Stanford Humanities Center
In memory of a writer with the rare combination of democratic humanism and fantastic world-building imagination.
This article offers a brief overview of revenge narratives involving nonhuman characters and the critical work they inspire.
In this essay, we suggest that this new conceptualization of Swamp Thing re-positions the creature as a thing; an obdurate entity that does not easily adhere to rigid classifications of ‘human’ or ‘plant,’ of ‘animate’ or ‘inanimate,’ of ‘original’ or ‘copy’ (even if characters within the comic text may argue otherwise).
Ever since the publication of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic almost thirty years ago in 1993, C.L.R. James has been seen as a paradigmatic black Atlantic intellectual, and his work – including his classic history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins (1938) - has often been interpreted through that frame.
The Swiss-born artist Thomas Hirschhorn builds from the bad new days, not the good old ones, as Bertolt Brecht urged us all to do. This is so because Hirschhorn aims to confront the present, which, in his idiom, is also to ‘agree’ with it.
Jovan Scott Lewis retells the history and afterlife of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, from the post-Reconstruction migration of Black people to Oklahoma Indian Territory to contemporary efforts to rebuild Black prosperity.
Jordache A. Ellapen reflects on his photographic project, Queering the Archive: Brown Bodies in Ecstasy, which blends photographs from his family archive with contemporary portraits shot in a studio. The work examines the intersections of race, sexuality, and eroticism as they relate to the in/visibility of black and brown queer bodies and subjectivities in South Africa.
Peter Christensen looks closely at two architectural and mass housing projects to explore the place of dignity in architecture and the call for just climate futures. What can the spatial humanities teach us about architecture’s role in honoring the lives that inhabit it?
