I am only hounding myself with these questions, trying to work myself up by the silence that is my only answer from all around. How long, I ask myself, will…
Contemporaries Essays
Come Slowly — Eden —
1. The first time I visited Paris, I tried to act it out. Written in 1919 and published the next year by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, Hope Mirrlees’s Paris describes…
Paradise: On-Earthly Dilemmas
You’re on earth. There’s no cure for that. —Samuel Beckett, Endgame for Johanna Winant I. On-earthly delights The painting now known as The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490 – 1510)…
A Friend, An Enemy
On June 21, 2021, I added a postscript to this essay. — Joshua Kotin I On April Fool’s Day, 1965, Amiri Baraka (known then as LeRoi Jones) sent a postcard…
My Interdisciplinary Uncanny Valley
Of all the interpretive experiences, and of all of the analytical puzzles, that might have baffled me, I had never envisioned this one: attempting, as an English professor, to understand…
Bandwidth Imperialism and Small-File Media
We understand the provocation of “new filmic geographies” in two ways: as media geopolitics, explored in the first part by Laura, and as media geopoetics, explored in the second part…
The World Imagined
To see the world in a grain of sand William Blake During Oscars season 2020, the internet was abuzz with a meme of Bong Joon Ho reflecting on the widespread…
Netflix and the Transnationalization of Nollywood
In 2020, middle-class Nigerians basked in the experience of watching the latest Nollywood films on their release dates, previously exclusive to cinema- or festival-going audiences. Meanwhile, viewers in France and…
Lebanon’s Shifting Cinematic Landscape
When Lebanese filmmaker Ziad Doueiry’s feature film The Insult (2017) was nominated for an Academy Award in 2018, the Lebanese media scene was abuzz. Doueiry, whose first film, West Beyrouth…
Seven Social Landscapes
1 At the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, director Alejandro González Iñárritu led critics away from the Palais to an airplane hangar to experience his virtual reality installation Carne y Arena….