All tagged literature

Zadie Smith’s ‘Swing Time’

Zadie Smith presents her fifth novel, Swing Time, a fluid meditation, by way of a cross-racial relationship between two female protagonists, on race, class, geopolitics, dance, storytelling, and history as they manifest in London, New York, and West Africa.

Aamir Mufti’s ‘Forget English!’

In Forget English! Aamir Mufti scrutinizes the claims made on behalf of world literature, arguing that at the center of its very possibility as a borderless, egalitarian and global body of writings remains the dominance of English — as a literary language, a cultural system of international reach, and the undisputed vernacular of global capitalism.

Lisa Lowe’s ‘The Intimacies of Four Continents’

In The Intimacies of Four Continents, Lisa Lowe reads across historical archives and literary canons in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries to connect the liberal narrative of freedom overcoming slavery to the expansion of Anglo-American empire, observing that abstract promises of freedom often obscure their embeddedness within colonial conditions.