Violence underlies the whimsical colonizing of an island in “Animal Crossing.” But perhaps it holds promise for political repair, too.
Tag: Imperialism
How Mexican Chicago Remembers Tenochtitlan
500 years have passed since the fall of the Aztec capitol. But like that city, Pilsen’s power lies not in its buildings, but in its people.
Imperialism: A Syllabus
Opposition to imperialism unites the struggles of our times. To recognize empire is to take a necessary step towards a more just world.
Choosing Empire: America before and after World War II
Both America First nationalism and postwar liberalism refuse to face the challenges of the globalized world that America itself inaugurated.
From Versailles to the War on Terror
The status of the Ottoman Empire and its extraterritorial treaties were left in violent limbo at Versailles. This impacts the world to this day.
Can Photography Be Decolonial?
Can the inherent contradictions of “whiteness” and the “decolonial” ever align with the reparative potential of photography?
Public Thinker: Yarimar Bonilla on Decolonizing Decolonization
“Hurricane Maria ushered in a great deal of trauma and suffering, but it also allowed us to reassess the very nature of the political.”
Fathers of Empire
There is a moment early on in Hazel Carby’s Imperial Intimacies when she writes about the ways her mother Iris—as a Welsh woman—refused Englishness but still embraced Britishness. This is revealed in her mother’s dismay that ...
How Families Navigate Empire
Beginning at the end of the 1960s—in what we now call the start of the feminist Second Wave—women, especially black women, began making scholarly ...
Public Thinker: A. Naomi Paik on a Future without Rights
What is specific to or even unique about the condition of “rightlessness,” to the ...
The Afronaut Archives: Reports from a Future Zambia
“Most Westerners don’t even know whereabouts in Africa we are.” So said ...
The Banality of Empire
One of the basic paradoxes of British imperialism is that even as it relied so fundamentally on violence, it insisted on presenting itself as opposed to violence, indeed as dedicated to stamping it ...
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 ...
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 ...