Literature : John Cayley

When discussing literature in the early 1990s, Jacques Derrida was quick to remark, “The name ‘literature’ is a very recent invention.” Historically and politically located, therefore. Literature, particularly when it is taken to derive from or include oral linguistic aesthetic practices, has also been understood as an inevitable, evolved, ‘universal’ consequence of human creative activity, and even as constitutive of the ‘human.’ …

Exposure : Erin Graff Zivin

Two propositions. First proposition: exposure is a political concept. Second proposition: exposure is a method describing the performative articulation of political concepts. The current formulation, as well as the limits, of the concept “exposure” are found in Emmanuel Levinas’s thought, characterized by some as ethical philosophy” …

Imperception : Alex Moskowitz

Phillis Wheatley Peters’s collection of poems, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was published in 1773. First appearing in London, the collection is perhaps best remembered today for the poem titled “On Being Brought from Africa to America” …

Performativity : Bonnie Honig

“Everybody’s talking about performativity, now,” Eve Sedgwick said in 1993.1 She said it was because of Judith Butler’s book Gender Trouble, which cast sex/gender as performative, that is to say, as a discursive product, not the natural cause, of words uttered, gestures performed, clothes worn, bodies moving. But, as Sedgwick knew …