Critical reception to Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), a Thai film that won the prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in the year of its release, remains wildly polarized. In one camp, mostly populated by professional film critics, the verdict flirts with ecstasy...
Response to a reader’s criticisms of “The Egyptian Revolution through a Literary Lens”
The reader is correct to a certain extent: revolution involves hard political work, and reading novels does not make for revolution alone–and some postcolonial theory fails to address revolution in any meaningful way. But I think the reader must have quickly perused my […]
The Egyptian Revolution through a Literary Lens
This winter, as protests against Hosni Mubarak escalated in Tahrir Square, commentators from across the political spectrum began to construct analogies between the situation in Egypt and earlier flashpoints in history. From the left, the Pakistani critic Tariq Ali suggested that “we witnessing…a wave of national-democratic […]
Travels with Vargas Llosa
Last December, I found myself on a flight to Lima carrying a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, the most recent winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Between a young Peruvian woman with Asian features and myself sat a tall man in a leather jacket with olive skin and striking cheekbones. He […]
Lewis Nkosi (1936-2010): An Appreciation
If Johannesburg became the “classical location” for “an African form of metropolitan modernity,” as Achille Mbembe argues in a recent essay, then the passing of Lewis Nkosi, who died of a stroke on September 5th at the age of seventy-three, marks the end of a […]
Post-Mandela Art?
By Timothy Johns
Though buried beneath controversies over vuvuzelas, refereeing, and the implosion of various national teams during the FIFA World Cup, Yiull Damaso’s autopsy painting of Nelson Mandela, titled “The Night Watch!”, nevertheless generated a considerable amount of heat this summer, particularly in the host […]