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.
Ryan Poll
Ryan Poll teaches in the English Department at Northeastern Illinois University where his research focuses on the intersection of popular culture, aesthetics, and politics. 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. Other publications include essays on Get Out, Bruce Springsteen, and detective fiction. He is currently finishing a manuscript entitled Aquaman and the War on Oceans: Comics Activism in the Anthropocene (U Nebraska P). Follow him on Twitter @RyanPoll2 and feel free to contact him via e-mail: [email protected]
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.
The Mandalorian’s Political Allegory: Diversity Is the Way
When the president of Lucasfilm Kathleen Kennedy announced there will be more than 10 Star Wars shows and films coming out, she declared that popular culture is a space of diversity. All stories can and should be told simultaneously and adjacently.
Steve McQueen’s ‘Small Axe’ and Emerging Institutions of Black Power
In contrast to the pervasive attitude of cynicism that declares the world fixed and existing power structures unbeatable, Small Axe narrates how Black Power has been and remains a viable force that shapes British and world history.
Colonial Pandemics and Indigenous Futurism in Louise Erdrich and Gerald Vizenor
From a non-Native perspective, COVID-19 may be experienced as an unexpected and unprecedented catastrophe. Yet from a Native perspective, this current catastrophe links to a longer history that is synonymous with European colonization.
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.
Why Boccaccio’s ‘The Decameron’ Can Help Guide Us Through COVID-19
Rather than write about death and the world unfolding in the throes of the Black Plague, Giovanni Boccaccio instead wrote about the utopian potential of storytelling.
‘Gloria Bell’: Silent Suffering and Disco Dancing in Late Capitalism
Gloria Bell painfully conveys that this economic system thrives on our isolation.
Make America Bleed Again: The Violent Geography of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ’Oklahoma!’
Originally produced as fascism spread throughout Europe and nativism spread in the US, Oklahoma!'s exploration of belonging was a conspicuously political one.
Jordan Peele’s ‘Us’, Postmodernism, and Free-Floating Racism
Before terrifying us, Peele overwhelms with cultural signifiers untethered from their referents in his latest, Us.