Friday, May 2, 2008

Small break

Hello, you dedicated few readers! It's been a while since my last post (well over two weeks). I was swamped with the end of the semester grading and other small hassles. I'll also be off for the next two weeks on vacation, so look for new posts by the last third of May!

Until then, I'll redirect you to probably the most interesting piece of political writing I've read in the past few months, a piece on the conversation about race in America as filtered through our hesitancy to comment on racial representation. Fittingly, it's written by Ed Gonzalez, one of the film critics that I admire most at least partly because of his consistent inquiry into the politics of representation and the larger social significance of media such as film. Most interestingly, I find his personalization of this issue especially disarming (in a good way) and appropriate: several theorists (D.A. Miller, Eve Sedgewick, etc.) have been trying to engage in a more personalized kind of theory and criticism, but they very rarely balance the personal and the political as precisely and as subtly as Gonzalez does here.

Enjoy, and see you in a few weeks!