Sputnik in Russian Cultural History
Ethan Pollock Sputnik sent shockwaves through the United States and around the world, but it did not have to be that way. Rocket scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain had hoped...
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Glass Consciousness
Brinda Bose & Prasanta Chakravarty The self-reflexive Stephane Mallarme, acutely aware of the limitations of language, acknowledges in his essay ‘Bucolique’ the inability of language to contain grandeur. Language cannot and should...
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On The Poverty of Student Life
Mustapha Khayati [First published in 1966 at the University of Strasbourg by students of the university and members of the Internationale Situationniste. A few students elected to the student union printed 10,000...
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Of Newspapers and Governments
Malarvizhi Jayanth The memoirs of a former journalist who is using the Wikileaks context to settle old scores Once upon an election, the ruling party was bullying and booth-capturing recklessly. I was there....
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Cordial Old Mates: Adorno-Marcuse Exchanges
Correspondence on the German Student Movement Theodor Adorno/Herbert Marcuse Prof. Dr. Theodor W. Adorno 6 Frankfurt am Main Kettenhofweg 123 14 February 1969 Dear Herbert I wrote to you on 24 January and...
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The Blind Kingdom
Véronique Tadjo Chapter One; Earth Jolts The earth jolted, violently – all of a sudden – while most inhabitants still slept. In a matter of seconds, the world turned upside down. The ground...
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The Second Discovery of America
Eduardo Galeano For Pedro Arsipe, homeland meant nothing. It was the place where he was born, which meant nothing to him because he had no choice in the matter, and that was...
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Some Notes toward Queering the Humanities in the University
Brinda Bose Has the increasing visibility of the movement against Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (that criminalises homosexual behaviour) in recent years brought any significant change to gendered spaces in Indian...
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The Rienzi Effect
Hans Rudolf Vaget Joachim Köhler, in his Wagners Hitler: Der Prophet und sein Vollstrecker, goes so far as to suggest that the German dictator was “merely” the executioner of Wagner’s ideas. Köhler...
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A Moment of Revelation
Prasanta Chakravarty (A Report on ‘The Everyday Life of a Discipline’- a colloquium on contemporary English Studies that took place on February 4, 2011, at the Department of English, University of Delhi) Unlike...
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A Letter from Badal Sircar
To: Richard Schechner November 23, 1981 Dear Richard, You wanted me to write for the "Intercultural Performance" issue of The Drama Review. You wanted me to write about my experience with my theatre...
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Reconstructing Historical Materialism
Jairus Banaji [This is Part I of a two part essay that HUG is publishing. The paper was presented at the 6th Annual Historical Materialism Conference in London, 2009] What I‘d like to...
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Acid Rock, Mrinal Sen and The Seventies
Sharmadip (Toy) Basu The Bengali Marxist film-maker Mrinal Sen’s Kolkata Ekattor, or Calcutta ’71, is celebrated in the genealogy of Indian New Wave cinema as an exemplar of dialectical storytelling. Released in 1972,...
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Homeric-Thersitic
Robert H. Bell “But after all, what is the whole subject matter of that revered poem the Iliad but ‘the broils of foolish kings and the foolish populace’?”—Desiderius Erasmus (The Praise of...
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