Category: Articles
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The Men, The Myths, The Conflicts
A Cross Review of Mafia Raj and Guns, Slums, and “Yellow Devils” In Mafia Raj by Michelutti et al and Guns, Slums, and “Yellow Devils” by Laurent Gayer, they explore violence in postcolonial states and the strategies of power spanning political and economic institutions. The overarching theoretical inquiry is into how power operates, and the logic…
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Architecture and Tubercolosis
Three principal modernist architects’ plans – La Corbusier, Aaltos, and Dukier – comported with the treatment of tuberculosis, and symbolic approaches to treatment, health, and recovery. During the 19th and 20th Century, the rapid urbanization that led to greater population concentration in cloistered, unhygienic living spaces exacerbated the spread of tuberculosis. Prior to the development…
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Bruno Latour, Colonialism, and Disease
Bruno Latour argues that not only did colonial expansion dovetail with the establishment of public health in the African continent, but also that such a vast colonial expansion would have been impossible without the Pasteurian intervention. As he writes, “political politics fails, but politics by other means succeed superlatively” (142). Through the conquer of parasites…
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Epidemics and Environment
At around 400 BC, Hippocrates set forth the idea that health was a game of balance and imbalance between a person and the environmental landscape around them. He theorised that there were four humours, largely based on appearance and disposition, that were related with health, vulnerability to specific kinds of diseases, and prescribed treatment. Environmental…
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Book Review – Patricia Lockwood’s ‘no one is talking about this’
Patricia Lockwood’s no one is talking about this will inevitably be read by people who are already talking about this Last December, while performing a post-mortem of my recent boyfriend with some friends, I unexpectedly fulfilled a lifelong goal: going seriously viral on Twitter (I am now at 130 thousand likes, thank you very much).…
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Book Review – ‘Rumours of Spring’ by Farah Bashir
Farah Bashir’s Rumours of Spring is Shocking, Soft, and Sick with Anxiety Girlhood, in our popular imagination, usually invokes imagery of a young woman fulfilling the rites of feminine passage with the messiness of a bursting dawn. We tend to think of girlhood as a flurry of emotions at once obsessive and trivial, as hair…
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Book Review – Good Girls by Sonia Faleiro
Lipless Mouths and Fallen Mangoes In the poem ‘The Glass Essay,’ Anne Carson writes, “She stands into the wind. / It is a hard wind slanting from the north. / Long flaps and shreds of flesh rip off the woman’s body and lift / and blow away on the wind, leaving / an exposed…
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Walter Benjamin and the Political Stakes of Spielberg’s ‘The Post’
Muddying Masses, Machines, and Meryl The Post opens in 1971 Vietnam, to American soldiers smoking cigarettes and streaking tar-black muck on each other’s faces. Seconds later, percussive mechanised weapons rattle through the jungle while smog drenches the lush, muddied shot. The soldiers dive into trenches and trees, while both dodging and delivering showers of shimmering…
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Hiroshima mon amour: The Dialectics of Showing and Telling
The indelible first 16-minutes of Alain Resnais’1959 film Hiromshina mon amour tells its audience precisely everything it will do for the next hour-and-a-half. The film opens with the unbreaking, aggressive intimacy of entangled lovers pushing into each other’s skin like historians examining precious artefacts, as an unsettling, plaintive score wrings the scene in an aesthetic…
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Book Review – The Ease of Excess in ‘Privilege’
Reviewing Shamus Rahman Khan’s ‘Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School’ Princeton University Press. 2011. 232 pages. $29.95 cloth. In 2009, Gossip Girl – a soap opera about the “obnoxious elite” in New York’s private schools – had its protagonist sermonise, “destiny’s for losers. It’s a stupid excuse to wait for…
sanjana sheth 