I heard about this book reading an interview with Samuel Delany about literary pornography or pornographic literature, which he himself is a writer of. He mentions a time in the late 60’s when a publisher Essex House reached out to poets and literary fiction writers for erotic works with the only requirement being that the works focused on sex in…[Read more]
I’ve attached the introductory chapter to Rob Nixon’s book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, which I read a couple years back and wanted to return to in context of works I’ve read since then. I’m particularly drawn to Nixon’s re-formulation of Mary Louise-Pratt’s concept of “planetary consciousness” which she describes in terms…[Read more]
As I’ve probably mentioned, I’m currently writing a paper on Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren and am reaching that obsession phase with the book. So I had high levels of excitement over this letter from Samuel Delany to magazine publisher Kirpatrick Sale who had previously written Delany to express his (and Thomas Pynchon’s!) excitement over Delany’s…[Read more]
Published in a special science fiction issue of Black American Literature Forum, this article tries to consider what role Black racial identity plays in Samuel Delany’s novel Dhalgren. The author Mary Kay Bray uses DuBoisian double consciousness to understand the proliferation of ironies and ambivalences in the novel and argues that overall Delany…[Read more]
From the digital collections of the Newberry Library: “Francis La Flesche, a writer of mixed Omaha Indian and French ancestry, describes his experiences in a Presbyterian mission school on the Omaha reservation in his memoir, The Middle Five.”
The Huntington Library in San Marino, CA recently acquired and organized a slew of archival materials relating to Octavia Butler. Attached here are her handwritten notes on a typed sheet about her plans for Parable of the Sower, the first in a planned trilogy (the third incomplete at the time of her unexpected death) about a cult religion…[Read more]
This article, published in Callaloo Journal in 2013, looks at how Octavia Butler’s epic trilogy of human-alien crossbreeding on a post-nuclear apocalypse Earth both references and revises the “discourse of postcoloniality” and specifically unsettles the domestic space as a site of (gendered) deviance. I found the article on MLA while doing…[Read more]
I found this article while browsing a special issue of American Quarterly from 2008 that had several essays on Indigenous feminism (downloaded from Project Muse). I recently was thinking about captivity narratives because I felt a connection between the recent release “The Witch” and captivity narratives written in America and Canada from the…[Read more]
This nugget does not hold any particular research value for me. I just thought it was kind of a sweet and strange snapshot of Foucault as a professor and looking goofy wearing a cowboy hat. I found it on the website (pretty much the equivalent of an academic fan site) michel-foucault.com, which has a large gallery of Foucault photos and some other…[Read more]
I chose this 2009 article by Mark Rifkin for my essay because I have been interested in the utility of Agamben’s work on sovereignty for Indigenous studies and Indigenous political movements more broadly. I am appreciating Rifkin’s reading of Agamben alongside questions of the limits of the discourse of sovereignty in decolonization movements.…[Read more]
I’m having difficulty uploading the video file directly so here’s the link to a taped conversation between Jacques Derrida and Raymond Williams: http://keywords.pitt.edu/videos/video_10.html
I found this video while doing a bit of background research on the Start Hall essay, Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms, which engages extensively with…[Read more]
I’m taking the Disability Studies in 19thc Literature course this term and have been searching for a topic for my term paper. We are permitted to write on a text from any period so I’m probably going to write on a contemporary science fiction author. I found this article on Project Muse and found it helpful for bringing in different strands of…[Read more]
Included here is a transcription of an unpublished short story written by WEB DuBois around 1908, as well as a brief critical introduction to the text and a photo of one of the original typed pages of the story with DuBois’s handwritten edits. It’s a strange little origin story of industrial capitalism told in a fantastical mode with allusions as…[Read more]
