Making Experiences Our Own: A Review of The Amen Corner, 2021

For years, Ijeoma N. Njaka was afraid of failing to understand James Baldwin. Then she went to see his play

It is by no means guaranteed that a potential audience member will automatically make a connection between their life experiences, interests, knowledge, emotions, or memories with a piece of art. Interpretive or educational materials, however, can help a viewer create a personally meaningful connection with the art itself....

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Making Experiences Our Own: A Review of The Amen Corner, 2021

Introducing the Latest Issue of James Baldwin Review

Honoring Baldwin’s legacy in a new volume of academic research, criticism, and personal essays

As we continue to bring together a mixture of scholarship, reviews, and reflections—from a variety of voices—it is our humble aim to continue to grow our readership and expand the legacy and impact of our namesake author’s moving works and searing insights. ...

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Introducing the Latest Issue of James Baldwin Review

Turning Art into a Political Weapon

Scholars Terri Gordon-Zolov and Eric Zolov discuss the aesthetics and significance of the Chilean estallido

Wearing protest iconography was also a way to support the movement. And it was potentially risky. You could wear a handkerchief to cover your eyes from tear gas or to make yourself more anonymous or you could wear a green scarf to support reproductive rights. ...

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Turning Art into a Political Weapon

The Walls of Santiago

How the Joker and Pikachu become symbols of the Chilean social uprising, in an excerpt from Terri Gordon-Zolov and Eric Zolov’s new book

Humor provided a powerful weapon in the fight to topple the civic-military dictatorship. The radical deprivation of human rights during the Pinochet regime had secondary costs, among which were the loss of a sense of freedom, spontaneity, and overall well-being. ...

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The Walls of Santiago

Why Are We Afraid of Flounces and Frills?

An excerpt from Fashion | Sense: On Philosophy and Fashion

Why do most philosophers hate clothes—or rather, hate fashion? The majority rule seems to be to treat the outer surface with either ritual formality or complete derision, as if the less you comb your hair the closer you are to truth....

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Why Are We Afraid of Flounces and Frills?

The Philosophy of Ripped Jeans

An interview with Gwenda-lin Grewal about her new book on the intersection of philosophy and fashion

Fashion is always threatening to undermine autonomy but also always presenting you with the opportunity of taking it back. That is what’s lost when you say fashion is just for shallow people, it’s only about appearances, or that it doesn’t have anything to do with reality. I think quite the ...
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The Philosophy of Ripped Jeans

Burning Cities

The Natural History of Destruction examines the European bombing campaigns of WWII with provocative disregard for convention

Part of the film’s thrill is its boldness in posing these ethical questions through sound and imagery. He makes them come alive through his fictionalizing interventions into the archival material, with the extensive foley work and the assemblage of disparate material. It is, dare I say it, entertaining. Destruction is ...
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Burning Cities

The Bloody Autumn of Butcher’s Crossing

The following is an excerpt from an essay first appeared in Social Research: An International Quarterly. It is part of the journal’s summer 2022 issue, Books That Matter II. The most famous environmental book ever written in America is Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, published in 1962. But just two years before, ...
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The Bloody Autumn of Butcher’s Crossing

My Life in Wonderland

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, Lewis Carroll

My mother seemed to me, when I was a child, a combination of the Queen of Hearts and the Red Queen. She was, like the Queen of Hearts, idiosyncratic and imperious, someone with whom you could never win an argument, even when you knew you were right and she was ...
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My Life in Wonderland