There was something of a direct line between the anti-Dreyfusards of the 1890s and the Vichy Regime that delivered Jews to the Nazis by the thousands in the 1940s. In that instance, too, justice ultimately prevailed, albeit once again in a tardy fashion, this time, though, a tardiness the devastating consequences of which were incalculable. And now, with the recent successes of Brexit and Trump, it seemed as though the pendulum was swinging towards intolerance once more. [read full essay]
There is very little that the mind feels which the body does not reflect – in heat up the stomach, chill across the skin, weight in your chest. It is no wonder that we are so obsessed with sex, when it allows the connection between the body and the mind to be felt in unified action, when it is a moment where we can lose inhibitions, time, our very selves – plunging into, as Eimear McBride described it recently, the ‘God-knows-where’. It’s impossible to fully narrate the experience –... [read more]
In her recent interview with Ralf Webb in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Emily Berry discusses the problematics of considering poetry as ‘autobiographical’. Berry says:
I reject that term in relation to poetry, because it doesn’t seem to fit. An autobiography is meant to be an account of a person’s life, and, on the whole, you’re not going to get a poem that is a straight description of a person’s life — it’s usually an essence of that.
We settle, then, on a term coined... [read more]
Erik Mortenson, Ambiguous Borderlands: Shadow Imagery in Cold War American Culture
reviewed by Douglas Field
In ‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’, (1949) James Baldwin described America as a ‘country devoted to the death of the paradox.’ Writing during the early stages of the Cold War, Baldwin recognised the Manichean structures of US politics and culture which upheld rigid distinctions between black and white, American and Un-American, gay and straight. While Baldwin’s work critiqued such neat divisions for ‘overlooking, denying, evading . . . complexity,’ a number of his contemporaries,... [read more]
Stefan Collini is Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at Cambridge and one of Britain’s foremost public intellectuals. His emphasis as a public intellectual has recently shifted from modern intellectual history to the higher education system, specifically the analysis and critique of the causes and consequences of the Browne Review in 2010. Speaking of Universities follows What are Universities For? (2012), and Collini has also expressed his concern with the direction... [read more]
Nancy Green & Roger Waldinger eds., A Century of Transnationalism: Immigrants and their Homeland Connections
reviewed by Susan Burton
I began reading this book in my dentist's waiting room. He's a Swede who commutes to the United Kingdom weekly to tend his NHS practice. Afterwards, I drove into town in my South Korean Hyundai car, which was manufactured in India. I bought some T-shirts in Primark, the labels of which say they were made in Bangladesh. Then I drove home where my neighbours, mostly health workers at the nearby hospital, are German, Singaporean Chinese, Nigerian and Albanian. In the evening, I watched a news... [read more]
When a small press starts a pamphlet series with a publication about a fictional Nintendo Entertainment System character, we know we are entering into the realm of the niche interest. ‘I wonder if I am capable/ of love. I take meals,/inside of me – I don’t make eye contact, /or speak,’ delivers the poem’s speaker, a tiny 2D action figure in the original 8-bit NES game but here in this 'fifteen part persona poem' expressed with a psychology that is human in its neurosis. Lines like... [read more]
Kathleen Collins, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?
reviewed by Lucie Elliott
Whatever happened to Interracial Love? is the title of Kathleen Collins’ collection of short stories and a question posed throughout. The stories were written between 1970 and 1980, published for the first time in the UK by Granta, almost 40 years since their conception and 30 years since Collins’s untimely death at 46. Collins had worked as an editor, a French teacher and Film professor at CCNY; she was also a playwright, known in academic circles as a pioneer in black independent... [read more]
Heads up, Cara Hoffman’s Running is not about that deeply middle-class pastime of putting on trainers and hoofing a 5k with other well-fed, health-minded locals. Running in Hoffman’s book is lying – it’s a hustle – done by a cast of wasters who work the inbound trains, selling unsuspected tourists on low-end hotels in the red-light district of Athens, Greece. In exchange, these kids get a little drinking money and a roof over their heads. It’s a close-to-the-bone existence that... [read more]
Eric Foner, Battles for Freedom: The Use and Abuse of American History
reviewed by Tom Cutterham
Born to a family of communists and labour organisers in 1940s New York, and trained as a historian there in the 1960s, Eric Foner has for the best part of a generation been one of the leading historians both in and of the United States. His retirement from Columbia University last year has provided a number of opportunities to reflect on Foner's towering intellectual achievements – including a conference in his honour at Columbia this month, and this book, which collects some of his... [read more]
Haun Saussy, The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and Its Technologies
reviewed by James Williams
In its subtitle, ‘Orality and Its Technologies,’ The Ethnography of Rhythm anticipates comparisons to what doubtless remains the most familiar touchstone in discussions of orality, Walter J. Ong’s 1982 work Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Haun Saussy’s account, though, amounts to a deft sidestepping of some of the temptation toward grander narrative which Ong’s classic reading may provoke. Instead of insisting upon any sharp distinction between orality and... [read more]
