On the way into Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium during this year’s World Cup, spectators found FIFA’s flagship Fan Shop in an unlikely spot: at the feet of a monumental statue to Lenin. The irony was ...
Tag: Nationalism
Ondaatje’s Long War
In a scathing review of The English Patient, Hilary Mantel called Michael Ondaatje’s most feted work “uneven, unresolved, unsatisfactory.” Her criticism has since become a regular complaint about the ...
When the Klan Returns
For nearly a century, the 1920s Ku Klux Klan has seemed an exception that proves a rule. Far-right movements typically eschew electoral politics, as earlier and later waves of the Klan also did. But ...
The Invention of the “White Working Class”
As liberals came to terms with what happened on Election Day 2016, early press reports focused on the so-called white working class. We’d seen these ...
The Pocketbook Illustrations of the Rebel Artist B. M. Anand
This photo-essay was originally published in The Caravan. The featured artwork has been excerpted from Aditi Anand and Grant Pooke, Narratives for Indian Modernity: The Aesthetic of Brij Mohan Anand ...
The Citizenship Business
In April 2015, men in hazmat suits and safety masks buried over two dozen bodies on the Mediterranean island-nation of Malta. The waterlogged corpses, victims of a capsized dinghy, had been desperate ...
Turkey’s Progressive Past
In her posthumously published memoir, written in the late 1960s, the journalist Sabiha Sertel reflected on her life in exile from Turkey, her home country. She had lived through a period of ...
Why Boys Must Cry
In contemporary Nigerian literature, muscular heroes of postcolonial independence have lost their swagger. Today’s patriarchs read like quaint fogies, stomping their feet about government, money, and ...
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 ...
“Sharing” the Israeli Occupation
In April of 2014, an Israeli combat soldier from the Nahal Brigade named David Adamov was captured on camera violently threatening a Palestinian teenager in Hebron. After a video of the event posted ...
Streetwise in Weimar
Scholars of Weimar Germany have long wrestled with the fact that this period of unparalleled innovation in intellectual and cultural life was a time of economic and social crisis, brought to a close ...
Russia, Today: Part 1
Amid the annexation of Crimea, the frozen conflict in eastern Ukraine, and an emerging proxy war in Syria, many commentators have proclaimed the beginning of a new Cold War between Russia and the ...
What Global English Means for
World Literature
Globalization is one of the great issues facing universities today, particularly in humanities departments. It means different things to different people, but most agree that globalization pluralizes ...
Bergen, Norway: Discourse and Context
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. This past spring I found myself in Bergen, Norway, undertaking an arts residency and ...
How Fascism Pushed Women out of the Frame
Italians today tend to draw a firm line between the totalitarian right-wing nationalist regime that ruled the Kingdom of Italy from 1922 to 1943 and the Italian Republic that emerged in its wake. The ...
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 ...
Bellatrix and the American Revolution
Bellatrix, a star in the Orion constellation, is 240 light-years from Earth. The light emitted from Bellatrix that we currently see began its journey just prior to the American Revolution, when Paul ...
Morality and the Italian Civil War: An Interview with Stanislao Pugliese
After more than 20 years, Claudio Pavone’s A Civil War: A History of the Italian Resistance, recognized as a masterpiece of Italian historiography, has been translated into English. Stanislao ...
Necessary Digressions
On July 2, 2014, Recip Tayyip Erdoğan, the prime minister of the Republic of Turkey since 2003, announced his candidacy for president. With this maneuver, worryingly similar to that of Vladimir Putin ...
A World of Connections and Inequality:A New History of the 19th Century
The 19th century poses special problems for historians and social scientists. If conventional views of the march of history are correct, the world should have become modern over this period ...