It may be hard to fathom, but thirty years ago, it was very much an open question as to whether Theory and Black Studies were compatible as domains of university-based…
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1990 at 30, Contemporaries Essays
1990 at 30, Contemporaries Essays
Out of Date: David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity and the Postmodern Condition
David Harvey begins his preface to The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry in the Origins of Cultural Change with the observation that his initial response to “postmodernism” was to try…
1990 at 30, Contemporaries Essays
Introduction to 1990 at 30
In mid-2019, we issued a challenge to the participants in this dossier: they would “re-read” an important work of criticism published in 1990 in time to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary…
Contemporaries Essays, Slow Burn: Quarantine Edition
Exodus: Vaera: Len, May 6
This piece first appeared in Jewish Currents. Vaera Exodus 6:2 – 9:35 Washington, DC Dear friends, At my Jewish preschool, we were taught at Thanksgiving that the Puritans…
Contemporaries Essays, Slow Burn: Quarantine Edition
Exodus: Shemot: Dan, April 29
This piece first appeared in Jewish Currents. Shemot Exodus 1:1 – 6:1 Spartanburg, SC Dear friends, The winter of Operation Cast Lead—when Israel invaded Gaza, killing well over…
Contemporaries Essays, Slow Burn, Slow Burn: Quarantine Edition
Contemporaries Essays, Ecologies of Neoliberal Publishing
Penguin Random House, Co-opted Values, and Contemporary Cli-Fi
The last several decades have seen a remarkable turn toward cli-fi: novels and stories that imagine in various ways and seek to raise the alarm for the consequences of catastrophic…
Contemporaries Essays, Ecologies of Neoliberal Publishing
The Many Books of the Future: Print-digital Literatures
I have been researching hybrid print-digital literary works for a few years now, which means I have given a fair amount of talks about them too. The discussions following these…
Contemporaries Essays, Ecologies of Neoliberal Publishing
10 MYTHS ABOUT DIGITAL LITERARY CULTURE
Predictions have an uncanny tendency to come true, just not in the way predicted. Take the early 1990s mantra of “the death of the book” — the existentially-laden theme of…
Contemporaries Essays, Ecologies of Neoliberal Publishing
America’s Next Top Novel
Despite the fact that there are more books published annually than ever before; despite claims that the commercial publishing industry has sacrificed all pretenses of quality to churn out marketable…