Clusters
Latest Clusters
Another Revolution: Building Modern Worlds at the Interface of Art, Culture, and Politics
Feb 19, 2025
To think about “another revolution” in our contemporary moment means to also think about another crisis of revolution. Not unlike the middle of the last century—with its prevailing sense among Western intellectuals that historical revolutions had failed and that, consequently, revolution had largely been discredited as a political concept and project—there is a palpable disillusionment with radically transformative endeavors among progressives around the globe today
Precarity, Caregiving, and Covid
Jul 24, 2024
In the years after the Spanish Flu, no one wanted to talk about it. Elizabeth Outka describes this phenomenon of cultural erasure in her timely book Viral Modernism (2019). [1] A global pandemic that killed more people than World War I was rarely represented directly in modernist literature. Illness was harder to memorialize than war; it challenged narrative structures; it was a miasma rather than a blast. In examining...
The World of Shakespeare and Company
May 28, 2024
What’s left to learn about Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach’s bookshop and lending library in interwar Paris? The story of Shakespeare and Company has been told and retold—by Beach herself in Shakespeare and Company (1959) and The Letters of Sylvia Beach (2010), by Noël Riley Fitch in Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation (1984), and by Laure Murat in Passage de l’Odéon (2003). Ernest Hemingway mythologized the bookshop and lending library in A...
Global South Cinephilias
Mar 28, 2024
Though the term cinephilia simply means “love of cinema,” historically it has been used to mark a love of cinema with a difference. Whether it is understood broadly or in its most limited, conventional sense—as an impassioned, discriminating fervor for film that takes its cues from the film societies and cinémathèques of interwar and postwar France—cinephilia typically sets itself apart from “ordinary” film fans’ intense attachment to stars, genres, and visual spectacle, however generative...