The slasher is a horror subgenre whose formulaic narrative revolves around a group of young people chased by a monstrous (disfigured or masked) psychopath. In the end, the so-called final…
Contemporaries Essays
My Apron is a Chainsaw: Leatherface and His Family Beyond the Masculine Proletariat
October 2024 marks fifty years since audiences were first terrorized by one of the inaugural slasher monsters, Leatherface. According to the critics’ consensus, Leatherface and his family of unemployed slaughterhouse…
“Becoming Philosophical” in the Slaughterhouse: Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Industrial Cosmic Horror
“One could not stand and watch very long without becoming philosophical, without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the hog-squeal of the universe.” – Upton Sinclair,…
Autonomy
When Yogita Goyal first encouraged me to participate in a roundtable on keywords in postcolonial studies, I struggled to think of a particular concept or term that would be suitable…
Reparation
Durban and the “Southern Rebellion” In 2001, reparation did not seem poised to be a keyword for postcolonial thought in the 21st century. The United Nations World Conference Against Racism…
Latin-Africa
The term “Latin-Africa” originates from twentieth-century Latin American Cold War rhetoric. Cuban leader Fidel Castro coined it in 1976, at Havana’s First Congress, to celebrate Cuban military support of Angola’s…
Agitation
Moving away from postcolonial thought’s accounts of internationalist failure in the 1990s, this essay asks, how might anticolonial thought agitate in the present? Agitation, from the Latin agito, denotes a…
Failure
Postcoloniality as a formation is haunted by failure. After the dismantling of European empires in the mid-twentieth century, the promise of decolonization dissipated quickly, as crises of governance, and flawed…
Introduction: Keywords for Postcolonial Thought
Describing his unsettling return to Cambridge in 1945 after World War II, Raymond Williams ponders the “new and strange world around us” where people “just don’t speak the same language.”1…
Charisma
From charismata to rizz, the concept of charisma continues to swell and transform in intriguing ways. The Oxford University Press declared the slang term “rizz” the 2023 word of the…