Zimbabwe is a place whose writing cannot but be both global and ambivalent about globalization.
Jeanne-Marie Jackson
All articles by this author
August 26, 2016
After Columbia
Deans often feign surprise at graduate student complaints, and claim not to notice the thousands petitioning them every semester.
We need an Obama or Clinton NLRB to step in at Harvard and Yale, in other words, because Obama’s and Clinton’s friends and allies, their cronies and chiefs of staff, are preventing workers at those universities from exercising their rights. The reason we need to put a Democrat in the White House is to keep Democrats at bay in the private sector. The reason we need an Obama or Clinton to run the state is to stop Obamism and Clintonism in civil society.
August 23, 2016
Doing Philosophy Better
Human depth isn’t Square Wave’s focus at all: people are present in the novel to direct us toward meaningfully original orchestrations.
Mark de Silva’s debut novel Square Wave uses fiction as a space to foreground philosophy. The result is a novel that can be maddening in its refusal to gratify through plot, character, or even theme, focusing instead on corresponding shapes of thought and social organization.
October 5, 2015
The South African Novel of Ideas
It is difficult to exaggerate the extent to which talk about African writing centers on how to talk about African writing. The most common topic of debate is the Caine Prize, a high-profile short-story competition based in London and open only to authors of African descent (earning it the derivative and slightly patronizing epithet “the African Booker”). Each summer when the shortlist is announced, there is a flurry of op-eds and interviews with African writers who decry the neocolonial hold of British institutions on their careers. Many writers go on to question the very idea of a prize designated for “Africans,” arguing that it threatens to impose false geographical and thematic restrictions on a vast range of writers.
May 5, 2015
The radicalism of Charlie’s French leftist founders, like its cartoons, is by default grounded in the nation state.
