Articles

When writing critically about the Russian avant-garde, one finds oneself inexorably drawn towards cosmism, as inexorably as the Earth...

What does it mean to defend the dead? To tend to the Black dead and dying: to tend to the Black person, to Black people, always living in the push toward our death? It means work. It is work: hard emotional, physical, and intellectual work that demands vigilant attendance to the needs of the dying, to ease their way, and also to the needs of the living. —Christina Sharpe[1]   A world divided into compartments, a motionless, Manicheistic world, a world of statues: the statue o

Introduction   Arendt’s account of modernity and The Human Condition  (1958)[1]   Opening the final section of The Human Condition...

Introduction   Canonical Penance in the early Church and the modern concept of prison, broadly construed, are both processes of...

1   To become an administrative official in imperial China necessitated following a burdensome path from an early age. To begin with, a...

Well-known for her book  Bananas, Beaches and Bases , exposing the embedded systemic and institutionalised patriarchy that is evident not...

Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook, or press down its tongue with a cord? Can you put a rope in its nose, or pierce its jaw with a hook? Will it make many supplications to you? Will it speak soft words to you? Will it make a covenant with you to be taken as your servant forever?[1]   *   The rich symbolic inner workings of Hobbes’ Leviathan  have been much commented on in the centuries since its publication, with most attention being given to its incomparable frontisp

A witness walking to these shores in our time would not spy a single war-worn and sea-tossed Ithacan sailor returning to his homeland but rather thousands of woeful, current- day avatars of Odysseus, refugees who in the words of Homer find themselves ‘τῆλε φίλων καὶ πατρίδος αἴης’, ‘far from friends and home’.   The linkage of space, politics, and the humanities in the theme of this conference is something more than a matter of mere historical timeliness—and certainly not opp

It didn’t take long for the backlash against last summer’s enthralling ESPN Michael Jordan documentary The Last Dance  to arrive. Before...

This piece was written in the direct aftermath of George Floyd’s murder on 25 May 2020. Since then, having also been selected as an...

Eliot’s work is filled—especially the poetry—with masks, role-playing, and multiple voices. Yet it is saturated everywhere, too, with...

A statue tumbles and, with an almighty splash, sinks below the water. Those responsible cheer with joy. Onlookers are captured in a range of emotions: confusion, rage, wonder. What is taking place? Is this an anti-historical act of violent vandalism, or the liberating removal of a relic of the colonial era, an enduring reminder of oppression?   When Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol toppled the statue of the merchant and slave trader Edward Colston in June 2020, it was

John Dewey Distinguished University Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, Elizabeth Anderson is famously redefining egalitarianism in the field of political philosophy. Conventionally, philosophical debate has imagined the two concepts of equality and freedom to be polar opposites. Anderson has sought to challenge this perception by subordinating the popular egalitarian notion of distributive equality to tha

In Indianapolis in 1984, an unusual political alliance was formed. On one side was the staunchly conservative city council and on the...