Today is overwhelmingly defined by white-supremacist violence and the whiteness of AI technology. Can seeing them together help defeat them both?
Essays
Heritage Studies after Said
The Middle East must no longer be defined through the lens of decolonization and the agendas of perpetrators.
Like a Viking
According to Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, the Vikings aren’t like the stereotypes you’ve heard. Nonetheless, the game lets you play as those stereotypes. Why?
Hilton Head Island—Haunted by Its Own History
Historical traces of racism and exclusion remain on the island. It’s just that new residents can’t—or won’t—read them.
Thoreau in Good Faith
The writer went to Walden to reorient his world, so that the woods, rather than the town, centered his spiritual map.
The Ten Thousand Things
“I am supposed to be writing this essay, ostensibly on technology, but not for the first time, I believe I am unable to write; and not writing, doubt that I will I ever write again.”
Criminalized Borders and US Health-Care Profits
The pandemic took the health inequalities generated by US imperialism, and made them worse.
A Collapse No One Story Can Tell
Ten years since the 2011 Syrian uprising, there has been a veritable literary boom of fiction writing from Syria. What does it reveal?
How to Dream beyond Oil
Energy sources shape, rather than simply serve, our social and cultural imaginaries. Recognizing this poses a different set of challenges for how we might contend with our current planetary emergency.
Let Families and Communities Seek Asylum Together
Why not redefine our asylum system to accommodate the complex and multiple reasons people flee?
Refuge: Denied. Asylum: Pending
The United States originates in settler colonialism, slavery, empire, and a long history of giving refuge to some while refusing refuge to others.
Abolish Migrant Prisons: A Manifesto
So long as the state can criminalize movement and eliminate groups deemed undesirable, no one is free.
From “Crisis” to Futurity
Introducing a new series to push forward our thinking and action about immigration and borders.
What Will Be Impossible?
Why excavate these Reformation characters—the preacher and the werewolf—now? What do they have to teach us?
B-Sides: Elinor Wylie’s “Atavism”
Caesuras do things to stories—and to readers, even readers too young to know the term.
Can Algorithmic Bias Teach Us about Race?
Machines learned racism from humans. Perhaps humans can now learn about that racism from the very machines they taught.
The Direction of Beginning
These poems undo the cultural invisibility of America’s Native Nations. They also, with unique abundance, secure the value of poetry itself.
Why Play at Orientalism?
Games like Crusader Kings III build feudalism into their code, and in so doing assert the supremacy of the modern global North.
Sex, Race, and Feminist Connection
History, Ann Stoler showed, is not just political action, disconnected from daily domestic acts. Intimate relations are worthy of serious study.
A Messy Utopia Is All We Might Get
Climate change didn’t just wreck the planet; it closed off and reshaped the future. Even utopia—if we reach it—will be a mess.