The Pixar/Disney film Wall-E (2008) presents a dystopian vision of the future, where Earth has become overwhelmed by trash and pollution due to a culture of excess consumption, forcing humans to evacuate the planet and live in a starliner traveling in space owned and operated by the megacorporation, Buy n Large. Wall-E (Waste Allocation Load … Read more
“Mi nombre no es XX.” Throughout Guatemala, on postcards, calendars, bookmarks, and posters, the dead are speaking. Fifteen years after the signing of the peace accords, and thirty years after the burned earth campaign, where the military slaughtered 200,000 people to stamp out the manufactured threat of a Marxist takeover of the Guatemalan highlands, the … Read more
Poor people are easy to buy.—San Miguel Ixtahuacán choir Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others. Our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others, the empires and their overseers. In the colonial and neo-colonial alchemy, gold turns into scrap metal and food into poison.—Eduardo Galeano Biotech in … Read more
And look at all the antihumani prejudice there is. A woman can be with another woman and that’s okay, but a chusma woman like you and a woman-oso humani like me, we couldn’t hold hands together or kiss in public.—Rodesia to Carmelita in Chicas 2000 The world we live in today, the cradle of our … Read more
Amitav Ghosh’s award-winning science fiction The Calcutta Chromosome (1995) speculates on the somatic transformations to biological life in an era where the world’s waterways have become imperiled. Lauded for its “hypertextual” interweaving of speculative fiction, Bengali literature, and the history of medicine, through which it challenges the West’s monopoly on “scientific” knowledge, this third in … Read more
Folded just so, the parachute never failed. Always, it floated back to you—silkily, beautifully—to start over and float back again. Even if you abused it, whacked it really hard—gracefully, lightly, it floated back to you.—John McPhee Introduction American writer John McPhee once described with great nostalgia a toy silk parachute that his mother gave him … Read more
What happens after a living thing eats another living thing? In general, we assume that the one disappears, and the other goes on. In fact, it is seen as an absolutely necessary part of life—the eater breaks down the eaten into its molecular components, derives energy and nutrient building blocks for its own body from … Read more
“The existence of the quantum discontinuity means that the past is never left behind, never finished once and for all, and the future is not what will come to be in an unfolding of the present moment; rather, the past and the future are enfolded participants in matter’s iterative becoming.”—Karen Barad Attention and Critique, Love … Read more
This new issue of The Scholar & Feminist Online, edited by Elizabeth Bernstein and Janet R. Jakobsen, forges new ground by weaving together issues of gender and sexuality, usually sidelined in conversations about neoliberalism, with questions of the economy and political processes. Emerging out of a 2012 international workshop on the mutual imbrication of economic, … Read more
Neoliberalism seems to mean many different things depending on one’s vantagepoint.— Aihwa Ong Only an interconnected, analytically diverse, cross-fertilizing and expansive left can seize this moment to lead us elsewhere.”— Lisa Duggan The interrelated social processes that have come to cluster under the term “neoliberalism” can provide important insights into the social and cultural context … Read more
