Review Essays
Most people are local in their orientations. They spend their days focused on work, school, the kids and their friends. They go to the movies and out to dinner. Under normal circumstances the attention paid to what is happening on the other side of the proverbial hill goes little beyond an occasional tut-tut at the…
Read Full Article...Review Essay Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush by Robert Draper; Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency by Lou Dubose and Jack Bernstein Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy by Andrew Cockburn. When George W. Bush became president, an Australian friend wrote to me, perplexed. She asked, “How…
Read Full Article...Terrorism is a low-cost tactic of coercion and fear that almost anyone anywhere can adopt. It takes only a few highly motivated individuals to shatter the security of millions. It is also a tactic that drives governments to extremes of paranoia and into morally repugnant terrain. So great is the fear of this method of…
Read Full Article...The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery (1855) exemplifies—both in its content and reception— the kind of uncomfortable, status quo-defying denunciation which is subjected to erasure, suppression, or misrepresentation. Even though its questions and provocations about 19th-century American slave society have never truly been addressed by the systems…
Read Full Article...Toyin Falola’s book Global Yoruba: Regional and Diasporic Networks is a landmark in Yoruba Studies, and almost certainly going to become a permanent point of reference. It is an epic book, unparalleled, to the best of my knowledge, in its breadth in exploring the natal, larger African and diasporic development of Yoruba history and culture, emphasizing the growth of…
Read Full Article...Like Moliere’s M. Jourdain speaking prose without knowing it, classic writers were unwittingly doing ecocriticism for centuries before the genre burst forth onto the academic scene in the early 1990s. From Virgil’s Georgics to John Clare to Thoreau to Rachel Carson, sensitive people had actually noticed that they were living on and from the primal…
Read Full Article...Works Discussed: Richard Seymour, Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization Siddhartha Deb, Twilight Prisoners: The Rise of the Hindu Right and the Fall of India Over 2,000 people, overwhelmingly Muslim, were slaughtered in the 2002 riots that swept through the western Indian state of Gujarat. As detailed by Richard Seymour in Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of…
Read Full Article...The war between Israel and Hamas, Hezbollah, the expansion of hostilities into Lebanon and the missile assault on Israel by Iran have thrust the Jewish state foremost into the headlines. It has also sown new divisions in the American social and political fabric, further exacerbating tensions and hatred in what is already a deeply divided…
Read Full Article...Works Discussed: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Heretical Aesthetics: Pasolini on Painting, edited and translated by Ara H. Merjian and Alessandro Giammei Ara H. Merjian, Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art, and Neocapitalism The first part of Heretical Aesthetics actually recycles the title of the first section in Ara H. Merjian’s previous, much lengthier, volume, purportedly on…
Read Full Article...In the 2019 UK General Election, beleaguered by a concerted campaign of print and broadcast media attacks, enfeebled by in-party subterfuge, and twisted inside out over how to resolve the salient issue of Brexit, a ragged and limpen Labour Party succumbed to a heavy defeat. Jeremy Corbyn, the first politician proposing a break from neoliberal orthodoxy to front…
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Latest Issue
2025: Vol. 24, No. 1-2
Latest Issue
2025: Vol. 24, No. 1-2
Between The Issues
