The Disappeared Country

By Mladen Dolar

JUNE 2022 | Critics Page

On many occasions when I have to fill in a form, I am asked for the date and country of my birth. For the country, I am offered some two hundred options, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, including many I would have a hard time finding on a map. But my country of birth doesn’t appear on any of these lists. The country where I was born and where I spent the majority of my life has disappeared, it is conspicuously missing. Its name is still vividly present in the collective memory, but I guess not for long.

J. Nicole Jones’s Low Country: A Southern Memoir

By Yvonne C. Garrett

APRIL 2021 | Books

In her debut, a memoir, Jones catalogues family violence as a part of her remembering; violence becomes a framework and connecting thread for the 13 vignettes that explore her own, her family’s, and her hometown, Myrtle Beach’s troubled and collective past.

Randa Jarrar’s Love Is an Ex-Country

By Yvonne C. Garrett

FEB 2021 | Books

In Jarrar’s new book (a memoir), Trump’s rise to power is an undercurrent as, in over more than 200 pages, across decades, time zones, and borders, Jarrar explores what it is to live as an American who is also Palestinian, a woman, and a woman of a certain size who also self-defines as queer. We can all learn a lot from Jarrar: about racism, privilege, oppression, fat-phobia, sexual violence, and the way this country (and others) treats women.

a country of anonymous pain no more

By rafael amorim

FEB 2021 | Critics Page

brazil. a white man in his gray coat, with a smile full of scorn at the corner of his lips, appeared on an internet video to say “brazilian art of the next decade will be heroic and will be national” in a prophetic tone, he said that the art of the next decade will be “and will be equally imperative, since it is deeply binded to the urgent aspirations of our people, or else it will be nothing.