James Baldwin is everywhere in the twenty-first century: circulating on Twitter and Instagram; ventriloquized by public intellectuals such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Eddie Glaude, and Jesmyn Ward; and adapted in cinema….
Contemporaries Essays
The Embedded World
I first saw Samuel Benchetrit’s French film Asphalte (2015) with Korean subtitles at a cinema in Busan, South Korea. I have since returned again and again to the film, and…
Toward a Geopolitical Approach to the Study of Transnational Cinema
Chong Keat Aun’s debut feature-length film, The Story of Southern Islet (Nanwu, 2020), takes place in Chong’s native Kedah in Peninsula Malaysia. The film was nominated in two categories at…
Mapping Film Traffic
That we think of national cinemas as a natural category has little to do with any quality inherent in a given filmic text. 1 In the heady early days of…
Where the World Things Are
Where does film live today?1 When Warner Bros. announced a deal with HBO Max in December 2020 — according to which its content would be released via streaming and in…
Collected & Uncollected
In September, 2019, I was invited to speak at a symposium about archives. The premise of the gathering was to imagine new ways of translating archives and immaterial forms of…
Misbegotten
And from Cain there sprang misbegotten spirits, among them Grendel. — Seamus Heaney, transl. Beowulf (2000) This is an excerpt from a longer essay, framed from just before the 2016…
On Less Convenient Histories
Every day, I look at the sepia-tinted photograph that hangs on my refrigerator, but I don’t often see it. The woman at the center of the image has long, coarse…
A Lacuna Follows
“The Foundation of This is laid in Truth of Fact; and so the Work is not a Story, but a History,” wrote Daniel Defoe at the beginning of The Fortunate…
Math of the Non-visible
Siddhartha Lokanandi, who owns a bookstore and arts event space here in Kufürstenstrasse called Hopscotch, told me two things in our first meeting that he believes to be true about…