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Distances Blued and Purpled by Romance: Revisiting the Midcentury Colonialist Gaze in Black Narcissus
Mar 12, 2025
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s midcentury psychological fantasy Black Narcissus (1947) is enjoying something of a resurgence, available to be rewatched and taught more widely than ever before. For much of the 70-plus years since its release, the movie was difficult to find except as written descriptions, movie stills or poster art (fig. 1). It was a tantalizing entry in filmmaker lore that the likes of Martin Scorsese and Tilda Swinton cite as formative influences, while...
From Mentor to Supplicant: The Correspondence of Jessie Redmon Fauset and Langston Hughes
Jan 29, 2025
On January 6, 1925, Jessie Redmon Fauset wrote a letter to Langston Hughes from Paris. It's a long letter—over a thousand words—and it balances advice with appeal in ways that capture the intimacy and strength of their friendship. Her first novel, There is Confusion , had been published in 1924 and Fauset was on leave from her position as the literary editor of The Crisis, studying and writing in Paris. She had planned the trip as a celebration: finally, at forty-two, she...
Five Years of Visualities
Nov 25, 2024
Five years ago, in August 2019, the Visualities forum was established as a site for thinking through the visual relations and ocular regimes of modernity. It posed three broad provocations: “In what new ways might we discuss the visual as a special category—aesthetic, epistemological, political—in modernism? How do different modes and practices of vision interact within the contested terrain of modernity?
Queer Domestic Architectures: Theorizing Kinship and Communal Modernism
Nov 21, 2024
Although I have been living alone for a few years, I still remember having roommates and how communal living shapes domestic space and the rhythms of daily life. I remember how thin walls, bleary mornings, and long evenings in shared kitchens and living rooms inevitably lead you to learn more about your cohabitants than you’d perhaps like, the mutual exposure to daily patterns of work and leisure, mood shifts, and the vicissitudes of bodies creating an intimacy that emerges from the slow...