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Subjects Archives: Media

Media, Communications, and Literature

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The Popular Front Novel

I became interested in literary relationships with communism and anti-fascism when I was an undergraduate student. I was curious about how modernist writing, often thought to have peaked by the mid-1920s, was transformed by the rise of fascism and the coming of the Second World War.

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Berlin Bulletin by Victor Grossman

A film from yesterday and an audience from today

With its theme a little-known event of over a century ago, the film was ancient in cinema terms, its rather unsuccessful premiere was way back in 1926 and the performance Monday evening marked an event even earlier than that, one which is rarely discussed and even less celebrated. Yet the theatre was sold out and […]

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Gears.

In defense of old materialism

There was only once, in the final year of my PhD, that my supervisor and I butted heads. I had just submitted my fourth chapter for her review and, because I was living in another city at the time, she sent me an email saying we needed to speak on the phone urgently.

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Book Image.

Criminalizing environmental activism

Berta Cáceres, assassinated in her home on March 3, 2016, was just one of hundreds of Latin American environmental activists attacked in recent years. At least 577 environmental human rights defenders (EHRDs) were killed in Latin America between 2010 and 2015—more than in any other region—as documented by Global Witness.

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Nazi flag flies from Austrian legation in Washington, D.C. on March 12, 1938 (New York Public Library) .

How American racism shaped nazism

Depending on the reader’s perspective, Whitman’s central argument seems either modest or bold, as he claims, “What all this research unmistakably reveals is that the Nazis did find precedents and parallels and inspirations in the United States” (10). The most radical Nazis were often the most enthused about American legal precedents. More moderate, less anti-Semitic […]

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Prashad-Noward

Writing while socialist

With each workshop the broad outlines of socialist writing become clear to me. I am now able to better distinguish between capitalist writing—which typically emerges from the liberal, mainstream media and is intended to produce commodities—and socialist writing—which is intended to produce a confident community of struggle.

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White people; Viewing the Performance of 'The Merry Wives of Windsor’ in the Globe Theatre (1840) by David Scott. Photo courtesy the V&A Musuem

How ‘white people’ were invented by a playwright in 1613

The Jacobean playwright Thomas Middleton invented the concept of ‘white people’ on 29 October 1613, the date that his play The Triumphs of Truth was first performed. The phrase was first uttered by the character of an African king who looks out upon an English audience and declares: ‘I see amazement set upon the faces/Of […]

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