“Je ne m’enterre pas dans un particularisme étroit. Mais je ne veux pas non plus me perdre dans un universalisme décharné. Il y a deux manières de se perdre: par…
Contemporaries Essays
Hijacking Imaginaries: On Having Feelings for Decolonization
Some years ago, I found myself sitting among distant cousins at a family reunion; at some point in the long evening I asked, apropos of nothing: “when you were a…
The Incessant War
Emergencies make periods. Not just in what one perceives to be individual consciousness, when the subject in emergency clings to the before and after of seemingly incommensurate realties, when the…
On the Afterlives of US Forever Wars: Insurgent Aesthetics as a Queer Practice of Freedom
Oh, how we long for “a day after” now!1 I am drafting this essay from the Great Indoors on the Northwest side of Chicago on the ancestral lands of the…
Great Games
They can say they buried him at sea, but they cannot say they did it according to Islam. Sea burials are permissible for Muslims in extraordinary circumstances. This is not…
“We cannot conquer it — we cannot leave it alone”: Victorian Afghanistan and Its Afterlives
My father spoke English with a slight British accent, a lasting mark of the schools he attended in Kabul in the 1940s and early 1950s. He would regale us with…
Genres in Detention
In February, a group of students and I visited the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia. Originally built to be used as a medium-security prison, it went unoccupied for years….
Extraordinary Renditions
In August 2003, as the United States was ramping up the Global War on Terror, the Pentagon hosted a curious movie night for its intelligence and army personnel: Gillo Pontecorvo’s…
Enrique Olvera and the Sociopolitical Aesthetics of Neoliberal Culinary Art
Chef’s Table, streaming on Netflix for six seasons so far, aspires to elevate the chef as an artist and bring the rarefied sphere of gourmets and foodies to a wider…
Neoliberal Gaslighting, Quality Journalism, and Podcasting
The American Dream In the spring of 2018, ABC aired the family-oriented sitcom Alex, Inc, the story of a man who risks his family’s savings on starting a venture-funded podcasting…