For decades, South Asian architecture was impelled by the promise of a new society after empire. Now, such buildings are being demolished.
Essays
Connecting Dots to Challenge E-Carceration
Whether tracking a migrant traveling thousands of miles or someone on parole at home, carceral tech is reaching into all walks of life.
Trans Women and Children on TV
The family as we know it today functions to further isolate trans children from trans women and vice versa. Thank goodness for TV.
Unreal Realism: Chicago’s Avant-Garde Women
Chicago—for women artists of various backgrounds—demanded a new art to advance the struggle for freedom by imagining other possible worlds.
Why Renters Fought NYC’s Push for Ownership
“Doesn’t every New Yorker really want to own a co-op?,” a realtor asked a crowd of tenants in 1972. But this provoked only “a chorus of noes.”
Goodbye “West Side Story”
Many Latinxs—the nation’s largest ethnic group & most avid movie consumers—think the nation’s most beloved musical on racial tolerance is racist.
(A)I, Rapper: Who Voices Hip-Hop’s Future?
If we accept AIs crafting rap, we repeat the same exploitation that currently separates Black and brown artists from the fruits of their labor.
“Now Is the Time of Help”: On Claudia Rankine
A new play centers on a Black woman who stops “accommodating white people” and, instead, asks them “about their love affair with my death.”
Watching “Go Fish” with My Queer 15-Year-Old
“You can wear something to be cool,” you told me, “or because another person likes it. You don’t have to be truly ‘yourself,’ or whatever.”
B-Sides: Jesmyn Ward’s “Where the Line Bleeds”
Novelist Jesmyn Ward is known for historical grandiosity, but her long-overlooked book “Sing, Unburied, Sing” turns away from realism into the realm of generic strangeness.
Cuba & the US: Necessary Mirrors
Exponentially more enslaved Africans were forced to the lands that now make up Latin America rather than the United States. Where is their story?
A Statue Gives Romans a Voice: 2021, Rome, Italy
The people of Rome have been leaving notes on the Pasquino statue for over 500 years. And this practice continued in the pandemic, fortunately.
COVID: The Pandemic Without Honor?
“I don’t believe there was any conspiracy inside government to kill people off,” a health official explains. “From what I saw there was no plan.”
Putting French Literary History on Trial
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s Goncourt-winning novel confronts the racist history of France’s literary prizes.
Can We Repair the Past?
For the righting of historical wrongs, to simply transfer property continues to perpetuate violence. True reparations require far more work.
Toxic Masculinity, Spectral Homosexuality
The secret of the Western—as Jane Campion’s “Power of the Dog” shows—is that its mythology nurtures a queer fantasy, hiding in plain sight.
Queer Ever After?
If queer today often looks rather like heteronormativity’s “sick and boring life,” how can we cultivate queerer worlds, or other possibilities?
Apocalypse and Anticlimax: The Petrified Forest, Calistoga, CA
Unlike us today, the Victorians who discovered this stone forest were less afraid of the future than they were of forgetting the past.
Is “Regulation from Below” Possible?
A powerful grassroots movement campaigned in the ’70s and ’80s for banks to reinvest equitably in red-lined urban communities. It failed—but why?
The Healing Power of Virtual Cuteness
Violence underlies the whimsical colonizing of an island in “Animal Crossing.” But perhaps it holds promise for political repair, too.