This piece first appeared in Jewish Currents. Bo Exodus 10:1 – 13:16 Elmhurst, Queens Dear readers, The locusts are swarming, the darkness is descending, and the Lord is…
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1990 at 30, Contemporaries Essays
When M. Mitterrand was a Faggot: Reading Ignorance and Pleasure in Eve Sedgwick’s “Axiomatic”
Wow. I mean, really: wow. I re-read Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet for this collective engagement with core texts from 1990, and was reminded of the vertiginous nature of her…
1990 at 30, Contemporaries Essays
Haircut Theory: Living with Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble
I recently found myself in a bit of gender trouble when I discovered that Judith Butler and my girlfriend share a hairstylist. That Judith Butler does not cut her own…
1990 at 30, Contemporaries Essays
Hearing What Black Women Have Been Telling Us All Along: On Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought
Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought (1990) helped to announce and participated in a watershed moment in Black feminist theory, one that ushered in what might be understood as the…
1990 at 30, Contemporaries Essays
The Dirty World: On Stuart Hall’s “The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities”
The “dirty world” supplied cultural studies with its questions, and the traditional humanities with its points of departure and return. Invoked more than once in Stuart Hall’s 1990 essay for…
1990 at 30, Contemporaries Essays
Future Metaphysics: Before and After Robert J. C. Young’s White Mythologies
“Marxist literary criticism hasn’t produced a new theory in over twenty years,” Robert J. C. Young notes early in White Mythologies. This is when he’s being polite. The charge is…
1990 at 30, Contemporaries Essays
The Nation We Knew: After Homi Bhabha’s “DissemiNation”
I’ve been trying to read Homi Bhabha’s “DissemiNation” as if for the first time. I’ve been trying to come to it innocent, and yet it appears before me already read….
1990 at 30, Contemporaries Essays
On the Unfinished Business of Theory from the South: Arjun Appadurai’s Globalization Theory
1. The exercise that is “1990 at 30” raises a question about historical temporality: what is and isn’t the theoretical tradition of the contemporary? Does 1990 mark the beginning of…
1990 at 30, Contemporaries Essays
Splitting the Difference: Black Studies’ Theory Wars and bell hooks’s “Postmodern Blackness”
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…
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…