Colonialism as Alien Invasion: Cadwell Turnbull’s The Lesson
What if the arrival of alien life wasn’t the future, but just another recapitulation of our bloody past?
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Posts Tagged: globalization
At Home and Not at Home Everywhere: A Conversation with Xu Xi
Xu Xi discusses her new essay collection, THIS FISH IS FOWL.
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The Mania of Queer Desire: In Praise of Fever Ray’s Plunge
I remember driving a bird mad once.
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The Demands of Domestic Labor: A Conversation with Megan K. Stack
Megan K. Stack discusses her new memoir, WOMEN’S WORK.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Katia D. Ulysse
Katia D. Ulysse discusses her forthcoming novel, Mouths Don’t Speak, the importance of religion and music in the novel and in Haitian culture, and why Haiti will always be “home.”
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TORCH: My American Playground
I left the car by the roadside and ran up the slope, in tears now, reaching the picnic tables and swings and, as bright and vivid as in my dreams, my purple-shaped climbing frame, exactly as I remembered it.
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A Language in Constant Rebellion: Talking with Aura Xilonen
Aura Xilonen discusses her novel, Gringo Champion, the realities of immigration, translating texts, and her love of cinema.
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We Brown Women
Our bodies will not be your banners. We are not yours to use and abuse, we are not yours to dupe. We see through your words, and we see your violence.
...moreThis Week in Books: I Brake for Moose and Other Stories
Welcome to This Week in Books, where we highlight books just released by small and independent presses. Books have always been a symbol for and means of spreading knowledge and wisdom, and they are an important part of our toolkit in fighting for social justice. If we’re going to move our national narrative away from […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Sunil Yapa
Sunil Yapa discusses his debut novel, Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, radical empathy, growing up surrounded by politics, and losing the first draft of his novel in Chile.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Valuation Methods
In some of my fantasies, I make a pitch for art or for truth, defend them like commodities.
...moreYour Brain on History
For the Los Angeles Review of Books, Larry S. McGrath writes about the growing role of neuroscience in writing new historical narratives. McGrath frames this discussion in a review of historian Lynn Hunt’s Writing History in the Global Era, looking particularly at her claim of a “biochemical revolution” in shaping the modern consciousness.
...moreThe Last of Their Words
Chi Luu writes for JSTOR Daily on the rapid extinction of the world’s languages and linguists’ efforts to preserve these dying languages for future generations. On the surface, there isn’t anything wrong with people wanting to communicate with each other in a language they all understand. A global language certainly has its advantages…. In the […]
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Here Be Dragons
For anyone from the global fringe, the flattening expectation created by a cultural stereotype is pervasive and familiar.
...moreEscaping Global Slavery, Almost
Njong Emmanuel Tohnain, imprisoned in a Chinese factory that produced shopping bags for Saks Fifth Avenue, wrote notes (some in English and others in French) inside five bags pleading for help from the wealthy consumers on the other side of the world. In September 2012, Stephanie Wilson purchased a pair of boots at the luxury […]
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Anne Elizabeth Moore
“The phrase ‘global citizen’ always gets tossed around with my work, and part of it is that, clearly, talking about being a global citizen is the only way we can talk about participating in globalization without feeling like assholes.”
...moreEndangered Languages
“Different languages highlight the varieties of human experience, revealing as mutable aspects of life that we tend to think of as settled and universal, such as our experience of time, number, or color.” At National Geographic, Russ Rhymer writes about the value of protecting the heterogeneity of language in a rapidly globalizing world.
...moreLove in the Time of Terror Babies
“My parents, with admirable foresight, had their first child while they were on fellowships in the United States. My mother was in public health, and my father in a library-science program. Having an American baby was, my mother once said, like putting money in the bank.” So begins Daniel Alarcón (who is reading at the […]
...moreThe Boring, Unplayful, Unoriginal Global Novel
“What are the consequences for literature? From the moment an author perceives his ultimate audience as international rather than national, the nature of his writing is bound to change. In particular one notes a tendency to remove obstacles to international comprehension. . . “More importantly the language is kept simple. Kazuo Ishiguro has spoken of […]
...more“Shakespeare would have eased off the puns”
“What seems doomed to disappear, or at least to risk neglect, is the kind of work that revels in the subtle nuances of its own language and literary culture, the sort of writing that can savage or celebrate the way this or that linguistic group really lives. In the global literary market there will be […]
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