Recent News

• Literary Hub published “Literature in Times of Revolution,” Lu Xun’s 1927 speech to Whampoa Military Academy, which appears in the collection Jottings under Lamplight.
• Kathleen Belew, author of the forthcoming Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, explained to This American Life [at 34:10] how the white power movement adopted the “leaderless resistance” model of cell terrorism.
• Cass Sunstein’s Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide was excerpted in the New Yorker.
• The New Yorker also reported on the tragic sunsetting of Dictionary of American Regional English ongoing research due to lack of funding—and what, besides the continuing availability of the DARE data (in print and online), lies ahead for American dialect studies.

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September 25: Stuart Hall’s Fateful Triangle

What we might think of as “Hall’s Dilemma”—the challenge of keeping people from investing meaning into “race” as a category of biological difference, based on superficial differences visible to the eye—is as old as some of the earliest European encounters with “the other” in Africa and the New World in the modern period (beginning five hundred years ago), when differences of culture and phenotype soon fused with economic desire and exploitation to produce “the African” as a new and mostly negative signifier. And for centuries, this toxic compound has played into our very human instinct for defining ourselves through some of our most obvious, often “measurable” diffe…