A report published by the Sutton Trust and Social Mobility Commission this week, ‘Elitist Britain’, found that two fifths (39%) of Britain’s ‘leading people’ were educated privately, more than five times as many as in the population as a whole, with almost one quarter (24%) graduating from Oxbridge. I therefore thought it would be timely to publis…[Read more]

This article explores three facets of green space within a medieval monastic context: its origin, its effects and properties and the way it was shaped into an expression of power. We learn a great deal about the history of green space through the nuances of monastic thought and vice versa. The term ‘green space’ in a medieval context may ini…[Read more]

This essay ruminates the ethics of a co-implicated, bounded dependence between objects (human and otherwise) that are always in some sense withdrawing from each other but also always together in a some-place labeled “here”: the world (where no Absolute or Outside vantage point is possible or habitable). This essay also considers the possibility,…[Read more]

This essay explores the challenge to the chivalric myth of the aviator in Willa Cather’s One of Ours and William Faulkner’s Soldier’s Pay. Revived during the First World War, this romantic myth cloaked the aviator in idealism and hid the actual body of the flyer in rhetoric. In this war of increasing mechanization, the air war was the last basti…[Read more]

Composting is a material labor whereby old scraps are transformed—through practices of care and attention—into nutrient-rich new soil. In this provocation, we develop “composting” as a material metaphor to tell a particular story about the environmental humanities. Building on Donna Haraway’s work, we insist “it matters what compostable…[Read more]

This essay recovers, describes, and analyzes the theatrical tradition emerging from New Orleans’s free people of color during the antebellum period. I will start out by tracing the presence of free people of color in the francophone theatres of New Orleans, teasing out their impact on the early formations of a francophone theatrical culture in the…[Read more]

On January 1, 1824, the English-speaking population of New Orleans celebrated the grand opening of the American Theatre, lauding
the advent of “Bards our own” and the rise of “our Drama” in the Crescent City (qtd. in Smither 41). For the city’s francophone residents, this event marked a new stage in the ongoing battle for cultural survival.…[Read more]

Introduction to America After Nature: Democracy, Culture, Environment

On 12 July 1776, Captain James Cook and his crew left England in search of the famed
Northwest Passage. Spanish, French, and Russian explorers before him had set out to
find this Arctic waterway, which was thought to link the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans
and promised to open up a new, more direct trading route with Asia. After seven
months…[Read more]

Moving from France to the Caribbean to the American continent, Creole Drama follows the people that created, shaped, and sustained French theatre culture in New Orleans from its inception in 1792 until the beginning of the Civil War. In doing so, it draws upon the neglected archive of francophone drama native to Louisiana, as well as a range of…[Read more]

This essay brings together two texts, a letter to the editor written in experimental prose by the Black avant-garde Beat poet, Bob Kaufman, and “The Unlocking,” a spoken-word poem written and performed by Ursula Rucker that appears at the end of The Roots’ critically acclaimed rap album, Do You Want More??!?. By using the aural to disrupt expec…[Read more]

Pages from a local East Chicago, IN, publication commemorating the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre at South Chicago’s Republic Steel. Lupe Gallardo Marshall (Mexican immigrant social worker at Hull House) gave this testimony to the La Follette Committee of Congress investigating the events of that day, May 30, 1937.

I am thinking about writing a…[Read more]

ZeroDeath is a digital poem that is conceived from the transhumanism philosophy of defeating death by technology. Though, digital revolution makes everything possible but the poet remains attached to Yahweh