A Community of the People: Tommy Orange’s There There
THERE THERE does not settle, it unsettles.
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Posts Tagged: colonialism
Black Panther and Strong Women
I saw myself on the big screen—the strong black woman that I am, and the stronger black woman I aspire to become.
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TORCH: Haiti, Crossing Borders of the Mind
The ocean is deep, unfathomably so. And one can stay on the surface or keep on plumbing the depths.
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In the Wake of His Damage
To be named, and yet not named. Something broke in me when I read his synopsis of us, as if I had been summarily dismissed after twenty long years.
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Concealed Histories: Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart
America is Not the Heart offers Filipinx-Americans the gratification of being seen, and a way of seeing.
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Moments of Truth and Beauty: A Conversation with David Rocklin
David Rocklin discusses The Night Language, the larger landscape of appropriation and empathy, immigration and power structures, and intimacy and representation.
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Identity Theft
In the past year, the writing process has become, for me, a way to navigate between the present and the past, between what I have access to and what I will never know.
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Slush Piles in White
The sensibilities of whiteness do not want us to work, do not want us to think, do not want us to imagine outside of its bounds.
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Lady Killers and Our Obsession with Murder: Talking with Tori Telfer
Tori Telfer discusses her first book Lady Killers and the fragile “social saran wrap” that keeps us all from killing each other.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #81: On Cultural Preservation
The Lost Boys had their moment in the media, but these people, these survivors, not boys at all and not lost now either, are still here, living lives, growing and changing and thinking and reflecting.
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“Language Orthodoxy,” the Adichie Wars, and Western Feminism’s Enduring Myopia
Adichie is far more significant than her accusers seem to know.
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Vincent Toro: Challenging Whiteness and Refusing to Be Colonized
Poet Vincent Toro on his debut collection, Stereo.Island.Mosaic, his writing process, and searching for identity.
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The Last Book I Loved: Poeta en San Francisco by Barbara Jane Reyes
Through incisive and uncompromising verse, Reyes unearths the hypocrisy at work in exalted American democracy…
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The Future of Body Horror: Can Our Art Keep up with Our Suffering?
The individuality of body horror is its signature attribute. Nothing is more intimate than one’s own body, and by extension, one’s own physical suffering.
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The Rumpus Interview with Robert Glancy
Robert Glancy discusses his sophomore novel, Please Do Not Disturb, growing up under a dictatorship, borrowing and stealing from reality, and his love of proverbs.
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The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #14: Altered States?
In my last column, the Muse inspired me to write about dreams. And since then, I’ve been thinking about other types of altered consciousness. As a guy who often hangs out with Catholic monks, and who practices “Will Rogers spirituality”—that is, I’ve never met a religion I didn’t like—I take an interest in miracles and […]
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Micah Perks
Micah Perks talks about her new novel, What Becomes Us, America’s cultural and mythical heritage, and why every novel is a political novel.
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What We Lost: Undoing the Fairy Tale Narrative of Adoption
The singular, unavoidable truth about adoption is that it requires the undoing of one family so that another one can come into being.
...moreTravel Writing as Artifact
At the Public Domain Review, Nandini Das revisits The Principle Navigations and argues that the massive folio of travel writings compiled by Richard Hakluyt in 1589 is more than an artifact of British colonialism. It also memorializes, “the elusive traces of those who disappeared, the disappointment of the non-event, the tedium of travel, and the absence of […]
...moreTelling, Not Showing
As I processed a dominant Euro-American writing pedagogy from the perspective of an aspiring fiction writer and an immigrant critic of color, I couldn’t stop wondering: are we, in 21st-century America, overvaluing a sight-based approach to storytelling? And could this be another case of cultural particularity masquerading itself as universal taste? Namrata Poddar tries to […]
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview with Jesse Lee Kercheval
I have learned to put myself, my ego, to one side and truly experience someone else’s poetry.
...moreAntigua through the Eyes of Jamaica Kincaid
Antiguan-American novelist Jamaica Kincaid has often made the island a centerpiece of her writing. New York Times travel editor Monica Drake recounts visiting Antigua alongside Kincaid’s words—an alternative to the dominant, colonialist narrative around the island: The tension that we’d accumulated in our daily lives seemed to float into the distance. We could have stayed […]
...moreThe Role of the Critical Writer
For The Awl, Maria Bustillos sits down for lunch with writer Teju Cole in Bali, where Cole recently spoke at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival. The two discuss art, colonialism, and the role of the critical writer. Regarding the latter, Cole says: What it’s our job to do [as critics] is to help create and sustain […]
...moreSaving History through Translation
At Lit Hub, André Naffis-Sahely discusses the vital importance of translation as a way to preserve a cultural/historical record. Translation improves a book’s chances of survival. In a way, it must. What one culture proves indifferent to, might find a better reception in another. Naffis-Sahely is the current translator of three volumes of colonial and postcolonial fiction […]
...moreTravel Writer’s Burden
In a thoughtful essay for Boston Review, Jessa Crispin reflects on the gender dynamics of travel writing, and the genre’s penchant for a colonial mentality that persists in today’s narratives: Any travel writer who deviates from gender-defined roles risks being overlooked. And that is a shame because we do not need men to explain the […]
...moreA “Voiceless” India
For the New York Times, Aatish Taseer argues that English has left Indian literature “voiceless,” as writers are often asked to produce work with western audiences in mind: India, if it is to speak to itself, will always need a lingua franca. But English, which re-enacts the colonial relationship, placing certain Indians in a position the […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Nayomi Munaweera
Nayomi Munaweera discusses Sri Lanka, its brutal Civil War, and writing a novel about two artists with their identities wrapped up in two different countries, Sri Lanka and America.
...moreClassic Literature Or Social Construct?
Classic literature is neither timeless nor fundamental. Writing is bound by its place in history, both as we read it and as it was written, and the idea of a universal experience is simply another construct of the dominant culture, argues Eric Williams, over at The Airship: When we treat The Classics as preordained with […]
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