Interventions

Welcome to Interventions, an experimental space where authors rehearse new ideas, reframe questions, or play unbridled within Arcade’s field of the humanities in the world. These short posts embrace the incomplete, the imperfect, and the indeterminate, but they may become much more: for example, the record of a thinker’s turn toward a new paradigm or the rough draft of a chapter in a new book. Rapid publication and immediate responses permit Interventions to foster conversation. The tone of the posts may range from personal to political, while maintaining a critical edge.

Published regularly, Interventions are often freestanding contributions to Arcade, but some may join our feature called Colloquies. Inquiries and submissions are received by the editor of Interventions.

Dark and mysterious etching featuring four human figures with bat-like flying apparatuses.

Ageing for Beginners: An Unrepresentative Guide

Richard Read

We all know we can move between ages: the bank manager and the brain surgeon screaming in the members' stand at the football club, the sombre academic taking to ecstatic dance at the post-conference night club, the OAP who falls in love, the police people hiding tats beneath their uniforms. Does this pin-ball capacity to flick between several different ages we carry ready and waiting their turn within ourselves serve any evolutionary purpose?

New Zealand Attack: On Bridges and Walls

In memory of the horrendous attack at the mosques in New Zealand, a defence of migrants, refugees, and a plea for moderation to confront the extremism that threatens further attacks.

Tenochtitlan Becomes Mexico: Rulers, Commoners, and the Petitioning State

After the conquest, Tenochtitlan became Mexico, but the city remained predominantly indigenous. As a viceregal capital and global commercial hub, Mexico City underwent profound changes as ethnic newcomers from Oaxaca to Manila elbowed out the Nahua from their barrios, and Aztec systems of water management survived even as dikes and canals were modified.

Returning to Order through Realism

Law and Order is the familiar rallying cry for a generation of contemporary right-wing politicians from Poland and Turkey to Brazil and the USA. In the context of such a political program, difference, change, and cultural others must be avoided as disruptions of the safety that order is supposed to represent.

The Problem of Sancho's Shit

Are there limits to the pursuit of realism in fiction? For Cervantes, at least, those limits are to be found somewhere in between three hundred goats and the bodily needs of Sancho Panza.

Against Hate: "Hello, Brother" (V)

In the wake of the massacre in New Zealand, a reflection on the need to confront hatred, to come together as one human community and to learn that our difference is the formative experience of existence on earth.

Iberia and the American Colonial State: Paperwork, Archives, and Fictional Claims

In both the Iberian Peninsula and the New World, the archive played a central role in the creation of borders. Through the alchemy of litigation and treaty mediation, the paperwork of fictional claims was transformed into lines on the ground.

Texting Under Drone-Crossed Skies

How has the experience of being a refugee changed in a world of drones, 24-hour live news feeds, and text messages that zip across the globe in seconds? How does contemporary fiction capture the contradictions of being a refugee in a hyperconnected 21st century?

On Early Modern European Political Theory and African Slavery

Offering a provocative critique of the unspoken liberal underpinning of historiography on slavery, Herman Bennett's new study is addressed to Europeanists who have ignored the centrality of slavery to early modern political theory.

Interventions

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