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]

My subject is an archive of gay and lesbian activism that helps us understand a postcolonial counterpublic. The project I undertake is of historical recovery and theoretical elaboration of the specificities of postcolonial sexuality-based movements as necessary and long overdue supplements to global sexual activism.

A review of Andreas Huyssen’s “Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film” (2015)

A review of Andreas Huyssen’s “Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film” (2015)

This article raises questions about the aesthetics of scale as they appear relative to genetically modified organisms in science fiction and especially in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009). Bacigalupi makes the unusual choice of representing GMOs largely through science fictional tropes of automatism rather than the grotesque. Because of t…[Read more]

This essay considers Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) from the standpoint of its influential depiction of African Americans as automata. Through Ellison’s other writings, including his review of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944) and his unpublished drafts of Invisible Man, the essay links the political concerns of the novel with…[Read more]

City Botany: Reading Urban Ecologies in China through Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke

Lecture/class notes on Modernism. I’m sharing my teaching notes (rough) for works that may be helpful to others and are widely taught.

Lecture/class notes on Herbert Marcuse’s Essay on Authority. I’m sharing my teaching notes (rough) for works that may be helpful to others and are widely taught.

Lecture/class notes on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eigthy-Four. I’m sharing my teaching notes (rough) for works that may be helpful to others and are widely taught.

In setting his 1898 tale In the Cage in a telegraph office, Henry James was adapting and investigating a metaphor that earlier novelists had used for the workings of fiction. As invoked by writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens, the idealized image of the electric telegraph hints at some of the formal and ideological properties of…[Read more]

In the past, Palestinian cinema was dominated by a nationalist discourse revolving around refugee ideology, resulting from the trauma of the lost homeland. As the past is generally static, revisiting it became an exercise in nostalgia. The last decade, however, has seen the emergence of a number of transnational Palestinian films telling stories…[Read more]

An approach to understanding modernism in literary history through the lens of translation by tracing the work of key figures such as Pound, Dos Passos, Jiménez, and Unamuno to translate US and Spanish literatures after the Spanish-American War of 1898.