Revelatory Liminality in the Metamorphoses’ Myrrha Episode
[Trigger warning: this post discusses a poetic episode featuring incest.] In Book X of the Metaphorphoses, Ovid tells the story of Myrrha and her incestuous longing for her father, Cinyras. In this section, readers follow along as Myrrha vacillates between the rightness and wrongness of her desire, which she ultimately consummates . She does so
Neoliberal Vantages in Cyberpunk Video Games
Particularly within visual media, genre may be thought of as a way of looking, a kind of thematic and ideological point of view (POV) that distills the innumerable complexities of reality into narrative and aesthetic patterns that work toward imparting rhetorical stances to audiences. For example, the generic POV of the Western privileges guns and
Teaching Race with Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric
In the same year that Michael Brown and Eric Garner’s murders at the hands of the police sparked national protest, Claudia Rankine published her book Citizen: An American Lyric. Originally published in 2014, Citizen consists of poems, monologues, lyrical essays, artwork, and photographs, all of which explore microaggressions and their broader relationship to systemic racism.
Slavery on Screen and the Black Trauma Genre
Upon the release of Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz’s Antebellum (2020), the film was met with mixed reception. Antebellum follows a young Black woman author, Veronica Henley (Janelle Monaé), who, after leaving her home and family to complete her book tour, “wakes up” to find herself enslaved on what appears to be a cotton plantation
Resurrection: Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground Then and Now
“The Man Who Lived Underground” was first published as a short story in Edwin Seaver’s Cross-Section: An American Anthology of New American Writing in 1944, and again posthumously in Wright’s 1961 short story collection Eight Men (Literary Classics 22). This version of the narrative begins with an unnamed protagonist already on the run from the
Curating the Civil Rights Archive in I am Not Your Negro and Dreams are Colder than Death
In my last post, I examined Fortnite’s March Through Time, an interactive experience inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.’s 17-minute “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. While most of the critical backlash against March Through Time has centered around the project’s “tonal dissonance,”—the seeming incompatibility of
The Nurse’s Repertoire in Romeo and Juliet
What does it mean to know? “Epistemology” describes a way of knowing, and, as you might expect, many different epistemologies exist. One episteme that has come to define the Western world is heteropatriarchy, a power-knowledge system organized around white, masculine supremacy. In the seventeenth century, French philosopher René Descartes theorized that the mind is separate
March Through Time: Fortnite’s Passive Engagement with the Photographic Archive of Civil Rights
In August of this year, Epic Games collaborated with TIME Studios to host a special, virtual event dedicated to the 58th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Fortnite’s March Through Time, an interactive experience inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.’s 17-minute “I Have a Dream” speech, is accessible through the
Beyond Disciplinary Bounds: Engaging with Haunted Archives
“Archive,” as defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, refers to “a place in which public records or other important historic documents are kept.” This definition not only locates them within a particular physical space, but also within the bounds of what is considered “important” and “historic”. This raises a few questions: who determines what is
Countercurrents: Book Review of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
Christina Sharpe’s 2016 book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, published by Duke University Press, examines various representations of Black life including the literary, cinematic, visual, and everyday life experiences of Black people. She offers a cipher to navigate the unspeakable and unknowable realities of existing in the violent afterlives of transatlantic slavery. To