Critical Inquiry

"The voice of an orator, or documentarian, enlists and reveals desires, lacks, and longings. It charts a path through the stuff of the world that gives body to dreams and substance to principles. Speaking, giving voice to a view of the world, makes possible the necessary conditions of visibility to see things anew, to see, as if for the first time, what had, until now, escaped notice."

From our Autumn 2008 issue, read Bill Nichols's "Documentary Reenactment and the Fantasmatic Subject": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/595629

Happy Birthday, Thomas Pynchon!

"The focus of Wright's stories is on the difficult everyday ethical choices that blacks faced under Jim Crow. Yet the wrong choice was often made, he implies, because blacks had been socialized into a culture of docility. The disposition to submit to injustice is difficult to overcome, and resisting the urge to acquiesce does not always come naturally to the oppressed."

From our Spring 2012 issue, read Tommie Shelby's "The Ethics of Uncle Tom's Children": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/664549

"The Palestinian theater, as Al-Saber presents it, is marked by its distinct method of participatory aesthetics, the juxtaposition of explicit debate and abstract stylization, and a wide, sometimes untraversable gap between a legible story and its theatricalization onstage."

New in review, Marissa Fenley on Samer Al-Saber's A Movement’s Promise: https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/marissa_fenley_reviews_a_movements_promise/