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July 8, 2020 Has the archive lost its taste and smell during the Covid-19 pandemic? I’ve been teaching a class on documents and archives for years. Before plunging the students into historic archives, I usher them into the class through an encounter wi­th a powerful contemporary document. For our first...

June 22, 2020 In her study of the Afro-Trinidadian writer and revolutionary C. L. R. James, Laura Harris introduces the evocative idea of an “underground undocument.” The undocument refers to the ambitious literary project James was invested in during the forties and early fifties, when he lived undocumented in the...

June 3, 2020 In late May, the New York Times published an article on the sounds of a city confronting COVID-19 and practicing social distancing. Capturing the new acoustics of the pandemic were sixteen microphones that had been spread through three boroughs as part of Sounds of New York City...

May 11, 2020  “I can sleep!” I thought on March 6, as the first event was cancelled. Ten days later, all classes at the university were cancelled. My travel to Italy to visit family was cancelled. My assistantship for the summer was cancelled. My colleagues. My workplace. My life. “It’s...

May 4, 2020 I arrived in Paris on February 1, 2020, roughly six weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic led the French government to implement its mandatory quarantine. My trip had originally been made possible by a doctoral fellowship through the Embassy of France in the United States, itself aimed at...

April 28, 2020 Over a span of just a few weeks, the force with which human species life has collided with governmentalities on a planetary scale cannot but yield a powerful biopolitical episteme. That the biological is urgently political now is without doubt. However, the problem I perceive is a...

April 21, 2020 In early February, after I finished reading Robin Mitchell’s Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth Century (University of Georgia Press, 2020), I wrote a short Twitter thread about how it impacted me, personally, as a student and scholar of Francophone Caribbean Studies as well...

March 18, 2020 Translated by Karen Pinkus, Editor of Diacritics Translator’s note: There has been a good deal of important writing by Italian intellectuals during the lockdown there. A short piece by Giorgio Agamben, titled “The Invention of an Epidemic,”  has aroused a great deal of controversy. It was followed...

August 5, 2019 This space will serve as a forum for readers and writers to interact in many ways: The afterlife of essays: the time frame of publishing a journal article is glacial (although, come to think of it, that’s no longer an apt metaphor) so this will give us...

August 20, 2019   My favorite job was as an illicit-sounding “book-dealer” after college in my small town on the shores of Lake Superior. The shop had a musty smell that three out of ten patrons would praise after entering and inhaling. I spent my time reading and writing while...

September 5, 2019 Any graduate student seeking insight into the experience of scholarly publishing can learn a lot, I am sorry to say, from the first few chapters of Karl Marx’s Capital. When workers bring the products of their labor to the market, Marx tells us, these products become commodities....