Taylor Swift Between Idols and Icons
Taylor Swift dazzlingly shows how our idols’ humanity is reduced and replaceable, but our icons help us recognize that love is what binds us and makes life meaningful.
Ryan Poll
Ryan Poll is an associate professor in the English Department at Northeastern Illinois University where his research focuses on the intersection of aesthetics, politics, and ecology. His first book, Main Street and Empire: The Fictional Small Town in the Age of Globalization (Rutgers UP), examines how the fictional small town is used to frame and stage normative US narratives throughout the 19th-, 20th- and into the 21st century. His second book, Aquaman and the War on Oceans: Comics Activism in the Anthropocene (U Nebraska Press) argues that Aquaman is an important figure of ecological justice whose long and storied history helps us chart how global capitalism is destroying the Global Ocean. Other publications include essays on Get Out, neoliberalism, and the theater of genocide. His current project is on modern formations of the sacred in global capitalism. Feel free to contact him via e-mail at r-poll@neiu.edu.
‘Anora’, (Sex) Work, and the Fantasies of Genre
Sean Baker’s Anora illustrates how sex work – a working-class job – is a dance between creativity and commerce, art and artifice.
‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ and the Politics of Genre
In genre-busting sci-fi Everything Everywhere All At Once, the multiverse is not a genre but a metaphor that invites audiences to think about the complexities and politics of genres.
Aquaman and the War Against Oceans (Excerpt)
Aquaman can be read as an allegory that responds to the climate change crisis, an era in which the oceans have become sites of warfare and mass death.
How Masculinity Fails in Jane Campion’s ‘The Power of the Dog’
Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog undermines “toxic masculinity” – a term that evokes the existence of alternative masculinities.
Zack Snyder’s Theories of Justice
The creation of Zack Snyder’s Justice League shows that the powerful few fear any form of democracy—even when it’s about something as seemingly innocuous as a superhero film.
Amanda Gorman’s History Lesson: An Inaugural Poem in the Shadow of White Supremacy
From the onset, Amanda Gorman's poem, "The Hill We Climb", dissolves the ideology that a presidential inauguration announces the new and deracinates the present from the past.
Colonial Pandemics and Indigenous Futurism in Louise Erdrich and Gerald Vizenor
Concepts within indigenous futurism such as Native slipstream, First Contact, Indigenous Science, and Native Apocalypse, help shape emerging narratives about Indigenous futures.
Spike Lee’s ‘Da 5 Bloods’ and Pedagogical Filmmaking in the Movement for Black Lives
As with Da 5 Bloods, Spike Lee's films are replete with experimental aesthetics that deconstruct the conventions of (white) Hollywood and re-frame and re-contextualize Black lives and Black history.
Reading Pandemics: From Boccaccio to Indigenous Futurism
Join us -- at a safe distance -- on this journey through the canonical and radical as we look to literary representations of pandemics in the past to help us understand the politics and possibilities of the present COVID-19 pandemic.