In the first season of True Detective (2014), two white male representatives of Louisiana’s Criminal Investigation Division are shown tracking down a potential serial killer. The killer, or killers, leaves…
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Contemporaries Essays, Global Horror
Contemporaries Essays, Global Horror
“Ain’t It Funny”: Danny Brown and Detroit Horror
In 2013, Danny Brown sparked a minor hip-hop beef when he said about fellow Detroit rapper Big Sean: “You listen to how I talk about Detroit, and you listen to…
Contemporaries Essays, Global Horror
The Enslaved Child and the Carceral Child
In 2019, black children are still denied consideration as children. Anti-black violence has never spared and continues not to spare children. Children are neither symbolic exceptions nor accidental casualties but…
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…