Reviews Archives - Page 12 of 18

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Be Here Now

A review of 1997: The Future that Never Happened

January 23, 2018 • by Alex Niven

My abiding memory of 1997 is of a music video that emerged towards the end of the year. Officially a charity single for Children in Need, but actually an encomium for the BBC and its license fee, the all-star cover of Lou Reed’s ‘Perfect Day’ released in late November was ...

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Looking Back 40 Years at the National Women’s Conference

Reviewing two recent books on the 1977 National Women’s Conference

January 6, 2018 • by Jo Freeman

Coinciding with the 40th anniversary of the National Women's Conference in Houston in 1977, are two recently published books about that conference. They are: Shelah Leader and Patricia Hyatt American Women on the Move: The Inside Story of the National Women’s Conference Published by Lexington Books, Paperback 2017, xxi, 169 pp, photos Marjorie Spruill Divided We ...

Looking Back 40 Years at the National Women’s Conference

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Film review: Champ of the Camp

The first ever feature-length documentary filmed in the UAE’s controversial labor camps

January 1, 2018 • by Elena Gagovska

Mahmoud Kaabour’s film Champ of the Camp (2014) opens with the song by a South Asian man set against the backdrop of a modernistic building covered in glass windows. The song is called “Long Separation” and the setting is the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Such juxtaposition runs throughout the movie: the poor ...

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In Memoriam

Ashbery’s poetic cosmopolitanism

December 11, 2017 • by David Micah Greenberg

Rimbaud’s Illuminations also presents the city as object of inspiration and denigration. Take the opening of “Metropolitan” (here translated by Ashbery): From the indigo strait to the seas of Ossian, on the pink and orange sand bathed by the wine-colored sky, crystal boulevards rise up and intersect, immediately populated by poor ...

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Against Jason Brennan’s Book

A response to ‘Against Democracy’

December 11, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

I will begin with a short prefatory comment about the occasion for this discussion at this particular moment in the intellectual history of the US. I will then outline four points in criticism of Brennan’s argument as presented in his book, whose title — Against Democracy — he is obliged, I submit, to own: ...

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The Death of Homo Economicus

A review of Peter Fleming’s latest book

November 22, 2017 • by Vince Carducci

Fleming takes up the metaphor of the tsunami to describe the 2008-2009 financial crisis and its aftermath. The tsunami metaphor has been invoked, particularly in the media, Fleming notes, as a way to frame discussions of the economic devastation and subsequent austerity that the crash has wrought on economies around the world. ...

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Queers, Zombies, and Institutions

A Review of Lorenzo Bernini’s Queer Apocalypses: Elements of Antisocial Theory

November 21, 2017 • by Aaron Neber

Edelman’s words, published in 2004, may seem an already antiquated sentiment: (many) queers can now marry and fight in American wars; the Pope has ordered Christians to atone for the marginalization of LGBT people; and queer theory is fully lodged in American academia, making its charge for revolution resound less ...

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What Happens Now?

Naomi Klein, No is Not Enough: Defeating the New Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need

November 16, 2017 • by Claire Potter

It’s a year after the American Election Day that shook the world, and a new book that seeks to explain the disaster of Donald Trump’s victory drops every few weeks. We political historians are scrambling to keep up. Last month, Hillary Clinton’s What Happened? hit the stands. How does it feel to ...

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The Antidote to “Too Much Niebuhr”?

A.J. Muste and the Anti-American Political Tradition

November 15, 2017 • by Ray Haberski

The conflict between radical pacifists and other Protestants went deeper than the question of the United States’ role in the world; it was also about national identity, race, and historical memory. To Muste, when policymakers posited the United States as the representative of democratic civilization, they effectively erased its history ...

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Postcolonial Investigations and the Role of Necessary Discontinuity

A Review of Iain Chambers’ Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorized Modernities

October 24, 2017 • by Dora Suarez

In Postcolonial Interruptions, Unauthorized Modernities, Iain Chambers is preoccupied with the critical foreclosure that impedes our perception of the ways contemporary migration, as well as “the racism that precedes and accompanies it,” is not abnormal or exceptional.[1] In face of the waves of violence that convulse the landscape of the ...

Postcolonial Investigations and the Role of Necessary Discontinuity

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Full Frontal Feminism

Why Billie Jean King Made History in the Battle of the Sexes

October 9, 2017 • by Susan Ware

If only the 2016 election had turned out so well. “The Battle of the Sexes” puts its politics -- both feminist and sexual -- front and center, which is rather remarkable for a mainstream Hollywood offering. King takes on the male tennis establishment, personified by unctuous tennis promoter and former champion ...

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The Sound of a Thunder

Weatherman and the Music of Late-Life Regrets

October 3, 2017 • by Jeremy Varon

Meteorological images of all sorts -- with their implications of inevitability -- found their way into the narratives about the group. “Looks like we’re in for nasty weather,” plucked from Creedence Clearwater Revival went a 1969 headline in the Underground Press about the group. And in a late 1970 communiqué called “New ...