Imre Kertész and the Nobel Lecture

Heureka! “Whereas I, on a lovely spring day in 1955, suddenly came to the realization that there exists only one reality, and that is me, my own life, this fragile gift bestowed for an uncertain time, which had been seized, expropriated by alien forces, and circumscribed, marked up, branded – and which I had to […]

The Imperfect Longing

I gave a conference paper on (Re)Mapping the Black Atlantic at DePaul University in 2013. It was on the anniversary of Paul Gilroy’s seminal work The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. I spoke on Sam Selvon’s short novel The Lonely Londoners and the idea of a desiring language – one that Frantz Fanon named as the urgency of ‘reciprocal recognitions.’ […]

Stuart Hall Died Today

This is the obituary of the cultural critic and sociologist published today in The Guardian. A good document that explores some of the same themes that I do in my article on Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londonders. That is, the ‘familiar stranger,’ a trope that is the inheritance of diasporic peoples from the German sociologist, Georg […]

This Title

“Open the unusual door, child,” James Baldwin quoting his friend and mentor, Beauford Delaney, the painter (1901-1979)