In the paragraphs that follow, preferably in John Larroquette’s voice, please read / pronounce / hear the word “slash” whenever you see / read the punctuation that follows this colon:…
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Contemporaries Essays, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
Contemporaries Essays, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
“Becoming Philosophical” in the Slaughterhouse: Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Industrial Cosmic Horror
“One could not stand and watch very long without becoming philosophical, without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the hog-squeal of the universe.” – Upton Sinclair,…
Contemporaries Essays, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
My Apron is a Chainsaw: Leatherface and His Family Beyond the Masculine Proletariat
October 2024 marks fifty years since audiences were first terrorized by one of the inaugural slasher monsters, Leatherface. According to the critics’ consensus, Leatherface and his family of unemployed slaughterhouse…
Contemporaries Essays, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
“I Will Survive”: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) and the Emergence of the Postmodern Final Girl
The slasher is a horror subgenre whose formulaic narrative revolves around a group of young people chased by a monstrous (disfigured or masked) psychopath. In the end, the so-called final…
Contemporaries Essays, Keywords for Postcolonial Thought
Latin-Africa
The term “Latin-Africa” originates from twentieth-century Latin American Cold War rhetoric. Cuban leader Fidel Castro coined it in 1976, at Havana’s First Congress, to celebrate Cuban military support of Angola’s…
Contemporaries Essays, Keywords for Postcolonial Thought
Reparation
Durban and the “Southern Rebellion” In 2001, reparation did not seem poised to be a keyword for postcolonial thought in the 21st century. The United Nations World Conference Against Racism…
Contemporaries Essays, Keywords for Postcolonial Thought
Autonomy
When Yogita Goyal first encouraged me to participate in a roundtable on keywords in postcolonial studies, I struggled to think of a particular concept or term that would be suitable…
Contemporaries Essays, Keywords for Postcolonial Thought
Failure
Postcoloniality as a formation is haunted by failure. After the dismantling of European empires in the mid-twentieth century, the promise of decolonization dissipated quickly, as crises of governance, and flawed…
Contemporaries Essays, Keywords for Postcolonial Thought
Agitation
Moving away from postcolonial thought’s accounts of internationalist failure in the 1990s, this essay asks, how might anticolonial thought agitate in the present? Agitation, from the Latin agito, denotes a…
Contemporaries Essays, Keywords for Postcolonial Thought
Marriage Hygiene
“Marriage hygiene” may not be a keyword now, but it was in the 1930s, when it was used chiefly as a euphemism for birth control. It appeared prominently in Lysol…