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 ...
Tag: Nationalism
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 ...
Gandhi in Africa
The title of this biography, Gandhi Before India, glances backwards and forwards. It invokes Ramachandra Guha’s previous blockbuster India After Gandhi and suggests a likely title—Gandhi After ...
Virtuous Citizens and Virtuous Cities
Immigration. Financial reform. Inequality. Climate change. Dysfunction has paralyzed America’s national politics and alienated its citizens. Not only do crises go unaddressed, but elected officials ...
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 ...
Latin America’s Left: Between Demos and Kratos
On March 5, 2013, the Venezuelan government announced the death of president Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías. In the New York Review of Books, Alma Guillermoprieto, one of the most perceptive commentators ...
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 ...
War Stories
Today anyone with a computer or smart phone can access videos of armed conflicts from around the world. Battles that would once have been shared days, years, or even generations after the fact, via ...
When the Past is Past
Set sometime in the early 1950s, Toni Morrison’s latest work of fiction centers on a 24-year-old black veteran of the Korean War named Frank Money, recently returned from the frontlines and showing ...
Mapping a Young America
Maps are ubiquitous now, embedded in nearly every mobile device, but in the early days of America, maps were far more precious. In Mapping the Nation, Susan Schulten argues that the formation of the ...
The Epistolary Terrorist
Alex Gilvarry’s debut novel, From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant, opens with an announcement that what follows is not a novel at all: Editor’s Note: With the exception of footnote ...
Dress-Up Games with Russian History
In 2002, the Kremlin-affiliated youth group Moving Together staged a public protest on Moscow’s Theater Square at which they threw the works of several prominent Russian postmodernist authors into an ...
The Great [National] Novel
When Capital was published in Great Britain earlier this year, it was immediately heralded as the first important novel about the recent financial crisis. And this made sense since its author, John ...