The language must be careful and must appear effortless. It must not sweat. It must suggest and be provocative at the same time. It is the thing that black people love so much—the saying of words, holding them on the tongue, experimenting with them, playing with them. It’s a love, a passion. Its function is […]
2014 – 2015 Fall 2014 100 Level – Reading Generically: Modern Short Prose (Tutorial) Fall 2014 High 100 level – Disturbing the Peace: Baldwin, Morrison, and a Black Literary Tradition Spring 2015 100 Level – Representing Reality: The Literature of Kleist and Kafka Spring 2015 200 Level -Â The Idea of Europe: Readings in the 20th […]
This is an article that was published in 2012 after a truly rigorous peer review process. Identity as Cultural Production in Andrea Levy’s Small Island Abstract: Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004) presents a counter-history of the period before and after World War II (1939-1945) when men and women from the Caribbean volunteered for all branches of the […]
I need to process this but I must first offer it to you…. A terrific essay by Rebecca Wanzo of Washington University: On the Passing of a Black Intellectual As Hall once framed the argument in a discussion of his own field, “against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God’s name […]
This is the obituary of the cultural critic and sociologist published today in The Guardian. A good document that explores some of the same themes that I do in my article on Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londonders. That is, the ‘familiar stranger,’ a trope that is the inheritance of diasporic peoples from the German sociologist, Georg […]
Much of my writing and teaching gravitates toward the idea of the unhomely. I take it from Homi Bhabha and Martin Heidegger as cited in the introduction to Bhabha’s The Location of Culture: To be unhomed is not to be homeless, nor can the ‘unhomely’ be easily accommodated in that familiar division of social life into […]
From “Introduction: narrating the nation” by Homi K. Bhabha, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha Nations, like narrative, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizons in the mind’s eye. Such an image of the nation–or narration–might seem impossibly romantic and excessively metaphorical, but it is from those […]
Times would pass, old empires would fall and new ones take their place, the relations of countries and the relations of classes had to change, before I discovered that it is not the quality of goods and utility which matters, but movement; not where you are or what you have, but where you have come […]
What literature needs most to tell and investigate today are humanity’s basic fears: the fear of being left outside, and the fear of counting for nothing, and the feelings of worthlessness that come with such fears; the collective humiliations, vulnerabilities, slights, grievances, sensitivities, and imagined insults, and the nationalist boasts and inflations that are their […]
“The point about myths is that they are open-ended. They are open-ended when they are true in that they suggest new arrangements of human essentials based on contingent human experience, not on historical, systematic experience. Human beings are capable of all kinds of possibility, combination, and diversity….†–Michael Harper, American Poet