How does a person locate the city that seems to not want them? This is a question that came to mind as I read Ayhan Geçgin’s Lungo Cammino (tr. Giulia Ansaldo, 2023) and revisited Thuận’s Chinatown (tr. Nguyễn An Lý, 2022). In both texts, the cities in which the characters are situated remain aloof, distant, […]
Love at Last Sight: Writing Hong Kong in Taiwan
Hong Kong is often represented as a port city—a colonial emporium, a gateway to China, a non-space of transit, a stop in multigenerational migrations, a floating city amnesiac about its past and uncertain about its future.
Inorganic City: A Living Autopsy of Tirana
To a certain extent, living in a “cool” city was the promised land that allowed people to swallow the bitter pill of the 1990s neoliberal shock doctrine.
The Human Situation in the Work of Alexander Kluge
All of Kluge’s books contribute to one large, ongoing project to build up a toolkit of resistant feelings that readers can use to plot their own ways out.
Towards a Postcolonial Politics of Relatability: Translating People from Oetimu by Felix Nesi
Fiction that imagines the world from its so-called “peripheries” may in fact upend the way we perceive the concept of the “center” itself, reorienting the weight of worldliness towards the edge, the margin, the contact zone.
City Addresses: Iman Mersal’s Rihla through a Dis(-)appearing Cairo
As [Mersal’s] recursive and often discontinuous writing attests, the drive toward progress tends to entail an imperfect erasure, whose traces might resurface—as if through a palimpsest—if only one cared to look.
The Textbody: Rendering the Body’s Divergences
The body can guide the process of its own translation if its author will let it. An expert at adaptation, it already knows how to exist on the page.
The Folly of Philanthropy: On the Demise of UArts
In the end, a long-term structural operating deficit killed UArts, not a capital fundraising shell game or evil provost.
The Native American Horror Story (video essay)
Blending a cultural story and creating something new with it can be good or bad, depending on who’s telling the story and who’s in charge of the narrative.
Rangi is my ancestor, your ancestor is money . . .
Failure doesn’t . . . mean we have lost or that we can’t live in a world where Palestine is free, where the Congo is free, where Hawai’i is free, where West Papua is free, and where Western Sahara is free. . . . Everything is broken, but it doesn’t mean that the horror our ancestors experienced or that we continue to bear witness to cannot be healed.