The frenzied pace of the news cycle in the age of Trump has a magnetic pull that makes it hard to take a step back and think strategically about the recent history of popular anti-capitalist and anti-racist struggles that have … Continue reading “Against Racial Capitalism, from Occupy to the Present”
I wanted to show you something that would give you pleasure the kind of pleasure I sometimes feel listening to Joanna Brouk or standing in the middle of a gallery in the Met not focusing on a particular art work … Continue reading “from a feeling called heaven“
I am told that Brussels is the new Berlin, what Berlin was twenty years ago. What this person means is that it is the only spot left in Europe where artists can afford to be artists. I walk to the … Continue reading “Journal from Brussels and Paris”
If I have to hear another argument about the relative importance of race versus class, I’ll scream. Long a staple of graduate theory seminars, late-night Facebook rants, and the various circular firing squads of the Left, the argument exploded into … Continue reading “Towards an Insurgent Politics of the Particular: A Review of Asad Haider’s Mistaken Identity“
In the face of structural dispossession and intensified border regimes, what does it mean to demand or to defy “more visibility” and “better representation” as an undocumented migrant? This is a central question in Rebecca M. Schreiber’s recently published The … Continue reading “Reconfiguring Representation: Rebecca M. Schreiber’s The Undocumented Everyday“
In January 2016, I had the opportunity to dialogue over email with sound artists Mendi and Keith Obadike. We discussed their site-specific work, Blues Speaker [for James Baldwin](2015), jointly commissioned by the Harlem Stage and the Vera List Center for … Continue reading “On Blues Speaker [for James Baldwin]: A Conversation with Mendi and Keith Obadike”
Author’s note: Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh (13 November 1917 – 11 September 1964) was a Hindi poet, a literary critic and theorist, a short story writer, and a journalist who wrote extensively on the geopolitics of the period. A concerted Marxist … Continue reading “Translating “To a Formless Void” by G. M. Muktibodh”
“When they go low, we go to war.” —Anonymous “This is a show tune, but the show hasn’t been written for it yet.” —Nina Simone 1. Incivility is anger directed at unjust civil ordering. It is a rage directed at … Continue reading “Eleven Theses on Civility”
The following is an edited interview between Jordan Alexander Stein, associate professor of English at Fordham University, and Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox–just out from One World–and professor of eighteenth century literature, gender and sexuality studies, and … Continue reading “Jordan Alexander Stein in Conversation with Jordy Rosenberg”
Two events made this year’s month of March a densely political one in Italy. On 4 March, the general election resulted in a hung Parliament, but saw the definite political victory of Italy’s two main populist parties: the Five Star … Continue reading “From Trilateral to Troika, and from the Five-Pointed Star to the Five Star Movement”
On Hunter of Stories. 2017. By Eduardo Galeano. Translated by Mark Fried. Nation Books. The late Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano made it his life’s mission to come up with an alternate history of Latin America, one that relied more on … Continue reading “Stalking History”
I love my child but I will always love my father more. I love my child and this is why I learn to keep her good face clean. As you clean your face remember to move your hands toward your … Continue reading “Look at What You’ve Done”
On Cape Verde, Let’s Go: Creole Rappers and Citizenship in Portugal. 2015. By Derek Pardue. University of Illinois Press. As Europe grapples with an apparently inexorable wave of ethnic nationalist politics in response to its so-called immigrant crisis, the question … Continue reading “Musical Migrancy”
F Rations Crippled little spheriod super-capsule unsafe to outlive, the whole body the WHOLE BODY of a strong people presents you with this old gift certificate gene, we trillion as one willed it to be spliced into tin can F … Continue reading “Three Poems”
On James Baldwin: The FBI File. 2017. Edited by William J. Maxwell. Arcade Books. “Isn’t Baldwin a well-known pervert?” So wrote FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in a 1964 internal FBI memo, a single page in a file that extended … Continue reading “Baldwin’s FBI Blues”
