Tag
Colonialism
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Resistance or Complicity? The Engineered Paradox of Digital Activism
As genocide unfolds in Gaza, we turn to platforms that profit from our witness. Are we fueling the very systems we seek to resist?
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“Something There Is That Doesn’t Love a Wall”
When US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced he would be stepping down after 31 years on the nation’s highest court, public reaction was both swift …
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“Remembering and Forgetting”: An Interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen
Since the 2015 publication of his Pulitzer Prize–winning debut novel The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen …
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Turning History Inside Out
It’s not hard to imagine the Hollywood pitch meeting for an adaptation of Esi Edugyan’s new novel, Washington Black. “It’s 12 Years a Slave meets Jules Verne …
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Algiers: Capital of Revolution
In 2018, it is difficult to imagine what it felt like to live through a genuinely revolutionary moment, one that connected hopes for the Third World with dreams …
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Public Thinker: Matthew Engelke on Thinking Like an Anthropologist
Matthew Engelke is one of the leading anthropologists of his generation …
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Guns Were for White Men
This image from the 1773 edition of Mary White Rowlandson’s narrative of her 1675 captivity by Native people presents us with a puzzle, one historian Jill Lepore queried in her influential history of King Philip’s War1: the woodcut image features a white woman armed with a rifle, defending her home from four hatchet-wielding men. Yet…
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“Slave Old Man” in English, English in “Slave Old Man”
Linda Coverdale’s English translation of the 1997 novel L’esclave vieil homme et …
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Japan’s Isolation 2.0
The taxi driver who took me from Tokyo train station to my hotel had turned his cell phone sideways, like a television, and propped it up on the dashboard of his car. He was watching a historical drama set in the Edo period (1603–1868); the hero was walking a footpath that had connected Edo (Tokyo)…
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Women of the Algerian Resistance
On May 8, 1945, France joined the festivities of V-E Day, celebrating the total defeat of Nazi Germany as well as the …
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When Secularism Fails Women
When it comes to the work of what Kati Curts recently called “categorical quickening,” Joan Wallach Scott is an exceptional midwife of the body politic …
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“The Horticulturalist of the Self”
In a 1963 issue of the New York Review of Books, Susan Sontag hailed the translation of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s major early works into English, unabashedly calling the …
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The Caribbean: Through a Lens Brightly
James Anthony Froude is a name now lost to time. In the Victorian era the British historian, writer, and traveler held great prominence, much of which was due to his unabashed celebrations of imperialism, which he most famously presented in his influential 1888 study, The English in the West Indies. Froude’s infamy arises from his…
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B-Sides: Dambudzo Marechera’s “The House of Hunger”
Contemporary southern Africa is littered with the detritus of grand schemes—imperialism, apartheid, development, independence, socialism. Wrought first by colonial violence and then by anti-colonial movements gone bad, the wreckages of utopia heap up in Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola, and South Africa. The fallout of these schemes accumulates and compacts. Citizens find themselves making their lives on…
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Singing in the Dark
They came to bury her with praises but, defeated once again by her sheer presence, their words shriveled and rotted in the monsoon damp. As Mahasweta Devi’s dead body lay in a Kolkata hospital on July 28, 2016, Indian politicians—many of whom Devi had fought throughout her life with great courage—queued up to make a…
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Caliban Blues
Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed is one of hundreds of rewritings of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. The adaptations began just over a decade after its first performance, in 1611, and for the past four …
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@X: Making America White 200 Years Ago
In January 1817, more than three thousand African Americans gathered in Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia …
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Wading Through the Swamp: Nairobi, Kenya
Above the low traffic hum on Woodvale Grove, the main street running through Nairobi’s affluent neighborhood of Westlands, a woman in braided hair …
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Anthropocene and Empire
In the autumn of 1839, an unusually strong tropical storm devastated coastal communities along the Bay of Bengal in what was then the English East India Company’s premier settlement. A decade later, Company merchant and sometime scientist Henry Piddington coined the term “cyclone” to describe this climatological phenomenon, taking a cue from the seaborne storm’s…
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The Pocketbook Illustrations of the Rebel Artist B. M. Anand
This photo-essay was originally published in The Caravan. The featured artwork has been excerpted from Aditi Anand and Grant Pooke, Narratives for Indian Modernity: The Aesthetic of Brij Mohan Anand (HarperCollins India, 2016). Born in 1928, the artist Brij Mohan Anand was greatly informed by the political and social climate around him. Anand grew up…
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Am I Not a Dragon and a Brother
Here’s what everyone will tell you about the award-winning Temeraire series that Naomi Novik has just completed: it’s the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15)—with dragons. The series has expressive, pitch-perfect writing, glorious steampunk details, and jaw-dropping adventures. Fans of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey–Maturin novels will relish Novik’s accounts of slashing battles and brilliant military maneuvers taking place both…
