Peer Reviewed Articles

The Chevalier and the Commahunter: Norman Holmes Pearson Edits Modernism

I would start out this essay with “Norman Holmes Pearson is best known as…,” but Norman Holmes Pearson isn’t particularly well-known as anything. For scholars of twentieth-century American literature, he surfaces…

Writer Conscious: Katharine S. White, Mary McCarthy, and Editing as Intimacy at The New Yorker

In a closely argued three-page letter in 1946, Mary McCarthy flatly rejected New Yorker editor Katharine S. White’s revisions to her latest submission. “I’m afraid that the new manuscript strikes a chill…

The Third Eye: Editorial Visions of the Draft Text

In a 1993 Paris Review interview, Toni Morrison identifies the value of editing: “Good editors are really the third eye. Cool. Dispassionate. They don’t love you or your work; for me that…

high angle photograph of colorful, well-stocked supermarket shelves

Caribbean Conflagrations: Camouflage, Ambivalence, and Anti-Analogical Entanglements

Beauty’s Blemish: Figuring Caribbean Landscapes The environmental figures that seek to portray the Caribbean’s strange place in the world can be easily recalled and most attributed to the work of…

Racialized Femininity and Representation’s Ambivalences in Trajal Harrell’s The Return of La Argentina

The audience is seated several rows deep, facing a blank gallery wall. As they wait, their chatter buzzes through the room. From an open panel at one side, Trajal Harrell…

Reading Interculturalism After Kalamandalam

In the first half of the last century, scores of Western artists and art historians traveled to India to have a firsthand experience of its variegated heritage of performing arts…

In the Same Room, Again: Anecdotes about Feminist Meetings

A Light Loose Commitment When I was a graduate student in New York, I worked as the managing editor of a feminist academic journal that focused on art and performance…