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Challenging the Peripheral: Reading Assam in Reema Rajbanshi’s Sugar, Smoke, Song
Growing up in the capital city of Guwahati, Assam, life was marked by recurring floods and occasional violence, shaping a unique resilience in middle-class girls like us. We were taught two critical lessons with utmost seriousness: never to venture out...
Can Everyone Travel? What it Means to Travel the World as an African
I was just a tourist, and a black one at that.—Ọlábísí Àjàlá, An African Abroad (1963)In a picture from the 1960s, Ọlábísí Àjàlá, a Nigerian journalist, travel writer, actor, and socialite, poses on his scooter in New Delhi, India. The inscriptions on the vehicle are...
An Eye on AI
What makes AI images a strange invention is their innate inscrutability. What we see in these pictures cannot be said to have existed. Unlike photographs, AI images do not result from light falling on material surfaces; they are functions of algorithms and databases,...
Cemetery: A Colonial Time Portal
All India is full of neglected graves that date from the beginning of the eighteenth century—tombs of forgotten colonels of corps long since disbanded; mates of East India men who went on shooting expeditions and never came back; factors, agents, writers, and ensigns...
Countercultural Chronotopes of Thomas Pynchon
The 1950s in the United States, marked by the post-World War II economic boom, were characterized by pressures to conform, Cold War fears, and increasing government surveillance. By the 1960s, the United States was primed for a revolution in thought and expression. As...
Revis[it]ing the Slave Narrative: The Past and Future of Octavia Butler’s Kindred
Octavia Butler’s groundbreaking 1979 novel Kindred follows the main character Dana, a contemporary Black writer in Los Angeles, as she is pulled across time and space to the Maryland slave plantation where her ancestors lived. Through Dana’s story, Butler uses the...
Elizabeth Stoddard’s Unruly Girlhood
Weird girls are having a literary moment. A search for “weird girl books” on TikTok confirms this, yielding hundreds of videos celebrating the genre. Authors like Mona Awad, Sayaka Murata, and Ottessa Moshfegh feature heavily. These books vary widely in content but...
Poetics of the Data/Body: Intimating Data Visualization After the Post-Internet Turn
When I was a kid, “internet” was still written with a capital “I,” the Internet, like a first-person pronoun, a discrete selfhood. And I was on it. Before Lev Manovich situated algorithms as organized expressions of culture, a kind of spell for transmuting reality...
Writing The Distance
Originally an act of defiance, I began riding bikes religiously in fall 2012, when I enrolled in courses at Mission, Pierce, and Valley College so I wouldn’t have to commute by bus. I was (and still am) undocumented, and President Obama’s executive order, Deferred...
The Most Alive Dead Band of All
Eight years after their first tour in 2015, Dead & Company are calling it quits this summer. Their final shows are scheduled for July 14, 15, and 16 at San Francisco’s Oracle Park. The John Mayer–fronted reunion act, which includes all surviving permanent members,...
Still
You have the same face. It’s as if she never left, says Tío Jorge as he pulls me in for an embrace in front of the El Salvador International Airport. His verbose laugh echoes my mother’s in Los Angeles. This familiarity in a stranger helps me lean into his embrace....
More Than Just Words and Numbers
The snails were in different places. I knelt on Mrs. V.’s living room couch watching the tetras school around blue-finned guppies and yellow mollies in the fish tank. I frowned—there were more snails today. I tried to look through the fish tank to next Tuesday, but...