Articles

1959: The Atlantic magazine devotes its April issue to “Africa South of the Sahara.” Articles on the politics of decolonization frame a large number of contributions on art and culture. A short story by Chinua Achebe appears alongside the work of Nadine Gordimer, Tom Mboya, Léon Damas, Léopold Sédar-Senghor, Amos Tutuola, and David Diop. “The Sacrificial Egg” is Achebe’s first story published in the United States, and its timing supports the US release of his novel Things Fall Apart. Unlike that...

In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1993), Toni Morrison calls for “studies of the technical ways in which an Africanist character is used to limn out and enforce the invention and implications of whiteness. . . . Such studies,” she continues, “will reveal the process of establishing others in order to know them, to display knowledge of the other so as to ease and to order external and internal chaos.” In demonstrating the reflexive role that Africanist personae play...

“So take warning: you must work, or else you must pretend to work, which is what I do. Work, work, work if you'd save your soul and your body.” —Margaret Schlegel, Howards End (1910)

A seemingly minor episode in Françoise Mouly’s biography holds special significance for the intersection of comics and the avant-garde during Art Spiegelman’s early career. In 1975, having arrived in New York with only $200 in her pocket and eager to improve her English by reading comics, Mouly had a part in Richard Foreman’s play Pandering to the Masses: A Misrepresentation, performed by his Ontological-Hysteric Theater at 491 Broadway. Despite her shaky command of English, Mouly had no trouble...

Economics and art are strangers. —Willa Cather, “Four Letters: Escapism” (1936)

In a letter written on August 30, 1964, Marianne Moore recounts listening to an old recording of her poem, “Rigorists,” that was playing that night on the BBC. “We had dinner at a little Greek Casa Blanca (very near) but stayed up late to hear me on the BBC—on a borrowed transistor,” Moore writes to her friend Hildegard Watson. In the letter, Moore compares her recorded voice to the sound of a bird recently crushed by an automobile: “I sounded like a sparrow suddenly run over,” she wrote, “still...

The condition of Paris as the main artistic capital from the end of the 19 th to the mid-20 th century caused it to attract an expressive contingent of foreign artists, and among those, dozens of Brazilian artists who were attracted by what was seen as the world capital of arts. They encountered, however, an extremely competitive universe, in which national origins were important components to recognition. As mentioned by Michele Greet, the participation of Latin-Americans in the Salons de Paris...

Walking among a series of prints by the American wood engraver Lynd Ward (1905–85), Art Spiegelman was surprised to find himself transported from a chic Binghamton art gallery into a primordial forest. Though he had not left the gallery, Spiegelman was surrounded by networks of branches, trees, and woods reaching out at him from the prints on the wall. Within this gallery-turned-forest, Spiegelman gained a new appreciation of the power of Ward’s arboreal aesthetic. Singling out a particularly...

In an essay on Herman Melville, D. H. Lawrence describes the Pacific Islands as “a vast vacuum, in which, mirage-like, continues the life of myriads of ages back.” Modernist studies has yet to awaken from this dream of Oceania as the hazy antithesis of modernity, a place “not come to any modern consciousness”: although the tide is turning, the Pacific has typically been treated not as an active site of cultural production, but as a tropical backdrop for the adventures of the likes of Gauguin...

On June 1, 1963, J. P. Clark’s poem “Agbor Dancer” was recorded for the London-based Transcription Centre’s program Africa Abroad, an English-language radio magazine program distributed for broadcast on multiple African stations. Africa Abroad producer Lewis Nkosi praised the poem and recorded it in its entirety in his review of the anthology Poems from Black Africa, edited by Langston Hughes. In “Agbor Dancer,” the speaker watches a woman dance to drums and juxtaposes the dancer’s connection to...

At the culmination of Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film Modern Times, the Factory Worker (commonly called “the Tramp”) breaks his long silence and sings. The moment is justly famous, as if audiences had been waiting decades to hear the voice of the downtrodden Worker. The Worker, however, does not quite attain to the voice, or the song, that he and his companion, the Gamin, had planned. The Worker has just lost his lyrics, which the Gamin has written on his shirt cuffs. These cuffs fly off his wrists...

No tengo sino libros que leo, marco con lápiz y acaban medio desencuadernados si los frecuento demasiado. (I only own books that I read, mark with pencil, and that end up with broken spines because I read them so much.)

In February 1928, the popular magazine Estampa published an unassuming centerfold photograph of a large group of people strolling through Madrid. The jovial crowd pictured is so large that they take over the sidewalk and spill into the avenue (fig. 1). At the center of the image, cheerful female dressmakers walk with synchronized steps. Nearby pedestrians take note of the group’s energetic display for the photographer and pause to look at them. This photograph does not appear to immediately...

“Is not segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness?” wrote Martin Luther King, Jr., in words that resonate unexpectedly with the work of another noted twentieth-century Christian, T. S. Eliot. Eliot’s own words from Murder in the Cathedral appear in King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” where the civil rights leader drew on the poet’s cultural and religious authority to address his audience of white clergymen. Yet a...

all the ad hoc committees, all the picket lines . . . all the tools of agitprop straight across the spectrum, do not confer upon anyone any ipso facto virtue. —Joan Didion

Published in conjunction with the author's translation of Günther Anders's “Washing the Corpses of History: The Hollywood Costume Palace," which can be read here. Is it not absurd that at the edge of the quiet Pacific there was a group that gathered to discuss political, philosophical, and sociological questions, while at the same time Hitler was raging in Europe and millions were being burnt to ashes in Auschwitz?

A translation of Günther Anders’s 1941 diary “Der Leichenwäscher der Geschichte ”, which first appeared in print in German in 1967. Published in conjunction with the contextualising essay “Hollywood, Exile and New Types of Pictures” which can be read here. Los Angeles, March 1941

Let everyone make h[er]self an amateur —Clive Bell, Art, 1920

The history of Iranian modernism is inseparable from the history of literary translation. In most accounts of Iranian literary history, the translation of European literary works played a formative role in the redefinition of poetic discourse as well as in the introduction of new literary genres, such as the short story and the novel, to modern Persian literature. In his landmark study of Iranian literary modernism, Mohammad Reza Shafiʿi-Kadkani rejects the ascription of originality to Iranian...

An art form that relates to a particular social class does not exist, and if it did, it would be entirely irrelevant to life. We ask those who want to create proletarian art: “What is proletarian art?” Is it an art created by the proletarians themselves? Or an art only in the service of the proletariat? Or an art intended to arouse proletarian (revolutionary) instincts? There exists no art created by proletarians because a proletarian who creates art no longer remains a proletarian but becomes...