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…
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Issue 8: Ambivalent Criticism, Peer Reviewed Articles
Issue 8: Ambivalent Criticism, Peer Reviewed Articles
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…
Issue 8: Ambivalent Criticism, Peer Reviewed Articles
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…
Issue 8: Ambivalent Criticism, Peer Reviewed Articles
Circuit Training: The Critique of Narrative Reason
The system must be oriented to openness de novo. Peter Sloterdijk We fence our encounters in with gates. Erving Goffman Form, in the narrow sense, is nothing more than the…
Issue 8: Ambivalent Criticism, Peer Reviewed Articles
An Introduction to Ambivalent Criticism
This special issue doesn’t propose Ambivalent Criticism™. Instead, this issue forwards essays that reflect on a style in which we already do criticism — a style we are calling ambivalent…
Contemporaries Essays, W(h)ither the Christian Right?
The Praise Band to English Professor Pipeline
Exchanging My Equipment for a Living I was recently searching for Kenneth Burke’s essay “Literature as Equipment for Living” when, by some algorithmic accident, the results confronted me with memories…
Contemporaries Essays, W(h)ither the Christian Right?
The Things You Can’t Teach in Evangelical Literature Classes
I deconstructed my faith completely while teaching English at an evangelical school, and while the school is not the main reason I left the faith, it is absolutely the reason…
Contemporaries Essays, W(h)ither the Christian Right?
Christian Rap and White New Calvinist Poetics
When I started college in 2008, I was a seventeen-year-old white Southern Baptist woman desperate to fit in at my liberal-leaning R1 university but also to find Christian friends. I…
Contemporaries Essays, W(h)ither the Christian Right?
Beyond the CBA: Constructions of Readers in Christian Right Magazines
Although united by broadly shared conservative theological principles and conservative political ideals, the homogeneity of the Christian Right is often overstated. Conservative Protestants, the largest component of the Christian Right…