“For good or ill, freedom and solidarity and social justice are not things we can get quickly.”
Tag: Globalization
Walking Among the University’s Ruins
Some wager that the end is not inevitable: that universities can reassert their centrality to the American liberal democratic project.
Global Inequality and the Corona Shock
COVID-19 is the first truly comprehensive crisis of the Anthropocene era, affecting virtually everyone on the planet.
The New Silk Road: Dordoi Bazaar in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
At the largest bazaar in Central Asia, an informal secondhand market has become something like a metropolis unto itself.
It’s the Geography, Stupid! Planetary Urbanization Revealed
Covid-19 spread so rapidly because urbanization is now planetary: connecting disparate territories through flows of goods and people.
Shanghai’s Past, Hong Kong’s Future
What does it mean for a city to be free? What happens when a free city loses its freedom? And when does that occur?
Migration and the Remains of US Empire
The way we talk about history matters. And this is especially true in the case of the Philippines, which, in many ways, served as a laboratory for America’s imperial ...
Ferrante’s Storytelling in a Global Age
Today Europa Editions publishes Elena Ferrante’s Key Words, by Italy’s foremost Ferrante scholar, Tiziana de Rogatis. Key Words takes the acclaimed Neapolitan ...
Decolonization Requires a New Economics
On October 15, 1968, the government of Jamaica banned a 26-year-old history professor from reentering the island nation. Walter Rodney, a lecturer at the ...
The Ruse of Fiction: An Interview with Amitava Kumar
Amitava Kumar’s recent novel, Immigrant, Montana, tells the story of Kailash, an Indian graduate student who ...
Stalling: How to Save the Global City
The image above is both a place and a placeholder. Flattened into the increasingly global language of digitally rendered landscapes—what South ...
Public Thinker: Timothy Snyder on Russia and “Dark Globalization”
Timothy Snyder has taken a region that resists understanding and made it ...
The Future of the Global University
Great universities seek to erase the borders that confine intellectual exchange. The aspiration is at once scholarly and political: policies informed by research will topple ...
Walter Scott’s “Rob Roy” @200
What can Walter Scott’s sixth novel, Rob Roy, a phenomenal publishing success in 1817, tell us about the benefits and risks of a globalized economy today?
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 …
How to Make Worlds
We might be tempted to think of the “world” in “world literature” as a spatial category. This “world” would designate the vast space beyond national borders, beyond the fiction of “Western ...
How to Be a Global Historian
If the past is still required to understand the present, then approaching the past globally is an absolute necessity. But what does it mean to “think globally” today? What does a truly global history ...
Always Already Translated
Here are some common metaphors for thinking about translation: as a ferryman (a word that derives from the Latin transferre), as a new set of garments, and as resurrection or afterlife. These ...
Tales of the Interwar
Today, the once-provocative suggestion that we live in an age of interminable warfare has become a truism. The claim often takes the form of an observation about the post-9/11 syndrome that drives an ...
What’s in a Face?
According to Jewish tradition, before each of us was born, we were visited by an angel who taught us all that is known and all that will be known. We were wise, in utero. And then, in the very last ...