“Marxist literary criticism hasn’t produced a new theory in over twenty years,” Robert J. C. Young notes early in White Mythologies. This is when he’s being polite. The charge is…
Archive for 2020
The Nation We Knew: After Homi Bhabha’s “DissemiNation”
I’ve been trying to read Homi Bhabha’s “DissemiNation” as if for the first time. I’ve been trying to come to it innocent, and yet it appears before me already read….
On the Unfinished Business of Theory from the South: Arjun Appadurai’s Globalization Theory
1. The exercise that is “1990 at 30” raises a question about historical temporality: what is and isn’t the theoretical tradition of the contemporary? Does 1990 mark the beginning of…
Splitting the Difference: Black Studies’ Theory Wars and bell hooks’s “Postmodern Blackness”
It may be hard to fathom, but thirty years ago, it was very much an open question as to whether Theory and Black Studies were compatible as domains of university-based…
Out of Date: David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity and the Postmodern Condition
David Harvey begins his preface to The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry in the Origins of Cultural Change with the observation that his initial response to “postmodernism” was to try…
Introduction to 1990 at 30
In mid-2019, we issued a challenge to the participants in this dossier: they would “re-read” an important work of criticism published in 1990 in time to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary…
Exodus: Vaera: Len, May 6
This piece first appeared in Jewish Currents. Vaera Exodus 6:2 – 9:35 Washington, DC Dear friends, At my Jewish preschool, we were taught at Thanksgiving that the Puritans…
Exodus: Shemot: Dan, April 29
This piece first appeared in Jewish Currents. Shemot Exodus 1:1 – 6:1 Spartanburg, SC Dear friends, The winter of Operation Cast Lead—when Israel invaded Gaza, killing well over…
Slow Burn, Quarantine Edition
Book of Exodus
Penguin Random House, Co-opted Values, and Contemporary Cli-Fi
The last several decades have seen a remarkable turn toward cli-fi: novels and stories that imagine in various ways and seek to raise the alarm for the consequences of catastrophic…