Once confined to the arcane recesses of literary theory seminar rooms and abstruse academic journals, postcolonialism can say today that it is thoroughly in vogue. More than mere lingo for the self-righteous pseudo-left, it is now the policy for academic administrators who cannot seem to get on the bus fast enough. Even amidst the vigorous…

Repeating Revolutions examines how France’s revolutionary past became a working political language during Algeria’s struggle for decolonization from the 1930s through the 1960s. Johnson’s central claim is that invocations of “1789” mattered because they operated as historical analogies that shaped political perception and legitimated action. Defenders of empire appealed to revolutionary universalism to portray French…

In this book, philosopher William Paris develops an account of racial injustice that centers the relationship between freedom and time. In his own words, Paris aims to “develop the hypothesis that racial domination is at bottom the domination of time by one group over another and thus emancipation must entail delivering the control of time…

A chapter by comic artist Kevin Pyle in the new graphic non-fiction collection Partisans centers on the “spomeniks,” massive, abstract concrete monuments that the Communist dictator Tito commissioned all over postwar Yugoslavia. Some 14,000 in all, the spomeniks were the new regime’s way of simultaneously commemorating the sacrifice of the anti-fascist partisans during World War…

Perhaps now, a decade or so since the landmark study of a unique but mostly forgotten director, can the importance of Edgar Ulmer be appreciated.  Or perhaps not. Ulmer so successfully evades categorization, and dwelt so often and long in the low-production-value world of films, that he has not yet truly emerged as an important…