Серия "Politics, Literature, & Film"

The worldwide controversy surrounding its first publication in 1988 and concurrent death threat against its author, Salman Rushdie, paradoxically led to a narrow understanding of The Satanic Verses , which focused on whether it is insulting to Islam and whether it should be banned. And despite piecemeal attention to its epistemic intricacies by students of postcolonial literature in the aftermath, The Satanic Verses ’ essential opacity has never been sufficiently met. The Unknown...

Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously declared that “the greatest duty of a statesman is to educate." The central claim of Why Moralize upon It? is that it is not only statesmen who can help educate a democratic citizenry, but also novelists and filmmakers. This book’s title is drawn from Melville’s “Benito Cereno.” Near the end of this novella, after he has put down a rebellion of enslaved Africans, the American captain Amasa Delano claims...