Tag
Internationalism
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The U.S. Has Never Forgiven Haiti
For Frederick Douglass, and for Black activists across the United States, there was no place more important to global Black freedom than Haiti.
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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 civilization,” and even beyond empires that have reshaped power, labor, and language across the planet. “World literature” would be all the written and spoken…
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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 formulations all assume that an original text composed in a particular language is subsequently translated into other languages. In her new book, Born…
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Afrofuturism: Everything and Nothing
Whence the “Afro” in “Afrofuturism”? In the 1994 interview with Samuel R. Delaney that inaugurated the term, Mark Dery defines Afrofuturism as “speculative fiction that treats African American themes and addresses African American concerns in the context of 20th-century technoculture—and, more generally, African American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future.”…
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Can Child Soldiers Be Saved?
Everybody loves stories about child soldiers, it seems, as long as redemption is involved. A memoir about Sierra Leone’s civil war, for example, is not exactly the feel-good stuff you’d expect to see at a Starbucks counter. But in 2007 Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, one of the first…
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The New School Tie
In 1998 Harrow school opened a satellite campus in Bangkok. Founded in 1572 by Royal Charter from Elizabeth I, Harrow is one of Britain’s ancient “public” schools, fee-paying institutions independent of the state that educate some of the wealthiest and most privileged members of society. Following Harrow’s example, other public schools quickly expanded into the…
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Outline for a Workshopped World
Despite their centrality to what Mark McGurl has recently designated the “Program Era” in American fiction, writing workshops don’t fare well in novels produced by the writers who participate in them.1 The campus novel is almost always satirical, and scenes set in creative writing classes tend to be crucibles of crippling shame and slavish emulation.…
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Speaking in Science
Some of today’s most provocative scientific tools are being built to do science themselves. IBM’s Watson, for instance, is being developed to sift through data at volumes far exceeding the capability of any one human researcher. While we tend to accept what our computers say about data in numerical or other easily computable form, the…
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Empathetic Criticism
Over the past 50 years or so we have heard repeated calls to break down and restructure the canon, to integrate works from non-Western literary cultures into the general knowledge we expect an educated adult to possess. Often missing from this high-minded call to action are explorations of what this means and how it should…
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“It’s When There Are a Lot of Them That There Are Problems”
The sorrow and outrage provoked by the attacks on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were underwritten by an all-too-familiar grand narrative: These were not the cowardly misdeeds of a group of disaffected and delusional youth; this was another instantiation of a primeval war of civilizations extending far beyond the Île-de-France. Accordingly, grandiose statements about…
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One Thousand and One Retellings
Why do people still keep rereading, and retranslating, the Thousand and One Nights? Does its hold have to do with the stories’ strategic positioning between “East” and “West” …
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For World Literature
You could tell the story of literary study in the US as one long process of expansion. For hundreds of years only the Classics were considered worthy of serious academic attention, and strenuous objections followed the introduction of modern literature courses in the 19th century. While Latin and Greek “inculcate a certain manly and just…
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The Joys of Multiplicity
Translation contains multitudes. Since there is no one right way to translate most things worth translating—though there are many wrong ways—translation opens up a sphere of multiplicity in which you can elect to enjoy your Bovary à la Lydia Davis or in the style of Steegmuller. Whose Crime and Punishment was Edward Snowden reading in…
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Reinventing Documentary
Forged at the interstice of art history and curatorial practice, T. J. Demos’s The Migrant Image is an ambitious sketch of how politically committed documentary artists—working in film, video, and photography—have responded to uneven capitalist expansion and the migrations impelled by abject poverty, authoritarianism, and armed conflict. The art projects Demos features confront this global…
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The Rise and Fall of Internationalism
On February 5, 2003, US Secretary of State Colin Powell insisted to the UN Security Council that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that the UN must issue an ultimatum for Saddam Hussein to disarm or face attack. UN Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix countered that there was no smoking gun. After weeks of…
