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”
The great colonial empires of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were, of course, brutal engines for the extraction of rents, crops, and minerals from tropical countrysides. Colonial cities and entrepôts, although often vast, sprawling, and dynamic, were demographically rather … Continue reading “The Urbanization of Empire: MEGACITIES AND THE LAWS OF CHAOS”
This essay is intended both as a specific study of interconnected moments in nineteenth-century British literature and as an opportunity to explore the cultural and political imagination of a people and its sites of production, reproduction, or transformation. Taking our … Continue reading “Edward Said, Reuben Sachs, and Victorian Zionism”
The Palestinian town of Ramallah, possibly on the lowest rung of urban hierarchies in the region, is a peripheral town trying to become a city on the fringes of the Arab world. Its nascent new middle class partakes enthusiastically in … Continue reading “Urban Modernity on the Periphery: A New Middle Class Reinvents the Palestinian City”
I saw Miral, the new film by Julian Schnabel last week. It was opening in New York and Los Angeles, to great controversy, as it was advertised as giving us a Palestinian point of view. My ears perked up when I … Continue reading “Painfully Beautiful”