Reading Michael Allan’s In the Shadow of World Literature, I thought of two competing ways to understand political impasses. On…
The contested worlds of world literature
Edward Said
Criticism and catastrophe
Rather than a cosmopolitan space where all national literary traditions can finally cohabitate on an equal footing, world literature is…
On inclusion
In a recent piece in The New York Times’ column The Stone, philosophers Jay L. Garfield and Bryan W. Van…
The Help, ethnography, and ickiness
This is a post about the politics of representation, postcolonial theory, and the Hollywood movie, The Help. And it begins…
Why I don’t read non-fiction from Barnes and Noble, and why that’s a problem for public scholarship; or, what I learned in third grade about epistemology and essentialization
I have not been interested in the Barnes and Noble non-fiction section for a long time. There might be a…