Tag
History
-
What Happens When Belief Stops Mattering?
“From the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 to the advent of Gorbachev’s glasnost in the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union was sustained not by terror or conviction, but by something harder to name: a routinization of participation.”
-
As in Painting, So in Poetry
“Colors are not sounds and ears are not eyes,” wrote Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, a mid-18th century German philosopher and art critic. He was making a point about what he saw as a crucial division between fine art and writing: not only do art and writing enter our minds via distinct senses, but we also require…
-
Totalitarian Sprawl
Was the Soviet Union a totalitarian state, ruled by a highly centralized power and demanding absolute subservience from its citizens? Or was it instead a more complex polity, one that only projected a tempting illusion of homogeneity? This has been a central debate in the historiography of the Soviet era since the fall of the…
-
Gems, Monsters, and Broodmares for Corpses
“No Hindu ever reads the Mahabharata for the first time,” A. K. Ramanujan, the celebrated poet, translator, and linguist, once wrote. The same cannot be said of the reader of contemporary literary English. Most have probably heard of the Bhagavad Gita, some might have an acquaintance with one of the poem’s modern Indian television avatars…
-
Suffragettes Take Hollywood
An industrial laundry in 1912 London, the steam infusing the air, the sweat on the workers’ faces so vivid the viewer herself feels the heat. These laundries were not only literal sweatshops; they also surrounded workers with burning toxic lye. This opening scene in Sarah Gavron’s new film, Suffragette, is as powerful as any that…
-
Virtual Roundtable on the Library of Korean Literature
In this virtual roundtable, edited and introduced by Seo Hee Im, Koreanists and scholars of world literature reflect on five writers recently published in the Library of Korean Literature series by Dalkey Archive Press. • Joe Cleary on Choi In-hun, The Square • Wai Chee Dimock on Lee Ki-ho, At Least We Can Apologize •…
-
Russia, Today: Part 2
Princeton historian Ekaterina Pravilova discusses the battle over rationality in Russian popular and academic circles, while French philosopher Michel Eltchaninoff explores the intellectual history of Putin’s political ideology …
-
On Our Nightstands: October 2015
Here at Public Books, our editorial staff and contributors are hard at work to provide readers with compelling, thought-provoking articles, but when the workday is done, what is actually on our nightstands? Here we bring you, in our own words, a new behind-the-scenes look at what we have been reading this month. SHARON MARCUS Editor…
-
On Our Nightstands: September 2015
Here at Public Books our editorial staff and contributors are hard at work to provide readers with compelling, thought-provoking articles, but when the workday is done, what is actually on our nightstands? Here we bring you, in our own words, a new behind-the-scenes look at what we have been reading this month. SHARON MARCUS Editor in Chief…
-
Famine Fiction
Betraying friends. Trading sex for food. Devouring human flesh. All of these occurred during the famine that followed China’s Great Leap Forward (1958–1961), and all of them …
-
Why Critics Wait
As protests over the death of Freddie Gray intensified, Sydette Harry tweeted about yet another dimension of widespread institutional anti-black racism in the United States. She wrote, “It’s funny how much folks watched The Wire and felt all the emotions but are confused the people who live it feel anything at all.” Harry’s tweet captures the…
-
China at World’s End
In a galaxy far away, but close enough, an intelligent alien civilization finally realizes that its planet orbits around three suns instead of one. They face the classic three-body problem of physics: like the movement of any three objects in space held by each other’s gravitational pull, the movements of these suns defy prediction. Sometimes…
-
Stunt Double: Twice Fallen
The wounds of civil wars last. You can forgive a stranger, but family and neighbors, that’s another story. In America, the Confederate flag still raises old myths and divisions. In Algeria, the French Algerians, derisively called pied-noirs, the flesh-and-blood symbol of French Colonial rule (1830–1956), still haunt the land they fought so viciously to keep…
-
McDreamy Is Dead
It’s been a fatal few seasons to be the primary love interest to an ambitious woman on television. Last year, The Good Wife killed Will Gardner, and the Internet refused to stop talking about it for weeks. The death of Derek Shepherd on Grey’s Anatomy, by contrast, has barely been mentioned in the critical-recapping genre…
-
Gallantry, Ishiguro-Style
Quaintness is history defanged, a past we render harmless by declaring it naive. It’s a form of retrospection somewhere between a sneer in the rearview mirror and longing’s backward glance, one modernity reserves for the ideals—and idealists—of a bygone age. Arthurian England has often received this aesthetic markdown on last season’s ethical attire. It’s an…
-
The Algebra of Justice
The Underground Railroad is among the most celebrated instances of civil disobedience in US history. But, though famous and beloved, it’s cloaked in mystery. As an extralegal, clandestine operation, it left relatively little in the way of documentation. We will never know how many slaves absconded to freedom or how many activists helped. “For very…
-
Spiralism: Haiti’s Long-Lost Poetics of Protest
Reading Frankétienne’s Ready to Burst is eerily similar to contemplating a wound that won’t heal, inspiring trepidation at what might soon—or potentially worse, not ever—change. Such was my experience of following the novel’s protagonists, Raynand and Paulin, as they attempt to make modest yet always ill-fated bids for basic human happiness in a Haiti in…
-
Far Outside and Deep Within:More Novels on World War II
Even in the paroxysm of publishing around the centennial of the First World War last year, novels about the Second World War dominated, as they usually do, historical fiction about the 20th century. In honor of the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II in 2015, I binge-read a slew of books published…
-
The Armenian Genocide and the Politics of Knowledge
In this centennial year since the Armenian Genocide, countless conferences, meetings, and commemorations are underway across the globe. While they have all been peaceful so far, they come at the end of a century of violence. I refer not just to the events of 1915–17, but also the waves of violence spurred by memory, recognition,…
-
The Trouble with “Modernity”
It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that capitalism is the engine behind the environmental crises of the early 21st century. It doesn’t even take a Marxist: as the French environmental journalist Hervé Kempf put it in a recent book, it’s not so much Homo sapiens as the rich who are destroying the earth—rich people,…
-
Thérésa Tallien’s Legacy: Style on the rue de Babylone
Since the 18th century, the rue de Babylone has been a site for salons that bring the haute monde into contact with innovative artists …
