A revolutionary age is an age of action; ours is the age of advertisement and publicity. Nothing ever happens but there is immediate publicity everywhere. In the present age a rebellion is, of all things, the most unthinkable. Such an expression of strength would seem ridiculous to the calculating intelligence of our times. On the other hand, a political virtuoso might bring off a feat almost as remarkable. He might write a manifesto suggesting a general assembly at which peo

[T]he ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. Hence, to kill or to allow to live constitute the limits of sovereignty, its fundamental attributes. —Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics” In June Tucker Carlson accompanied Donald Trump on a trip to North Korea to meet with the nation’s leader, Kim Jong Un. Ostensibly, the meeting was to ease tensions between the United States and the Democr

“Music is and has been a powerful apparatus of capture for values of all kinds, but it’s also a powerful tool in subverting the present and/or carving out a livable future” (72). As I read Jeffrey T Nealon’s I’m Not Like Everybody Else: Biopolitics, Neoliberalism, and American Popular Music, I rotate through a number of Pandora stations. There’s my classic R&B station based on bands like Sam & Dave and the Temptations with a distinct 60s-70s Motown sound. Another has been lov

My body became different. Over the span of a year and a half the body that I knew became smaller, got stronger, ate new things, felt different. Discussions of weight loss are often shrouded in the language of “newness,” as if the person inside the body went to a car dealership and traded their Toyota for a sleek new Lexus, furnished with that new car smell. Commentary surrounding the “new body” is eerily similar to that of trading out an older car for a new one: “congratulati

A couple months ago, as I watched Trump spew his rhetoric of narcissism and hate from the center stage of the Republican National Convention, I thought back to April, when Donald Pease visited Lincoln. During a conversation with graduate students in a Bailey Library lecture about Moby Dick, Pease, a noted American Studies critic and scholar, drew interesting parallels between Captain Ahab and Trump. And now, with the presidential election two months away, it seems like an app

Image: "Underwater City" es.forwallpaper.com Donald Pease of Dartmouth College presented the Robert E. Knoll lecture on March 15, 2016. During his prefatory remarks, Department Chair Marco Abel reminded the crowd assembled for the well-attended event that the Knoll lecture is historically one of the premier events in the Department of English. Indeed, Dr. Pease’s remarkable presentation, “Between the Camp and the Commons: Bio-Political Alter-Geographies in Douglass and Melvil

On April 2, 2015, Siva Vaidhyanathan, the twentieth Humanities on the Edge speaker, presented his lecture about “The Operating System of Our Lives” before an impressive crowd gathered at the auditorium of the Sheldon Museum. Vaidhyanathan, the Robertson Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia, explained in detail (and without notes) some specific and logically constructed reasons why people should be worried about current technological trends. This review of

The crowd in the Sheldon Museum sat slightly perplexed last Thursday as this unsettling recording of Antonin Artuad’s To Have Done With the Judgement of God (1947) played while the lecturer - Gregg Lambert - remained seated: Lambert, current Dean’s Professor of Humanities at Syracuse University and co-founder of the Perpetual Peace Project, took the podium, explaining how Artaud's piece interrogates the American system of manufacturing its population into soldiers, segueing i

The plants at the center of Ruth Ozeki’s 2003 novel All Over Creation are agricultural crops, in particular, the Russet Burbank potato. Ursula Heise notices how Ozeki repeatedly uses the potato as a metaphor for humans, and suggests this narrative equation demonstrates the dangers of conflating social and biological diversity. Heise’s larger point is that environmental literature and ecocriticism need a more nuanced engagement with theories of transnationalism and globalizati

This year I’m planning to head into the weeds, to think through some of the growing body of theoretical ideas and scholarship on plants. The phrase “in the weeds” suggests the experience of being overwhelmed with tasks or overtaken by details. In the weeds is off the clear path of knowledge or control. Whether or not such a location is seen as productive probably depends on what you define a weed as, and where, and why. Weeds are conventionally called plants out of place; in