Batman Occupied
...the serial killers and terrorists, and they too are becoming stale in their repetition. Jameson, however, is wrong about politics being forbidden in mass culture. The Dark Knight Rises is...
Us and Them
...now falls to terrorists, not novelists, to “alter the inner life of the culture.” If the attacks of the last decade have prompted many to perceive a world divided between...
"It Continues Not To End": Time, Poetry, and the ICC Witness Project
...of Kenyan and African literature more broadly. Second, the historical. This text is very much of a particular moment in Kenyan literary culture, what I would characterize as the disillusionment...
Migratory Words
...speak the language, you understand the culture much better. At the same time, I’m an outsider, because it’s not where I’m from. It’s not my heritage. So I have to...
Judging Books by Their Covers
...They want to carry the book around with them. They want to treasure it for its value not only as knowledge and culture but also as a weight in the...
Sunday Reading
...deep book Exit Capitalism: Literary Culture, Theory, and Post-Secular Modernity. Taibbi on that Goldman executive I liked this movie. Had a half blog post about the way the movie has...
Africa39: We Have New Names
...have lost, whether it is language and culture, or land and nation. And their writing is an attempt to recover a lost known object. But the Africa39 writers do not...
The Whitney Biennial for Angry Women
...the belief in the universal, a pure idea arrived at by a series of white men who have combed through culture and curated its worth. Another face we’ll call visual...
Groupthinkers
A review of Divining Desire (OR Books) by Liza Featherstone
Sunday Reading
...Lives in Poverty is a pretty serious indictment of the "amateur" athletic culture of the Olympics. I sort of get the feeling that the writer doesn't know it. "No political...
Secondary Modern
...art to turn in on itself, away from common experience, and to make itself its own subject. Art, thus separated from culture, requires a social elite to support it and...
The Shanzhai Lyric
...China has long been known for its vibrant counterfeit culture. The “World’s Factory” produces iPhones, Uniqlo and Gucci, but also Pardo, Muimui and Diro. “Copycat” or shanzhai brands are at...
The Principle of Our Negative Solidarity
...culture predicated less on collective projects and more on developing a name for oneself. In the years since then, as our projects progressed (his made it to print first), we...
Tim Burton's "Big Eyes"
...secret (an open secret, apparently) — "from her own daughter!" even. He capitalizes on a sexist culture to take credit for Margaret's ability, and then uses the specter of that...
A Deluxe Apartment in the Sky
...family, whose upper class suburban environment has, he explains in voiceover, caused them “drop a little of [their] culture.” His eldest son favors field hockey over basketball and has adapted...
Not All Nerds
...technical professionals. It’s also during this period that the character type of the “nerd” appeared in popular culture for the first time. The nerd, keyed to facility in math and...