Tag: Multiculturalism

Join the Mutant Resistance!

The real world just got a lot more like a superhero comic, and not in a good way. I write on November 13, 2016; one of the many things that came up in my panicked, angry, sometimes despairing social …

When Stuart Hall Was White

I do not recall when I discovered that Stuart Hall was black. Growing up in Britain as neoliberalism first began to take shape under the rule of Margaret Thatcher, I found that Hall’s work helped me …

Lin-Manuel Meets “Moana”

Disney’s new animated film, Moana, with songs by Hamilton genius Lin-Manuel Miranda, arrived last weekend to great expectations. Would it keep Disney’s musical franchise afloat? Would it continue ...

The Model-Minority Bubble

Perhaps the most famous shopping trip in American literature can be found in Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise. Wounded by a colleague’s unflattering assessment of his appearance, Jack Gladney ...

On Black Girlhood

The bikini-clad teen is thrown to the ground. An officer, his knee in her back, grabs her braids and slams her head into the grass. She cries, “Call my mama.” When other teens, leaving a pool party ...

Rape Culture Syllabus

I just start kissing them. Just kiss—I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything. Whatever you want. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.   —Donald ...

Americans in Bulgaria

Loving Eastern Europe is a tricky business. In theory, the term “Eastern Europe” is reductive and clumsy. In reality, it often feels deeply and self-evidently true. This puts those who document the ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Thornfield Hall, Brooklyn

On her author website, Patricia Park explains that her decision to revisit Jane Eyre in her debut novel, Re Jane, derives in part from the fact that, when she acted out as a child, her Korean mother ...

How the 9/11 Museum Gets Us

There was little choice. From the earliest conceptions of what would be done at Ground Zero, there would be one. A museum. And now here it is, the National September 11 Memorial Museum, which opened ...

The Road to the Holy Mountain

Twenty years ago, I stumbled upon one of the most unusual places on earth. A young student of logic, I was attending a workshop in Thessaloniki with extra time to spare, and the teacher suggested ...