Philip Roth’s death, last May, at the age of 85, shouldn’t have come as a surprise — after all, he was very old! — but it did. His last novel,…
Contemporaries Essays
Horror and the Arts of Feminist Assembly
We live in an era of what Lauren Berlant has called “genre flail.” Amid the floods, famine, and fire of accelerating climate disaster, worsening refugee crises, unbounded global war, mass…
True Detective and Climatic Horror
In the first season of True Detective (2014), two white male representatives of Louisiana’s Criminal Investigation Division are shown tracking down a potential serial killer. The killer, or killers, leaves…
“Ain’t It Funny”: Danny Brown and Detroit Horror
In 2013, Danny Brown sparked a minor hip-hop beef when he said about fellow Detroit rapper Big Sean: “You listen to how I talk about Detroit, and you listen to…
The Enslaved Child and the Carceral Child
In 2019, black children are still denied consideration as children. Anti-black violence has never spared and continues not to spare children. Children are neither symbolic exceptions nor accidental casualties but…
Global Horror: An Introduction
When I imagine contemporary art outside the constraints of the nation the first thing I notice is horror. An Anglophone Caribbeanist by training, my work has long focused on texts…
The Black and White Art Film in the Age of its Digital Distribution
In 2018, two of the most acclaimed international films, Roma and Cold War, were auteurist movies shot in digital black-and-white and distributed by two newcomers to the field of prestige cinema —…
Introduction
What’s “contemporary” about the Academy Awards? Maybe nothing. From the red carpet to the closing credits, the show borrows its choreography from a formula perfected between the 1930s (when it…
A 3 Hour Tour . . . A 3 Hour Tour
You may be busy pregaming the Oscars so I’ll make the takeaways clear and portable: The chaos surrounding the Oscars telecast matters because it is the funhouse mirror reflection of…
Postcolonial, Still
This series on the Global Anglophone grapples with what it might mean to shift from the object of inquiry named by the postcolonial to something more nebulous and still in…