Matthew Wilkens
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Peer Reviewed Articles
Peer Reviewed Articles
“Window Seat”: Erykah Badu, Projective Cultural Politics, and the Obama Era
On the afternoon of March 13, 2010, neo-soul singer Erykah Badu walked though Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, the site of John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination. Rarely meeting the eyes…
Contemporaries Essays
2011 Keynotes, Contemporaries Essays
Very Different Tonight: The Contagious Nightmares of Wilhelm Reich
Kim Cooper
This is a story about slippage between things that are objectively real
and things that are unknowable, about how one man’s memories
of a unique and troubled childhood….
Peer Reviewed Articles
Counterfactual States of America: On Parallel Worlds and Longing for the Law
Fiction takes us out of this world. A given work might set fabricated characters and events within the actual existing world, thereby altering it; or it might fabricate a new…
Peer Reviewed Articles
Hiroshima and the Nuclear Event
“The most spectacular event of the past half-century,” Thomas Schelling announced in his Nobel Lecture of 2005, “is one that did not occur. We have enjoyed sixty years without nuclear…
Peer Reviewed Articles
Richard Wright and the Police
Richard Wright always coincides with his object. -Georges Charbonnier Toward the end of his life, after a long exile in France accompanied by intermittent harassment by American internal security agencies,…