The Arts Archives - Page 17 of 36

Social Research

Take Me Out with the Crowd

On loneliness and Hannah Arendt

February 16, 2022 • by Christian Sheppard

Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism tells the true crime story of the twentieth century. Contrary to the basic requirements of human condition, Loneliness is one of the fundamental experiences of human life. ...

The Arts

Art on Her Mind

bell hooks’s theory of beauty in the everyday

February 14, 2022 • by Monika Gehlawat

bell hooks’s contributions to feminist thought and race politics are widely known, as are her rigorous theoretical works and academic scholarship. While I have read and learned much from her art and political criticism, what has moved me most recently are hooks’s personal reflections on the quotidian spaces of Black ...

Literature

Decolonizing Daniel Defoe

How Black lives matter in A Journal of the Plague Year

February 9, 2022 • by Anna Neill

It isn’t hard to see why A Journal of the Plague Year has enjoyed renewed attention in recent times. But to invoke it without considering Defoe’s support for British imperialism and the expanding Atlantic slave trade is to make literary history complicit with colonial and racial injustice....

Social Research

Loneliness, The New Issue of Social Research

The New School journal introduces its latest issue

February 7, 2022 • by Social Research

time of social distancing: a result of the coronavirus pandemic, the latest issue of Social Research engages itself with a reconsideration of the ideas about loneliness in American Culture. The literature explores the concept of loneliness, as is present in a number of notable books: David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd; ...

Loneliness, The New Issue of Social Research

Literature

Literary Imperialism and Scenes of High Melodrama

When BIPOC and queer writers defy minimalism

February 1, 2022 • by Torsa Ghosal

The term melodrama is a value judgment—and as such, it can be careless. ...

Literary Imperialism and Scenes of High Melodrama

Literature

The Eleventh Mouse

A writer welcomes the unexpected at end of an old year and the start of a new one

January 3, 2022 • by Maureen Buchanan Jones

Here I was caring for another creature with more than a bit of martyrdom and annoyance in my heart. I had forgotten my self-administered advice as an antidote to despair that “something extraordinary is going to happen today.”...

Film

Puerto Rican History Deserves More Than a Musical

West Side Story displaces the true story of the Young Lords Organization’s civil rights struggle

December 15, 2021 • by Jacqueline Lazú

For many, West Side Story is simply an iconic musical with catchy tunes. For me, however, it became a critical entryway into political consciousness about when and how Puerto Ricans matter in United States history, and why popular representations are instrumental to that....

Puerto Rican History Deserves More Than a Musical

Literature

Libertie

In Brooklyn in 1860, a daughter watches her mother bring a patient back from the dead, in this excerpt from Kaitlyn Greenidge’s second novel

December 15, 2021 • by Kaitlyn Greenidge

I saw my mother raise a man from the dead. “It still didn’t help him much, my love,” she told me. But I saw her do it all the same. That’s how I knew she was magic....

Literature

The Best Books I Read in 2021

And why I liked them

December 15, 2021 • by Claire Potter

It’s the most wonderful time of the year—buying books for other people that you want to read yourself! And on that note, here are the best ones I read last year. All links are to IndieBound to gently nudge you to buy from independent bookstores. Fiction It’s a tie between Douglas Stuart’s ...

Film

Who Should Tell Pauli Murray’s Story?

Why a white documentarian should have stepped aside and created space for a Black filmmaker

December 1, 2021 • by Benje Williams

My hand is trembling as I stick it into the dark air. I wasn’t planning on asking a question. Definitely not this question. But it needs to be asked, and I don’t see any other Black people in this theater in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood. “I’m so glad My ...

The Arts

When Diane Arbus Came to Central Park

The New York City story of a latchkey kid and a trailblazing photographer

November 30, 2021 • by Vicky Oliver

For me as a city kid, Central Park was a forbidden Eden. Even though I grew up a stone’s throw from the park, my parents forbade me to walk there, even chaperoned, even in broad daylight. And so, it’s all the more astounding that I recently found myself trotting—no, tearing over—to see ...

Feminism

What Does It Mean to Be “Written By a Woman?”

How a misleading phrase went viral on TikTok, Twitter, and then became part of the Gen Z lexicon

November 17, 2021 • by Madeleine Janz

He could be skinny or ripped or somewhere in between, but never fat. He’s different from most of the men you meet: He doesn’t catcall, he doesn’t question your rape story, and he would never, ever put anything other than your pleasure and happiness first. He could be old or ...