Tag
Nationalism
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Style and Politics: On “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America”
The National Security Strategy of the United States of America may have its longest life as a particularly vivid example of the ways in which bad faith will always manifest in terrible prose.
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Difficult Empathies
“What would a successful war novel look like? This question concealed a deeper question I had: What would a truthful Kashmir novel look like?”
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Migrant Lives, Global Stories
How can migrants speak? And what can listening to them reveal about the system of national sovereignty, the persistence of legal exclusion, and the longing for home?
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“Mississippi Masala” @30: Revisiting a Film Classic in Authoritarian Times
What might it mean to forge a politics explicitly based in the places we are, rather than a politics of the places from which we came?
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Hindu Nationalism: A Movement, Not a Mandate
Most authoritarian populists in power across the world are politicians, at the helm of parties that have won elections. Modi is more than that.
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The Manifest Destiny of Computing
Today is overwhelmingly defined by white-supremacist violence and the whiteness of AI technology. Can seeing them together help defeat them both?
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Hope and Capital: Talking India with Ravinder Kaur
“Anyone who comes in the way of the ‘good times’ becomes a threat to capital, and to the nation-state itself.”
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Ethnographic Fictions: Talking with Megha Majumdar
Anthropology’s attention to the granular texture of someone’s life is a beautiful training for being a fiction writer.[none-for-homepage]
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Membership, Citizenship, and Democracy
President Trump’s pernicious attacks on nonwhite immigrants have thrust a particular theory of political membership—white nationalism—to the forefront …
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Bake, Britannia
Eighteen years ago, in Borneo, Kelly Wiglesworth told a camera crew that she didn’t come to make friends, she came to win. This iconic moment from Survivor defined much of the nearly two decades of reality TV that would follow …
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Stadium Arts
On the way into Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium during this year’s World Cup, spectators found FIFA’s flagship Fan Shop in an unlikely spot: at the feet of a monumental statue to Lenin. The irony was unmistakable, but the effect was strangely appropriate. Here, embodied, was the paradox of Russia in the eyes of its foreign visitors:…
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Ondaatje’s Long War
In a scathing review of The English Patient, Hilary Mantel called Michael Ondaatje’s most feted work “uneven, unresolved, unsatisfactory.” Her criticism has since become a regular complaint about the …
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When the Klan Returns
For nearly a century, the 1920s Ku Klux Klan has seemed an exception that proves a rule. Far-right movements typically eschew electoral politics, as earlier and later waves of the Klan also did. But in the 1920s the Klan ran successful candidates for state and local offices. The US far right has generally found its…
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The Invention of the “White Working Class”
As liberals came to terms with what happened on Election Day 2016, early press reports focused on the so-called white working class. We’d seen these …
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The Pocketbook Illustrations of the Rebel Artist B. M. Anand
This photo-essay was originally published in The Caravan. The featured artwork has been excerpted from Aditi Anand and Grant Pooke, Narratives for Indian Modernity: The Aesthetic of Brij Mohan Anand (HarperCollins India, 2016). Born in 1928, the artist Brij Mohan Anand was greatly informed by the political and social climate around him. Anand grew up…
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The Citizenship Business
In April 2015, men in hazmat suits and safety masks buried over two dozen bodies on the Mediterranean island-nation of Malta. The waterlogged corpses, victims of a capsized dinghy, had been desperate migrants fleeing poverty and war in Syria, Libya, and Sub-Saharan Africa. The bodies interred in Malta were just a few of the thousands…
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Turkey’s Progressive Past
In her posthumously published memoir, written in the late 1960s, the journalist Sabiha Sertel reflected on her life in exile from Turkey, her home country. She had lived through a period of authoritarian rule led by a man whose attempt to transform the country into a Western-style democracy had forced her and others into exile,…
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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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“Sharing” the Israeli Occupation
In April of 2014, an Israeli combat soldier from the Nahal Brigade named David Adamov was captured on camera violently threatening a Palestinian teenager in Hebron. After a video of the event posted on YouTube went viral, Adamov was suspended by the military. His suspension instigated a social media protest, with soldiers from his unit…
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Virtual Roundtable on the Library of Korean Literature
In this virtual roundtable, edited and introduced by Seo Hee Im, Koreanists and scholars of world literature reflect on five writers recently published in the Library of Korean Literature series by Dalkey Archive Press. • Joe Cleary on Choi In-hun, The Square • Wai Chee Dimock on Lee Ki-ho, At Least We Can Apologize •…
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Russia, Today: Part 1
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 West. But as ideologues on either side spread their messages through international organizations and news media, it has become increasingly difficult to…
