The influential Tamil writer Pudumaippittan turned to the short story to theorize the relationship between literature and society in the late-colonial era. He used the genre’s brevity to compress his portrayals of well-known female types—such as widows, prostitutes, and goodwives—into singular emotional events. This enabled Pudumaippittan to evoke…[Read more]

Lightening Talk: Brown Skin, White Masks: Predictive Technology, Colonial Histories, and Queer Sexuality Today

Lightening Talk: Brown Skin, White Masks: Predictive Technology, Colonial Histories, and Queer Sexuality Today

Bringing together theoretical writing on objects, testimony, and trauma to develop the category of the “nonhuman witness,” this essay considers the narrative, ethical, and ecological work performed by peripheral objects in J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands (1974). Coetzee’s insistent object catalogues acquire narrative agency and provide material for a c…[Read more]

Henrietta Rose-Innes’s novel Nineveh (2011) catalogs the activities of a humane pest expert as she discovers, on an estate under construction outside Cape Town, how human and insect actors undermine the spatial expectations of post-apartheid South Africa. Rose-Innes advances a vision of interspecies connection by recasting controversial themes…[Read more]

Proust was strongly opposed to the idea of ​​a naturally “clear” national language whose directives would be inherent in thought itself. This book questions Proust’s style from the point of view of its theorization and the implementation of diffuse sensory rhetoric in À la recherche du temps perdu.

Originally founded by Tarana Burke in 2006, the “Me Too Movement” seeks to help survivors of sexual violence, particularly women of color, “to help find pathways to healing” (“metoomvmt.org/about/). Then, in the fall of 2017, the #MeToo hashtag reverberated throughout the Internet, on the front pages of newspapers, and in the public square as…[Read more]

Originally founded by Tarana Burke in 2006, the “Me Too Movement” seeks to help survivors of sexual violence, particularly women of color, “to help find pathways to healing” (“metoomvmt.org/about/). Then, in the fall of 2017, the #MeToo hashtag reverberated throughout the Internet, on the front pages of newspapers, and in the public square as…[Read more]

In the Haitian religious tradition of Vodou, Gede is the lwa, or spirit, concerned with the
beginning of life and the passage into the afterlife, death and regeneration. Gede is often
regarded as the spirit of the people in Haiti because he has a direct connection to every living
being, everyone may call on Gede for protection. Gede’s appeal a…[Read more]