“Despite its confrontational and cathartic aesthetics, Moor Mother’s music does not hold any immediate revolutionary promise. It rather makes us hear the impasse we’re in while also struggling not to be of it”
Category: History
[Essay] Glaring White: Class and Race in Chinese Beauty Ideals — Chelsea Xu
“Growing up, I was told the first rule of being a cute little Chinese girl is to have pale skin.”
[Essay] After “Life and Fate” — Margo Berdeshevsky
“I rock inside, a child again. Daughter of a man born in Ukraine who always said he was Russian.”
[Essay] The ‘everlastinge Posterytie’ of Thomas Chatterton: George Rawlins’s ‘Cheapside Afterlife’ — Josh Mcloughlin
“Rawlins’s powerful sonnet sequence of ‘imagined history’ is a fitting tribute to Chatterton’s forged fictions.”
[Essay] Empire after Empire: The Endless Desert of Settler Indigenisation in Nomadland — Patrick Turner
“Ultimately, Nomadland’s affective impact, and the sense of authenticity felt in McDormand’s performance should be understood within a colonialist standard of authenticity rooted in the indigenisation of whiteness – and the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty.”
[Essay] Goya’s Greyhounds — Michael McGinley-Hughes
“The cover of Blur’s ‘Parklife’ shows us how far the greyhound has travelled: from the palaces of Pharaohs and the forests of Hapsburg kings to the humble English dog track.”
[Review] 06C33 by Sofia Amina — Josh Mcloughlin
“The weight of ancestry and history press down on Amina’s reflections as she carries, quarries, and questions the burden of cultural inheritance: ‘Where does my history begin?’”
[Essay] Once Again, the Western — Ben Lewellyn-Taylor
“White male anxiety about an impending age where his place is not solidified is nothing new. We know this story too well, yet on screen white men go on killing, their violent delights our supposed entertainment.”
[Essay] W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk and the ‘Veil of Race’ — Tia Byer
“For Du Bois, the abolition of slavery may have freed black people from bondage, but the Reconstruction era that followed served only to disempower black people and perpetuate racial conflict.”
[Essay] On Prefaces in Kant, Hegel & Nietzsche — Josh Mcloughlin
“Prefaces in Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche construct ‘a sense of time’, a conception of the history of philosophy unfolding in the dyadic interplay of crisis and critique”
[Essay] The Teratologists — Louis Armand
“Post-war nuclear technologies represented the first instance in which direct transformation or even control of the planetary environment came into view as a scientifically achievable proposition.”
[Essay] ‘Dominic Cummings must be sacked’: Contemporary Political Engagement and Early Modern Petitions — Ellen Paterson
“Widespread anger over evil counsellors and the exercise of agency via petitioning that dominate contemporary political discourse have fascinating antecedents in Elizabethan and Jacobean England.”
[Essay] The Adviser’s Hubris: Cummings’s Cromwellian Machinations — Josh Mcloughlin
“Following on from Johnson’s turn as the sacrificial lamb, Cummings treads the political boards as contemporary history’s schemer-in-chief, thrasonical and hubristic in the advertisement of his unassailable power.”
[Essay] ‘…And now I am cast as a ghost’: Spectre(s) of India in Midnight’s Children — Seamus McGinley-Hughes
“The text delves into the recesses of primordial memory, cuts up and rearranges history and figures nation as dream; memory, history, and nation inform, antagonise, and haunt each other.”
[Essay] Boris the Ditherer: Covid-19, Sovereignty, and the State of Exception — Josh Mcloughlin
“An abject figure, Johnson will serve as an object-lesson in political impotence, a catastrophic failure of the decision-making imperative that is supposed to underpin sovereignty.”
[Essay] Kidnapping North Korean Cinema: Kim Jong-il, Shin Sang-ok and Choi Eun-hee — Hannah Streck
“Kim Jong-Il, the all-powerful fan-boy, kidnapped his favourite artists to make movies that would put North Korea on the cinematic map.”
[Essay] Unamerican Fictions: All that is Solid Melts into Weird — Louis Armand
“Thor Garcia’s novel is a swan song for an amnesiac America’s ‘innocence regained’, afforded by the supposed victory over the communist USSR; a kind of ‘fear and loathing’ in the age of hyperreality.”
[Review] Age of Anger by Pankaj Mishra — Will Moffitt
“Beginning with Rousseau as the archetypal exemplar of ressentiment, Mishra initiates a thrilling 300-page journey spanning four centuries that intertwines tales of German nationalists, Russian revolutionaries, Italian fascists, and a host of other anarchist terrorists.”
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