Public Books

Public Books is an online magazine of ideas, arts, and scholarship.

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“We did expect the show to complicate the narrative around France’s last king. … We saw none of these colonial connections mentioned anywhere in the exhibition.”
https://t.co/HIE76kB64G

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“We must tell the story of the past as it actually was: polyvocal, polygamous, polygendered.”

New at PB: Dani Joslyn reviews Rebecca Davis’s “Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America” (@wwnorton).
https://t.co/zjZIiSoCBC

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When scholars Meredith Martin & Hannah Williams visited 2 exhibitions devoted to Charles X, they expected some amount of reckoning with France’s colonial past. Instead they found “the shock of an afternoon … celebrating the sumptuous wealth of Charles X.”
https://t.co/HIE76kB64G

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“Instead of defending the existence of queer and trans people, historical works should be attacking the shibboleth of the historical coherence of heterosexuality and (its flimsier cousin) cissexuality.”
https://t.co/zjZIiSoCBC

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Dani Joslyn reviews Rebecca Davis’s “Fierce Desires,” a book that “supplants the last major synthetic history of sexuality, which came out in 1988” but ultimately “fails to fully grapple with the implications of sexual and gendered diversity.”
https://t.co/zjZIiSoCBC

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“Watched today, this flare of an episode from 2024 flashes even more brightly. It burns an afterimage onto the eyes that stays long after Rishi is no longer the camera’s primary subject.”

A. Banerjee on the episode of “Industry” told from Rishi’s POV: https://t.co/MWgkpX112T

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“Perhaps what makes the analogy between Rishi and Britain work despite the snags of racial difference is what Grace Blakeley calls ‘the financialisation of everyday life’ in contemporary Britain.”

A. Banerjee on “Industry”: https://t.co/MWgkpX112T

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“What happens is the cattle become racialized through this language of Mexican cattle are tick-infested, American cattle are good.”

New at PB: For Writing Latinos, Mary E. Mendoza talks with @gerry_cadava.
https://t.co/eiJe4jLTjG

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“The irony of a brown man claiming this colonial slogan is worth noting, and the irony doesn’t run out in this racial register.”

In an episode of “Industry,” the character Rishi bets big on sterling. How deep does his identification with Britain go?
https://t.co/MWgkpX112T

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“There’s a strange tendency within contemporary feminism to cast the anorexic as both a victim and a villain: certainly a victim of patriarchal body fascism, but also one who, by failing to resist this fascism, thereby inflicts it on other women.”
https://t.co/TWDgmFtjXQ

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“We think about this construction of the border as controlling these men who are crossing, and it was actually women and their reproductive capacity that really pushed these agents to argue for it.”
https://t.co/eiJe4jLTjG

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“‘John of John’ continues the literary tradition of ‘Shuggie Bain’ & ‘Young Mungo,’ while introducing a new layer of complexity to Stuart’s oeuvre, one set in the ancestral traditions that shaped so much of working-class identity in the 20th century.”
https://t.co/lUeA33AoyF

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“That is actually why we started building border fences for people.”

In conversation with @gerry_cadava, Mary E. Mendoza discusses how border fences originated to keep Mexican migrant women—“and their reproductive capacity”—out of the United States.
https://t.co/eiJe4jLTjG

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“Such a withdrawal is not a useful political action. But it’s definitely politically significant.”

Most normative treatments for anorexia exclude the possibility that one might stop eating out of depressive withdrawal from a terrible world.
https://t.co/TWDgmFtjXQ

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“The condition of debt once marked the divide between the diasporic and the host nation. This condition now seems to be what connects them.”
https://t.co/MWgkpX112T

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“Queer identity survives despite neoliberalism.”

In each of Douglas Stuart’s three novels, characters find themselves left behind by the neoliberal age. Read Will McDonald’s review of “John of John”: https://t.co/lUeA33AoyF

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“Better than any other writer writing today, Douglas Stuart has woven class and identity into one common struggle for endurance.”

In each of Stuart’s novels, the protagonists are struggling to endure. Read Will McDonald’s review of ��John of John”: https://t.co/lUeA33AoyF

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“That starts this very institutional regime of cleansing Mexican bodies … Mexican braceros coming in, getting sprayed with DDT, being placed in corrals…”

Mary E. Mendoza on the long history of the US’s treatment of Mexican migrants as “invasive.”
https://t.co/eiJe4jLTjG

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“Might the identification implied in Rishi’s statement ‘I am long sterling’ go deeper still?”

New at PB: Through an analysis of “Industry,” A. Banerjee looks at diaspora, indebted.
https://t.co/MWgkpX112T

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“If I’d healed through conventional treatment, I can’t imagine being moved to write about that.”

In a new interview, Amber Husain discusses the psychedelic-assisted therapy she underwent to treat her anorexia & the ways it informed her writing.
https://t.co/TWDgmFtjXQ