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A Prayer for Mimesis? Reframing Islam in Cinema
Feb 12, 2026
In 1896, mere months after revealing their revolutionary cinematograph in Lyon, the Lumière Brothers dispatched a team of operators around the globe to showcase the new device and capture moving images for international circulation. Among this cadre of pioneering cinematographers was Alexandre Promio, who traveled to Spain, England, and Italy, before embarking on a journey to Algeria in December that same year. This broader story is part of my forthcoming book,
Modernism, Energy, and Environment
Black Migrants and Climate Change Vulnerability Amid the Great Smog of London in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners
Jan 28, 2026
What would it mean to reread Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) as a narrative about the representation of Black migrants during the smog? The smog, the 1950s’ concerning ecological and climate issue, results from the mix of coal-burning smoke with London fog. Upon combustion, coal emits visible black smoke into the lingering fog, causing various health and respiratory hazards. The Lonely Londoners depicts the 1950s, when the Windrush generation of...
Northeast Indian Literature in Planetary Time: Creation Myths, Zones of Extraction and Anthropocene Heterotemporality in Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih’s Poetics
Jan 14, 2026
Fig. 1. Cover of Kynpham Sing Nonkynrih, Around the Hearth: Khasi Legends.Anglophone Literature from the borderland region of Northeast India has a relatively short history with the major works comprising the oeuvre published in the last four decades or so. One of the most visible trajectories in Northeast Indian Anglophone Literature (NIAL) [1] is the reworking of myths and origin stories, especially by writers from...
Gertrude Stein’s Landscapes, and Other Things That Are All at Once
Dec 3, 2025
I have always liked things that were all at once. Not abundance so much as excess. But excess is not quite the correct word. What I am thinking about, what I have many times tried to make, what I have often loved, is the exuberance of too much possibility. Too much: those things that capture, or at least organize and aestheticize, the ways the world is often too much.