The camp is about twenty minutes outside of Larissa village, in the midst of dried and irrigated fields, beyond a four-lane road that is silent but for the occasional car…
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Contemporaries Essays, Public Humanities as/and Comparatist Practice
Contemporaries Essays, Public Humanities as/and Comparatist Practice
Introduction: Public Humanities as/and Comparatist Practice
Is public humanities a discipline, an intellectual movement, a social justice movement, or a professional and institutional corrective to an unsustainable economic model in higher education? Can it be more…
Issue 2: How To Be Now, Peer Reviewed Articles
Issue 2: How To Be Now, Peer Reviewed Articles
Sean Bonney’s Hate Poems
We are [. . .] unalterable rebels, without gods, master or fatherland; irreconcilable enemies of all despotism, moral or material, individual or collective, in other words, of law and dictatorship…
Issue 2: How To Be Now, Peer Reviewed Articles
Introduction: How to Be Now
“What’s happening with the special issue? The ‘now’ of its title keeps changing its referent!” So one of our contributors complained in June, after we had predicted an April publication…
Contemporaries Essays, Stranger Things and Nostalgia Now
The Ecology of the Upside Down; or, The Possibility of Black Life in Stranger Things
Stranger Things is a show invested in the biopolitics of black life in the United States, though we watch its racial engagements through 1980s visions of white suburbia and explorations in…
Contemporaries Essays, Stranger Things and Nostalgia Now
White Nostalgia
My relationship to Stranger Things is ambivalent. As a child of the 1980s, I remember the analog technologies and cultural objects that the show obsessively brings back to life. Now I’m old…
Contemporaries Essays, Stranger Things and Nostalgia Now
Recovering ‘The Body’: Generic Convergence and Parental Reassurance in Stranger Things
It has become commonplace to lament the loss of an American childhood in which unsupervised play and everyday encounters with moderate danger build independence, resilience, and creativity. Today’s highly-regulated kids…
Contemporaries Essays, Stranger Things and Nostalgia Now
Analog Nostalgia and the Promise of Props in the Digital Age
“To create an authentic period world requires thousands of specific decisions — that sheet, that cassette tape on that bedroom dresser.” — Shawn Levy1 “It has always been something of a lifelong dream to create a…
Contemporaries Essays, Stranger Things and Nostalgia Now
The Violence of Nostalgia, or, the Crisis of Middle-Class Modernity
1. Vanishing from the charts only to appear again years later, pop songs are good at evoking memories of the past. When George Michael’s “Freedom 90” resurfaces now, decades after…