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 live while Black in...
[Trigger Warning: brief discussions of sexual assault.] It’s been nearly ten years since Bryan Fuller’s TV show Hannibal (2013-2015) debuted. Since then, it has garnered a cult viewership and a devoted online fanbase, often referred to as “fannibals.” However, to their (and my) chagrin, the show was preemptively cancelled after Season 3. As a late-comer to Hannibal (in that I’ve only just started...
[7-10 minute read] As a child, I was a voracious reader. Scholastic Book Fairs were the best part of the elementary school fall season; no questions asked. J.K. Rowling was still publishing book after book in the Harry Potter series, The Reading Rainbow featured heavily as parent-approved public broadcast television, and I distinctly remember the pride I felt after making my way through my dad’s...
As I wrote in my previous post, I spent the last week perusing the Abraham Joshua Heschel Papers at Duke University. One of my major goals of the trip was to glean as much information as I could about Sylvia Heschel (nee Straus), Abraham Joshua Heschel’s wife. I knew very little about Sylvia Heschel before going to the archive – I knew she was a concert pianist, but not much more than that. One...
[7 minute read] “Can we have snack right now? When we get back to the classroom?” “We usually have snack at 10:00 or 10:30am. It’s only 9:30am now. Don’t you think you’ll want it later?” I ask one of my students doubtfully, walking beside him as we head towards the seventh-grade classroom at Temple Concord. We have just come from T’fila – the communal thirty-minute prayer-time that begins weekly...
[10 minute read] The seventeenth century was a moment of exploration and imperial expansion for European powers; the Dutch were of no exception. In 1609, Henry Hudson landed in the New World after the East India Company’s failed attempt to find passage to India. Years later, the West India Company (WIC) would be founded in 1621, and played a crucial role in Dutch economic expansion during its...
[5-7 minute read] A quick look at popular TV programming might lead a person to think that Americans are obsessed with Britain. We watch sci-fi shows like Dr. Who? to feed our imaginations about the possibilities of alien life and technology, as well as shows like The Great British Bake Off that combine culinary delights with intriguing locales. Then there are the historical dramas that have...
[5-7 minute read] When going on vacation these days, we take our cameras (or phones) with us to commemorate the places we visited, and the adventures that we embarked on. Contemporary phones and photos offer a way to share our experiences with friends and loved ones in a manner that allows them to imagine they were on the trip with us. Whether it is curating a collection on Flickr or...
[10 minute read] In this month’s posts for Metathesis, I have been looking at how the metaphorical deployment of epidemic disease operates, and how we might understand the metaphorical function of plague zombies in contemporary texts. Why is it that the figure of the plague zombie features so prominently in the twenty-first-century imagination? If the plague zombie is a vehicle for addressing...
[7 minute read] Last week I discussed the use of contagion and metaphor, and mentioned how zombies can serve as “vehicles” for the metaphor of contagious disease. This week I continue my discussion of zombies, but before diving in, I want to draw a distinction between the two major representations of zombies in popular culture: what I somewhat reductively will refer to as the “Voodoo Zombie” and...