Toward the end of Ian McEwan’s Saturday, when the protagonist Dr. Henry Perowne is operating on the man who had just earlier invaded his home and “terrorized” his family, the…
Contemporaries Essays
Culture War on Terror
At the Southern Baptist seminary where I attended college at the turn of the millennium, chapel was held three days a week. We gathered at 10am on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and…
Texturizing 9/11 in the Flat World: Screen Culture, Endless War, and the Literature of Terror
In the memorable words of John Updike, who witnessed the 9/11 attacks from a Brooklyn high-rise, 9/11 “had the false intimacy of television, on a day of perfect reception.”1 But…
Introduction: Legacies — 9/11 and the War on Terror at Twenty
September 11 has an afterlife. Merely experiential, historical time does not tell the full story. Time acquires a spectral dimension. The collapse of the towers is not their true ending….
The 9/11 Commission Report and the Limits of the Bureaucratic Imagination
The 9/11 Commission Report begins, like any cosmopolitan pastoral, with the weather, with a constellation of placid and ordinary sites, with everyday people waking up and moving into the world.1…
X, Decolonize
You can’t get through R. Zamora Linmark’s Leche (2011) without a few detours. Scattered throughout the novelare: selections from Decolonization for Beginners: A Filipino Glossary, a fictive text by Filipino…
Decolonize the Western: Bacurau and the Aesthetics of Humiliation
Winner of the Jury Prize at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival and a box-office hit in Brazil, Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles’s Bacurau has been widely received as both…
Decolonizing Mexican Americans
The term “decolonization” has become increasingly popular within and outside of academia. It names a concept that seems to be especially useful for those of us of Mexican descent. Statements…
Introduction: “Not Only a Metaphor”
1 In 2019, Eve Tuck remarked that were she to write her landmark co-authored essay, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” now, she might change its “catchy, sticky” title to “Decolonization…
Enigmatic Forms
Zadie Smith’s 2013 story “The Embassy of Cambodia” begins with an enigma.1 A new embassy appears in the district of Willesden in North London, catching the attention of two individuals…