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Leveling the Playing Field: Liberal Infrastructures at the Olympics
Jun 6, 2025
In the weeks leading up to the 2024 Paris Olympics, coverage was dominated by a number of controversies stemming from the city’s efforts to stage the games: threats of strike from public and private sectors and an attack on rail lines grabbed headlines. But these preliminary and somewhat routine crises were eclipsed by furor over the opening ceremony, which included a runway show featuring drag performers and others staged in the style of a feast.
Notes from the Field of Arabic Literature in the Time of Genocide
May 28, 2025
It is the twentieth month of genocide, our planet’s second rotation around the sun, drenched in Palestinian blood, 600 days of Palestinian slaughter, and nothing is new except the finality of the massacre. The world has sacrificed the Palestinians with its complicity and silence, and it will soon start rehabilitating itself by erecting monuments of guilt, reciting land acknowledgements, mythologizing the Palestinian, and cannibalizing the myth.
Given the scale of this historic...
Reports from a Global Field
May 21, 2025
Understanding that modernity is always already global and colonial informs how Field Reports approaches modernism. Modernist studies is inevitably a comparative project because modernity has a shared material ground of an ever-expanding colonial-capitalism that traverses and connects the globe but that nevertheless manifests differently in singular locations. Colonial-capitalism produces a world-spanning interrelated singularity that renders the Anglophone world, including its imperial...
Thomas Mann, “Bilse and I” (1906): A Critical Introduction
May 7, 2025
In October of 1905, a defamation trial that would have a lasting impact on the development of literary modernism took place in the sleepy German harbor town of Lübeck. A lawyer with the slightly preposterous name “Ritter aus Tondern” was suing his cousin, the regionalist writer Johannes Valentin Dose, claiming that Dose had maliciously portrayed him as an alcoholic and an adulterer in the 1904 novel The Milksop ( Der Muttersohn )