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Contemporaries Essays, Global Horror

Global Horror: An Introduction

When I imagine contemporary art outside the constraints of the nation the first thing I notice is horror. An Anglophone Caribbeanist by training, my work has long focused on texts…

Contemporaries Essays, What's Contemporary About the Academy Awards?

The Black and White Art Film in the Age of its Digital Distribution

In 2018, two of the most acclaimed international films, Roma and Cold War, were auteurist movies shot in digital black-and-white and distributed by two newcomers to the field of prestige cinema —…

Contemporaries Essays, What's Contemporary About the Academy Awards?

Introduction

What’s “contemporary” about the Academy Awards? Maybe nothing. From the red carpet to the closing credits, the show borrows its choreography from a formula perfected between the 1930s (when it…

Contemporaries Essays, What's Contemporary About the Academy Awards?

A 3 Hour Tour . . . A 3 Hour Tour

You may be busy pregaming the Oscars so I’ll make the takeaways clear and portable: The chaos surrounding the Oscars telecast matters because it is the funhouse mirror reflection of…

Contemporaries Essays, Forms of the Global Anglophone

Postcolonial, Still

This series on the Global Anglophone grapples with what it might mean to shift from the object of inquiry named by the postcolonial to something more nebulous and still in…

Contemporaries Essays, Forms of the Global Anglophone

The Ends of Entanglement: Conjectures on a Future Politics for Global Anglophone Literature

During the rapidly globalizing 1990s a term used in quantum physics to describe “spooky relations” between particles “at a distance” made its way into the humanities, where it was adapted…

Contemporaries Essays, Forms of the Global Anglophone

Fragments of a World That “Doesn’t End”: The Apocalyptic Impulse in a Time of Perpetual War

9/11 and the subsequent “War on Terror” have produced temporalities of indefinite deferral and perpetual war. Literary scholars have noted the pervasive presence of this phenomenon in contemporary Global Anglophone…

Contemporaries Essays, Forms of the Global Anglophone

Mood, Health, and the Global Anglophone Novel

A maximal definition of the Global Anglophone Novel would, as we know, include all novels written in English, regardless of origin.1 The cost of inclusivity is definitional crisis: such a…

Contemporaries Essays, Forms of the Global Anglophone

The Form of Global Anglophone Literature is Grenfell Tower

On 14 June 2017, shortly after midnight, a fire broke out in the public housing flats at Grenfell Tower in North Kensington, London. The fire spread rapidly, due in large…

Contemporaries Essays, Forms of the Global Anglophone

What’s in a Name?: the Global Anglophone, the Anglosphere, and the English-Speaking Peoples

What does it mean to “do” Global Anglophone Studies at a time when an ordinary conversation in Spanish in a New York restaurant could propel a customer into such a…