Tag
Duke University Press
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“Courage or Foolhardiness”: Talking Aimé Césaire with Alex Gil
“This way of going about prophecy sadly replaces the historical fact of Black victory with a timeless failed rebellion. Too bleak, if you ask me.”
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Lessons from Haiti on Living and Dying
If he had to write The Black Jacobins again, C. L. R. James “would only give Toussaint [Louverture] a walk-on part.”
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In the Library of Lévi-Strauss
The walls were lined with books, as one might expect. Among them were a number of wooden masks, woven baskets, and a tapestry of a bodhisattva. The desk was …
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What Did We See in Color TV?
For those seeking to break up with their phones, or just decrease their screen time, tech ethicist Tristan Harris recommends starting with a quick technological fix …
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Getting to the Party in Time
The best parties, L. O. Aranye Fradenburg Joy claims in her epilogue to Jonathan Goldberg’s Sappho: ]fragments, are the after-parties: the parties that happen …
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Autism Aesthetics
About 10 years ago, I began to get impatient with disability studies. The field was still relatively young, but it seemed devoted almost entirely to analyzing how disability was represented—in art, in culture, in politics, et cetera—especially in the case of physical disability. This, I thought, fell short of the field’s promise for literary studies.…
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The World the Gulf Has Built
The viewing platform of the Burj Khalifa, currently the tallest building in the world, provides an exceptional view. On a clear day, you can see Dubai’s towers …
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Against Human Capital
My parents were on the brink of retirement at the same time as I was researching pension strategies in Israel. So, I couldn’t help thinking about them whenever retirees were discussed. It made things difficult for me, because every insurance agent and pension-fund manager I’d interviewed circled back to the same point: people were living…
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When Did Nature Become Moral?
When did nature become a good for cities? When did city dwellers start imagining nature to be something they were missing? Today, urbanites’ moral associations …
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Impossible Belonging
If the sharp end of critique’s job is to name injury, then it also has a soft lining that is oriented around recovery and repair. Even if a particular critical project stays with injury rather than whatever might come after, what else is there to want, in the wake of naming injury, but to fix…
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Newspapers and Northern Lights
In 1818 John Ross pointed the ship Isabella toward the Northwest Passage and opened up the Arctic exploration mania; the Shackleton-Rowett expedition of …
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Public Picks 2019
Each year around this time we send our readers into summer with a curated list of the titles that dazzled, challenged, and inspired us most over the past year. For this, the seventh-annual edition of Public Picks, we’ve asked our editors for the Public Thinker series, Literary Fiction, Higher Education, Children’s & Young Adult Literature,…
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Baldwin’s Children
James Baldwin’s recently reissued picture book, Little Man, Little Man, positions itself within a larger textual world. In this sweet and lively story of four-year-old TJ and his friends on a summer …
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“There Is a Scottsboro in Every Country”
When we speak about a future in which all black people in America can be free, it’s hard to picture how, exactly, that freedom might look. Many black communists …
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More Nurture, Less Nature?
What if genes weren’t the perfect blueprint we’ve been led to believe they are? What if your body was constantly being shaped by its environment? What if your children’s …
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“A Gun to Our Heads”
On October 13, 2016, Almir Suruí, then chief of the Paiter Suruí indigenous people of northwest Brazil, issued a panicked appeal. “This is my cry of alarm, please listen to me!” he wrote to national and international authorities and environmentalists. “We are undergoing a total invasion of deforesters and miners of diamonds and gold.” Each day 300 trucks enter…
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Black Speculation, Black Freedom
Many black scholars—especially those who study black life, history, and culture—would recognize an uncomfortable and familiar situation that epitomizes …
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Are Sharp Women Enough?
Twitter was a medium made for Dorothy Parker—alas, a century too late. Her famous poem “Resumé” is 141 characters. Her breakout feature in Vanity Fair, a series of Hate Songs, begs for a hashtag …
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Black Women Leaders, Then and Now
In August 1966, Ebony magazine published an entire issue devoted to “The Negro Woman.” In it was an article by television personality and journalist …
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Our Drones, Ourselves
Drones have changed modern warfare almost beyond recognition. In the 19th century, the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz likened war to “a duel on a larger scale,” but drones do away with chivalry, removing one of the duelists from danger and subjecting the other to a barrage of missiles.1 Thus, according to the philosopher Grégoire…
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Global Water Wars and the Public Good
Future global water wars are now widely predicted. In 1995, Ismail Seragaldin, vice president of the World Bank (1993–2000), first raised the specter of crisis with the …
