The Dangerous Bodies of Others: Twilight’s New Moon
In this essay, Zoe Jane Patterson explores the problematic racialization of the werewolf characters in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series.
The Question of the Authentic Indian
In a striking short story titled Out on Main Street, the writer and visual artist Shani Mootoo deconstructs the idea of the authentic Indian identity, countering it with the notion of hybridity.
A KKK Kidnapping, The Love Laws, and The Shape of Water
Zoe Jane Patterson weaves together Arundhati Roy’s writing with the film The Shape of Water, to make a commentary about love, race and unspoken social laws.
Notes on Kendrick Lamar, Moby-Dick, and the Margins
A clever, surprising intertextual analysis of Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN album and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick as tales of outsiders.
Freshman Fumblings, First Love: A Review of The Idiot by Elif Batuman
Vamika Sinha reviews the bestseller bildungsroman by Elif Batuman.
Don't Let Me Be Lonely: Depicting Abstract Emotions in Writing
How can one distil or display, accurately, the complexity of something like love, or loneliness, in a single text? Vamika Sinha analyzes the work of Jamaican-American poet Claudia Rankine, and her poetic diagnoses of modern American society.