Teaching which is not meant to apply to anything but the examples given is different from that which “points beyond” them. — Ludwig Wittgenstein1 Fascism is the triumph of the…
Contemporaries Essays
We Should All Be Sisters
“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again…
Breathing Lessons
“Things were not gentle, not ever, then.” “So you open your heart and it hurt. You stand up straight and hold your shoulders back to let your heart out, and…
On Not Translating: Don Mee Choi’s Anti-neocolonial Poetics
I think of refusal as one of the most highly effective modes of resistance. I refuse to be faithful. — Don Mee Choi In the world of translation, no term…
Watertongue: A Lyric Essay
Lake In dreams, I circle a page. It is lapis, lapping, with arms of water. I wake up on a November morning and write: I meet at the page: water….
Ambivalence as Misfeeling, Ambivalence as Refusal
Introduction How can ambivalence operate as oppositional emotion work for women of colour activists in Europe? As the “simultaneous experience of positive and negative emotional or cognitive orientations toward a…
Gestures of Refusal: Introduction
“Better the errant path than the known world.” — Saidiya Hartman1 In a time marked by the worsening social, political, and environmental crises of late capitalism, gestures of refusal have…
The Praise Band to English Professor Pipeline
Exchanging My Equipment for a Living I was recently searching for Kenneth Burke’s essay “Literature as Equipment for Living” when, by some algorithmic accident, the results confronted me with memories…
The Things You Can’t Teach in Evangelical Literature Classes
I deconstructed my faith completely while teaching English at an evangelical school, and while the school is not the main reason I left the faith, it is absolutely the reason…
Christian Rap and White New Calvinist Poetics
When I started college in 2008, I was a seventeen-year-old white Southern Baptist woman desperate to fit in at my liberal-leaning R1 university but also to find Christian friends. I…