From Michel de Montaigne’s essay “Of Friendship” to Jacques Derrida’s rearticulation of the former in The Politics of Friendship, scholars both early modern and modern have sought ways to address the fluid co-mixture of bodies from which the discourse of friendship can and does emerge. More recently still, new materialist thinkers of ontolog…[Read more]

A reading of Shakespeare and Deleuze on the subject of Anthropocene air. Keywords: endurance, climate change, fossil capitalism, carbon ghosts, Hamlet.

Can we imagine a Blue Humanities that takes the non-relation as a starting point for ecological thought? I believe we can. Following Shakespeare and Deleuze, this essay engages in a thought experiment that, if it is not too absurd, might, like the ship of fools of medieval times, unmoor the Blue Humanities from its current safe harbor by putting…[Read more]

This essay examines how the rhetoric of animalization in Shakespeare’s Othello compels us to think early modern categories of race in connection with early modern discourses of “human” versus “animal.” Beginning with Shakespeare’s representation of Iago, I suggest that it is the potential for sameness conditioned by Iago’s counterfactua…[Read more]

Online at: https://screen-queens.com/2020/04/14/listening-and-female-intimacy-in-portrait-of-a-lady-on-fire/

A write-up of my contribution to a roundtable panel that took place at King’s College London on 26th September 2019 to celebrate the English translation of Chantal Akerman’s My Mother Laughs. The speakers were Ros Murray (KCL), Jenny Chamarette (QMUL), Albertine Fox (Bristol), Frances Morgan (author of the Afterword, My Mother Laughs), Sarah Shi…[Read more]

Traditionally read as a poem about laboring subjects who gain power through abstract and abstracting forms of bodily discipline, John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674) more compellingly foregrounds the erotics of the Garden as a space where humans and nonhumans intra-act materially and sexually. Following Christopher Hill, who long ago pointed t…[Read more]

Turning to Walter Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana (1596) and The History of the World (1614), I reframe such biopolitical factors as Ralegh’s “dissability” around a concept that has less to do with human world-making and more to do with the “states of exception” (Giorgio Agamben) under which inhuman agencies come to matter for world history (of…[Read more]

Apocalyptic themes handled by Spanish directors of the current century, including Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, David and Álex Pastor, Álex de la Iglesia, Juan Antonio Bayona, Jorge Torregrossa, and Alfonso Cortés-Cavanillas, and F. Javier Gutiérrez.

Though the verbal icon has a long and robust multisensory history extending beyond Milton, my goal here is to challenge ableist readings of Milton’s poetry by linking his poetic ekphrasis to the politics and aesthetics of disability.

The matter of Troilus and Criseyde had been dealt in both England and Scotland in similar yet different ways from the late 14th to the early 17th century. In Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1385), the conflict between worldly and heavenly love is depicted in a controversial way. Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid (ca. 1480) seems to give a Sco…[Read more]

The critical tradition positions Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser among the pioneers of the nationalistic
movement in Early Modern England. From a historical point of view, this has been the result of the promotion of
Britishness by 19th and 20th century literary critics through their construction of national poets in the literary
canon.…[Read more]

In the Late Elizabethan Period, factionalism complicated the notion of, especially, male friendship. The scarcity of
financial resources of the royal patronage, the arbitrary distribution of favours, and bottom-up pressures of patronees
further problematized a healthy relationship among patrons and patronees and among friends. The horizontal…[Read more]

In the fall of 1966, Ḥiwār magazine published al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ’s novel Mawsim al-hijrah ilā al-shamāl [ Season of Migration to the North ]. Arabic literary critics both hailed the novel in the Arabic press and mourned that it had been published by the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom’s Ḥiwār, part of a global covert cultural front of the C…[Read more]