Chapter II Going Through The Motions Movement, Metahistory, and the Spectacle of Suffering in Teju Cole’s Open City”[L]iterature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing.”Cathy Caruth”And above all beware, my body and my soul too, beware of crossing your arms in the sterile attitude of a spectator, because life […]
Objectively, the global moment of Afropolitanism affords a greater visibility to people of African descent, be it in the world of visual arts, media, literature, or business. 39 Yet parallel to what commentators have described as a positive rendering of what is usually a negative ‘African exceptionalism,’ Afro-pessimist thinkers like Wilderson have contended that the
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argues that Black culture and identity have been quite thoroughly investigated in spatial terms, focusing on notions such as dispersal and displacement in national or geographical frameworks. However, she notes, “little work has been done to examine the impetus to create the temporal placement and displacement of black identity and culture, as well as its
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1.2 The Extranationality of African LiteratureAfrican literature has often been defined in terms of national or nationalist literature and interpreted as a response to either colonialism, nation-building, post-independence disillusionment, or globalization. A lasting theoretical contribution to this mode of thinking is Fredric – Jameson’s much debated “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” (1986)
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Chapter I Introduction – Writing Race in the Moment of Afropolitanism”We all know the truth: more connects us than separates us. But in times of crisis the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another, as if we were one single tribe.”T’Challa”Whatever of good may
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SUMMER 1980IN THE MONTHS AFTER LEARNING SHE WOULD BE JOINING THE ASTRO-naut corps, Joan did three things.First, she gave notice at Rice.On her last day, the Physics and Astronomy Department threw her a going-away party. By the punch bowl, Dr. Siskin asked-in a way that struck Joan as remarkably transparent-how she’d managed to pull this
SEVEN YEARS EARLIERJOAN’S YOUNGER SISTER, BARBARA, HAD CALLED HER ONE MORNING TO tell her about a commercial she’d seen on TV late the previous night.”It said, “This is your NASA.””What?” Joan said. She was in her kitchen, pouring herself a cup of coffee, the phone held between her shoulder and her ear. She was about
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VANESSA FORD HAS HAD BIOMEDICAL SENSORS ALL OVER HER BODY FOR hours. They have been sending her vitals down to the flight surgeon, who monitors every breath she takes. But even well before the elec-trodes were placed on her body, Vanessa has been aware that someone on the ground is always watching.Mission Control knows everything
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Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid summary of Atmosphere (2025), a historical-fiction romance set in the 1980s space-shuttle era: — Setting & premise The novel is set in the early 1980s at NASA’s Space Shuttle program. The protagonist is Joan Goodwin—an astronomer turned astronaut‐trainee—who leaves her more comfortable academic life to pursue a higher, riskier calling:
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Chapter 31 When Boo Radley shuffled to his feet, light from the livingroom windows glistened on his forehead. Every move he made was uncertain, as if he were not sure his hands and feet could make proper contact with the things he touched. He coughed his dreadful raling cough, and was so shaken he had
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