James F. McGrath The Doctor Who episode The Krotons features what to viewers in our time will appear to be quite primitive and poorly-constructed robots as the key villains. If one can get past the appearance – perhaps by keeping in mind that the Krotons are supposed to be not robots but organic crystal-based life forms [...]

The (Im)Possible Witness of a Suicidal Life Eugene McMullan *** The film opens with a 15-year-old First Nations youth walking along the train tracks in sub-zero temperatures until he sits down at last, closing his eyes. He will not re-open them. Just then we hear the loud whistle of an approaching train. Cold Journey tells the story of Buckley, whose [...]

Growing Up Different(ly): Space, Community and the Dissensual Bildungsroman in Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games  Reviewer: Pramod K. Nayar , pramodknayar@gmail.com  What strikes one first about Suzanne Collins’ bestselling trilogy, The Hunger Games , Catching Fire , and Mockingjay (2008-2010), are the echoes from William Golding’s marvelously frightening The Lord of the Flies , Stephen King’s The Running Man and the TV Reality show, Survivor. It also recalls that iconic eighteenth [...]

Hannah Hofheinz  A Perfectly Queer Tactic * * * It was November 15th, 2011 and a journalist had just asked if I would be willing to be interviewed. I stood with my friend in the large crowd of gathered occupiers, united to march in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street post-eviction, and I replied no. “No, but I will [...]

Review of Dina Iordanova, David Martin-Jones, and Belén Vidal, eds. Cinema at the Periphery. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), 280 pp. Reviewer: Ian McCormick, ian.mccormick@hotmail.co.uk Is a quiet revolution taking place at the intersection of film studies and postcolonial theory? Are we seeing a renewal of diasporic cinema and the production of innovative films in transnational contexts? Is the Hollywood [...]

Pluralizing Identity and Identifying zir Plurality  Robyn Henderson-Espinoza As Gloria Anzaldúa says in “To(o) Queer the Writer,” “Identity is not a bunch of little cubbyholes situated respectively with intellect, race, sex, class, vocation, gender. Identity flows between, over, aspects of a person. Identity is a river—a process.” The struggle today is, “which box do I check?” I am born [...]

Review of Tejumola Olaniyan and James H. Sweet, ed. The African Diaspora And The Disciplines . (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 376 pp. Reviewer: Darren Middleton, d.middleton2@tcu.edu The field of African Diaspora Studies is growing and becoming increasingly more sophisticated. Although there is a perceived lack in the field’s “existing body of conceptual and definitional knowledge” (Sweet, 2010, p. 1) this [...]