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Euphoria’s Minor Mother
Euphoria debuted on HBO in 2019, meeting with almost universal critical acclaim. The show is a teen drama that explicitly confronts controversial subjects like drug addiction, abusive relationships, and mental illness. At the show’s center is its narrator and...
Apocalypse Songs: On the Music of Algiers
Algiers are, unmistakably, a band well-acquainted with late capitalism’s structure of feeling. Journalists who dubbed their sound “dystopian groove” summed them up accurately. Their distinct, post-punk mélange of electro, gospel, and old school R&B is wrapped in a...
Beyond the Doomsday Machine: Teaching Literature Now
Literary study offers an opportunity to suspend disbelief, to imagine the world not as it is, but as it could be. This is the line I write on the syllabus for every undergraduate English course I teach. I want to make the case to my students, most of whom are not...
Beyond the Photographs: New Perspectives on Travel
Cambodia is the land of Angkor Wat, a World Heritage Site more widely known than the country itself. “City of the Gods” and “Kingdom of Wonder;” these are some of the ways in which the temple complex has been described. I remember first seeing pictures of it at a...
Challenging Patriarchy in María de Zayas’s “Novelas”
The virtual archival exhibit Wise and Valiant: Women and Writing in the Spanish Golden Age, curated by Ana M. Rodríguez-Rodríguez in collaboration with the Cervantes Institute and the National Library of Spain, acknowledges that women writers of the Spanish Golden Age...
Lessons Learned from a Self-Plagiarist
This past year, writer’s block hit me more acutely than ever. Time I had blocked off to write became day-long reading sprees and, when that felt too mentally taxing, hours of binge watching. Clearly, I needed help. That’s why I picked up Imagine: How Creativity...
Pilgrims at the Plantation
“The moment you’ve been waiting for!” Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Aaron Burr announces in Act I of Hamilton. “The pride of Mount Vernon: George Washington,” who stomps, stern and capable, onto the stage. (Thanks, Disney+.)There’s little new left to observe about the...
REVELATIONS in Isolation
In late March, faced with the new shelter-in-place order and only a faint understanding of the damage COVID-19 was to bring, I turned to my mother’s bookcase for a chance to escape. Luckily, I live with a parent who is a writer, poet, and voracious reader. Her...
Sacrificial Motherhood and Bodily Autonomy
Deolinda Correa trudged across the arid Cuyo Valley in search of her husband, her infant son in tow. While her initial goal was the pursuit of her husband, who had been forcibly conscripted by a regional caudillo — a strongman who rules by force and a cult of...
Science Fiction as an Abolitionist Tool
While accepting the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014, Ursula K. Le Guin called for science-fiction writers to use their power of imagination to envision a world no longer constricted by the inherent...
The Limits of Urbanism
Some books are published at the wrong time. Richard Sennett’s and Pablo Sendra’s Designing Disorder: Experiments and Disruption in the City is one such book. Published by Verso during the early peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in April, the work is a type of manifesto...
Young, Black, and Magical: The Renaissance of YA Afrofuturism and Speculative Fiction
In the late 2010s, an explosion of young adult (YA) novels by Black women flooded through a previously White-dominated sphere, topping publisher lists week after week. Novels like Nicola Yoon’s The Sun Is Also a Star (2016), Nic Stone’s Dear Martin (2017), Angie...