literature 
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SOURCE: The Nation
6/21/2023
Cormac McCarthy's Brutal Allegories of the American Empire
by Greg Grandin
"McCarthy demonstrated how the frontier wasn’t an incubator of democratic equality but a place of unrelenting pain, cruelty, and suffering."
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
3/10/2023
Actually, All of Shakespeare's Plays are About Race
by Daniel Pollack-Pelzner
A new collection of essays argues that Shakespeare's works helped Renaissance Europeans to invent the category of "whiteness," and for later generations to refine and contest its meaning.
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SOURCE: Public Books
3/1/2023
Is Globalization Changing Mexico's Relationship to Death?
by Humberto Beck
Post-revolutionary Mexico embraced cultural commemorations of the dead—Diá de los Muertos—to help conceal the violence of the regime's rise. Now, that "traditional" culture is again being transformed by global cultural appropriation and the escalating violence of global drug trafficking.
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2/22/2023
America Fought Its Own Battle Over Books Before it Fought the Nazis
by Brianna Labuskes
The Armed Services Editions paperback books were wildly popular among World War II servicemembers. But they became symbols of American freedom to read in the war against fascism only after a bitter domestic battle about the works and topics that would be permitted.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
2/2/2023
The Past Isn't Even Past, Especially in Florida
by Diane Roberts
"I plan to carry on teaching the way I always have, resisting the state’s decrees. The point of education is to produce not just pliant cogs but thinking citizens with knowledge of the rich and expansive ways to be human. That is genuine freedom."
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
2/10/2023
Why is Italy's Far Right Embracing Dante?
Italy's original Fascists embraced Dante as a marker of national chauvinism, and a prophet of authoritarianism; today's far right has renewed their enthusiasm for the poet.
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2/12/2023
Between Perpetrating a Hoax and Charging One: American Politics in the Waste Land
by Jed Rasula
The centenary of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land reminds readers of the rumors that the poem was published as a hoax. While pulling off a hoax takes cleverness, invoking the word to dismiss inconvenient facts is an abdication of responsibility that plagues political culture today.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
2/1/2023
What Happens if We Read Jay Gatsby as "Passing"?
by Alonzo Vereen
A high school literature teacher found his students were better able to engage with the classic if they stopped assuming that it's title character was a white man.
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SOURCE: New York Times
The Indigenous Sami Culture Shaped this Novelist's Fiction
Ann-Helén Laestadius grew up among the Sámi, an Indigenous people living near the Arctic Circle, in Europe. Her fiction has brought the long-running conflict between the Sami and the Swedish government, and the racism and violence endured by the Sami, to the forefront of public debate.
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SOURCE: New York Review of Books
1/22/2023
How the Russian Jews Became Soviet
The novelist Gary Shteyngart, who emigrated from the USSR to the US as a child, reviews Sasha Senderovich's "How the Soviet Jew was Made," a work that gives short shrift to neither the "Soviet" nor "Jewish" sides of the question.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
12/19/2022
Reissued 1933 Novel in Translation Captures Fascism's Rise Around You
Lion Feuchtwanger's "The Oppermans" captures the complexity of a dilemma faced by German Jews in 1933: whether a society has become sufficiently hostile to a minority group to force its members to leave.
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12/18/2022
Revisiting the "Knickerbocker" Origin Story of Santa Claus
by Tom A. Jerman
The notion that the American Santa Claus evolved naturally from the European Saint Nicholas conceals an origin story for the character that's both simpler and more complex.
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11/20/2022
Does Novelist Robert Keable Deserve a Reappraisal?
by Simon Keable-Elliott
Briefly celebrated in the 1920s, then consigned to posthumous obscurity, the missionary and novelist, whose experiences encompassed the collision of colonialism, war and racism in the British empire, is overdue for rediscovery.
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SOURCE: New Statesman
10/26/2022
The Moral Corruption of Holocaust Fiction
A popular book for young readers strips the Holocaust of its horror, and its victims of their Jewishness in favor of banal lessons about empathy and kindness.
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SOURCE: The Drift
10/25/2022
Against Queer Presentism—How Literary Studies Neglects the Archive
by Colton Valentine
LGBTQ writers in today's literary world too often operate on the presumption that they are the first to experience queerness openly, making their own experiences of repression seem universal and transhistorical, and effacing older fictional and critical voices.
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SOURCE: New York Times
10/13/2022
Do Documents Clear Chaucer's Name Over Accusations of Rape?
Although the belief that Chaucer was accused of the crime spurred a significant wave of feminist critical studies of sex and power in his writing, scholars have recently argued that the documents used to support the charge have been misinterpreted.
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SOURCE: Religion Dispatches
9/15/2022
"I'm Not Racist, I'm Just Mad Amazon is Destroying Tolkien's Middle Earth with Black Hobbits"
by Mary Rambaran-Olm
Viewer complaints that Amazon Prime has defiled the author's fantasy vision with "wokeness" ignore the historical diversity of the medieval society on which Tolkien based his works.
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SOURCE: Miami Herald
9/12/2022
Cuban-American Playwright Censored by Miami-Dade Schools—Is it over "Don't Say Gay"?
Columnist Fabiola Santiago argues that the censorship of the Cuban-American writer's plays by local schools shows that Cuban Americans can't expect the state's escalating culture wars to leave them alone.
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SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
8/27/2022
Sorry Zoomers, Gen X Invented the "Quiet Quit"
"Strivers, grinders and hustlers hate them, but quiet quitters, slackers and work-to-rulers are treasured antiheroes in American folk culture."
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SOURCE: The New Republic
8/16/2022
Salman Rushdie Changed Everything
by Siva Vaidhyanathan
The novelist's creative brilliance and critical acclaim signaled a moment for south Asian people around the world to see themselves outside the frame of colonialism and to grapple with the subcontinent's ethnic and religious fissures.