

A consideration of how paratextual information present on two, recently-published little magazines — The Southern Review and The Virginia Quarterly Review — might work to mediate their readers’ literary expectations and interpretations. Published simultaneously at: https://southernfringes.substack.com

Within Iran, the transformation in the Islamic legal understanding of the foreign (ajnabi) into a political concept was accelerated by the encounter with Europe during the 19th century. The classical Iranian understanding of otherness as a domain fully demarcated from the self was replaced by an internalized other, resulting in what we call here…[Read more]

In the summer of 2011, an adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Ivanov (1887) debuted on the Iranian stage. The director and playwright Amir-Reza Koohestani (b. 1978) created a production that was faithful to the classic status of this text while also maximizing its resonance with a contemporary Iranian audience. I explore how Koohestani achieved this b…[Read more]

Es una desdicha vivir en el único país del mundo en el que el Virus ataca al paseante solitario en mitad de sus ensoñaciones campestres… Cuando el espacio público está ocupado por necios y regentado por pillos, el sarcasmo y la sátira son la respuesta más adecuada. Todo para enfatizar una cuestión muy simple que se ha perdido de vista: EL DERE…[Read more]

Academics fly a lot: to research sites and archives, to conferences and workshops. Yet flying has many negative repercussions. Air travel has disproportionate climate impacts, and for reasons of time, money, and border security, produces many barriers for marginalized scholars, shaping who is able shows up at conferences and thus, who participates…[Read more]

This article examines new theories and praxis of listening for silenced voices and of telling compelling stories that make us human. Elucidation of our Levinas-inspired theories of the Other is followed by a discussion of classroom practices for in-person and remote instruction that foster collaborative knowledge building and intersectional…[Read more]

ABSTRACT
The styles, moods, performances, and practices of decadence have been simultaneous with modernization, not least in the process of nation-building. This article considers the dialectics of decadence and modernization with particular attention to the roles and responses of women in the twentieth to twenty-first centuries.…[Read more]

In this article we trace the history of Urban Renewal in Lansing through a collaborative research project involving undergraduate students and the course instructor. Looking in fine-grain detail at the block and individual house level, the project reveals the patchwork of discrimination that African Americans faced in accessing housing in the…[Read more]

A short story about the pitfals of a new law, the General Act for the Dismantling of Normalising Power and Structures of Privilege, and, more philosophically, about the problems of institutionalizing progressive politics through law. Published in The Cabinat of Imaginary Laws, by Peter Goodrich and Thanos Zartaloudis: Returning to the map of the…[Read more]

Part of the literature about politics is dedicated to questions of authoritarianism, which, in the vision of the authors, would be a crescent menace to democratic regimes throughout the world. This is the point: democracy, in the paper, is different from what actually happens in the practice and can be even be the opposite. In the so called…[Read more]

Spanish abstract: Una nota sobre el libro de George Ritzer ‘La McDonaldización de la Sociedad’ (1993) desde la perspectiva de la fase avanzada de estandarización de los procesos y del trabajo en el capitalismo mediado por las tecnologías de la información y comunicación y especialmente por la Red. ____…[Read more]

‘A lot of things need to be repaired and a lot of relationships are in need of a knowledgeable mending. Can we start to talk/write about them?’ This invitation — sent by one of the authors to the others — led us, as feminist women in academia, to join together in an experimental writing about the effects of COVID-19 on daily social practic…[Read more]