Category: Topics

The Dirt, or, Matter Out of Place

Hannah Chadeayne Appel

In her 1966 book Purity and Danger, anthropologist Mary Douglas famously explains dirt as “matter out of place.” Dirt does not index an objective category of pathogens or pollutants she suggests, but rather the designation of “dirt” indexes a contravention to a social order, and by extension, its boundaries.

| Features

The People's Microphone

Hannah Chadeayne Appel

“Mic check!” The shouted exclamation punctuates the days at Occupy Wall Street (OWS). A lone voice yells it from somewhere in the crowd, soliciting the hoped-for response, “mic check!” yelled back by all within earshot of the initial call. Often the response is weak the first time around. Maybe the caller is surrounded by people new to the movement, who aren’t yet familiar with the rituals, or don’t yet feel comfortable making them their own; maybe the voices around her are tired, from so many days and weeks of the people’s microphone. But with a second, often more insistent call, “mic check!” the surrounding voices rise in response, “mic check!”

| Features

An Introduction

Hannah Chadeayne Appel

Occupy Wall Street’s numbers have swelled to thousands here in New York City, not to mention the Occupy Together Movement across the country. At the October 10th General Assembly meeting–held every evening at 7pm–the kitchen announced that it serves 2000 people free food every day. The Occupied Wall Street Journal is in its second edition, with the first also translated into Spanish.

| Features

I was a Wall Street zombie

Tavia Nyong'o

Technically, I never worked on Wall Street. But, for a difficult year in my early twenties, I did don a suit at the crack of dawn and schlep down to one bank or another in the financial district or, occasionally, to one of its outposts in Long Island City, Queens, or Stamford, CT. Citibank, Chase Manhattan, American Express, Swiss Bank. I was a perma-temp in a series of glorified secretarial pools, the highest paid work my liberal arts degree could secure me, even in the middle of the Nineties dot com boom.

| Features

Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor: An Interview with Rob Nixon

Ashley Dawson

Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor was published this spring by Harvard University Press. Nixon’s work has been crucial to articulating the conjunction — as well as the fault lines — between postcolonial studies and ecocriticism. … Continue reading “Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor: An Interview with Rob Nixon”

| Features: Interviews

London Calling…

Tariq Jazeel

It’s difficult to know how to begin to write about the last few days here in the UK. The disturbances — shall we call them ‘riots’, ‘protests’, ‘unrest’, ‘civil disobedience’, ‘mob violence’? — that started last Saturday in Tottenham, just … Continue reading “London Calling…”

| Features

History is what the Present is made of

Michael Mandiberg

An Interview with Matthew Frye Jacobson.

Michael Mandiberg: So tell us about the Historian’s Eye project…

Matthew Frye Jacobson: This started for me back in about 2007-2008. I was trying to think about different ways of getting intellectual work out in the world, continuous with all the writing I’ve done but in a different register. Read more

| Features: Interviews

Postcard: Expo 2010, Shanghai

Aubrey Anable

Last July, in the midst of a brutal heat wave, we visited the World Exposition in Shanghai. This was the first world’s fair ever hosted by the People’s Republic of China, and its government reportedly spent over $50 billion on the event, nearly twice the amount it spent on the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Given the sheer spectacle and diplomatic value of the games, and how little attention the 2010 Expo garnered in the U.S., this sum is staggering.

| Features