Tag
Postcolonial
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B-Sides: Denis Williams’s “Other Leopards”
Denis Williams was a painter in London, a novelist in the Sudan, an art historian in Nigeria, and an archeologist in his native Guyana: the polymath’s polymath …
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Wading Through the Swamp: Nairobi, Kenya
Above the low traffic hum on Woodvale Grove, the main street running through Nairobi’s affluent neighborhood of Westlands, a woman in braided hair …
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Syria’s Wartime Famine @100: “Martyrs of the Grass”
In the days leading up to the Muslim holiday of the Feast of Sacrifice (Eid al-Adha) in October 2013, several Syrian clerics issued a fatwa …
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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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The Afterlife of Agent Orange
“All wars are fought twice,” writes Viet Thanh Nguyen in Nothing Ever Dies, “the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” Even decades after the first war ends, the second war can be just as brutal. For now the victors would get to rule over more than just territory: they would get…
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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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Invoking the Translator: A Conversation with Raqs Media Collective
Since their international breakthrough in 2002, the Raqs Media Collective—Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta—have created and curated an extensive body of work spanning text, performance, video, sculpture, animation, sound, computer algorithms, and the photographic image. Raqs (pronounced rux), based in Delhi, have had recent major exhibitions in Madrid, London, Buenos Aires, Mexico City,…
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Tales of the Interwar
Today, the once-provocative suggestion that we live in an age of interminable warfare has become a truism. The claim often takes the form of an observation about the post-9/11 syndrome that drives an endless War on Terror. Alternatively, it can become a description of our era as yet another chapter in the history of the…
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Burning Books to Stay Alive in Agualusa’s Angola
In 1975, amid the violence and chaos in Luanda on the eve of Angolan independence, Ludovica Fernandes Mano barricaded herself in her apartment. There she remained …
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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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O My Swineherd!
The last century may have ushered in an epoch of wars that have no end, but Homer’s Odyssey continues to inspire. You do not have to be James Joyce or Derek Walcott to find the story of a man’s protracted struggle to return home from a fight he did not want appealing. With Odysseus Abroad,…
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A Muslim Future to Come?
The devastating attacks of November 13 on Paris’s 10th and 11th arrondissements viciously targeted the “progressive” heart of the city. When I am there, that is where I live. Like many other inhabitants and observers, I find it difficult to comprehend why the militants assaulted this historically working-class, vibrant, multicultural, and youthful neighborhood—admittedly often characterized…
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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 gender roles. Chigozie Obioma’s debut novel, The Fishermen, recuperates this toothless archetype with superb grace. His task is not to rescue the patriarch from becoming his country’s flattest character…
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The Social Lives of Form
Over the past 15 years, the interest in form that has long characterized literary studies has grown into a movement in its own right—the so-called “new formalism.” While its generative debates are no longer exactly new, this formalist turn continues to ignite urgent and animated arguments. Three recent books explore not only how we might…
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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 French Algerians, derisively called pied-noirs, the flesh-and-blood symbol of French Colonial rule (1830–1956), still haunt the land they fought so viciously to keep…
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Love and Death in Indian Country
At its core, David Treuer’s latest novel is a tale of unrequited love and random violence. The stuff of melodrama, to be sure, but in Treuer’s skillful, multi-vocal telling, neither love nor death appears sensational or simple. Treuer, an Ojibwa writer from northern Minnesota, is the author of three other novels, a controversial work of…
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Can There Be a Feminist World?
The following is the lightly edited text of a lecture delivered on November 16, 2013, at the Columbia University Global Center in Amman, Jordan. I am pleased to be here at the Columbia Global Center in Amman. I lunched with the Vice President for Global Centers three days ago and told him, only half in…
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Marlon James’s Savage Business
The irony in the title of Marlon James’s new novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, is twofold. For one, this 686-page book is far from brief. On the contrary, it is a raucous, nearly …
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The Particular Obligations of the Spy Writer
For the bleeding edge of American epistemology, I look to the Central Intelligence Agency. In that regard, the spy service’s response to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s “torture report,” which documents abuses associated with the CIA’s detention and interrogation program in the early 2000s, didn’t disappoint. Did torture work, by whatever wretched metric applies in the…
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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 India—for volume two of the Mahatma’s life story. Gandhi, India, before, after: these titles quadrate nation and leader, time and space—a rather tame-looking matrix perhaps but one that…
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Lie Down in the Karoo: An Antidote to the Anthropocene
Simón and David, a man and a boy, arrive by boat to find a new life. David’s father perished in an accident during the trip. David had a letter giving specifics of his mother. This was also lost. It is, then, an undocumented migrant child accompanied by an unrelated adult who arrives at the inn,…
