Tag
Imperialism
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“These Cycles Are Repeating Themselves”: Lara Norgaard on Indonesian History and Translating Political Fiction
“Even characters with completely benign intentions or mildly selfish intentions end up doing pretty bad things because of the institutional structures around them.”
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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 …
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Public Thinker: A. Naomi Paik on a Future without Rights
What is specific to or even unique about the condition of “rightlessness,” to the …
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The Afronaut Archives: Reports from a Future Zambia
“Most Westerners don’t even know whereabouts in Africa we are.” So said …
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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 out. In 1856, a London newspaper called the Examiner insisted that “wherever there are Europeans, no matter whether officials, merchants, or missionaries,…
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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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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…
