The Drift
“History as It Is Happening” | An Interview With Rachel Kushner
The Drift
Rachel Kushner’s acclaimed novels — Telex from Cuba, The Flamethrowers, The Mars Room — have immersed readers in mid-century Cuba, the New York art world of the 1970s, and a women’s prison in the early 2000s. Each one is densely populated with ideas; her forthcoming novel, Creation Lake, takes on leftist communes, Neanderthals, and the bureaucratic state. Kushner doesn’t call her preparation for these works “research”; her approach to history...
“The Impossible Is Always Happening” | An Interview with Saree Makdisi
The Drift
Since October 7, as Israel has attacked the Gaza Strip, young people at colleges across the country have led protests in solidarity with the people of Gaza and in support of a cease-fire. In the halls of Congress and the newspapers of record, around television sets and holiday tables, these protests ignited a set of secondary debates: about free speech, slogans, anti-Semitism, and the concept of debate itself. To help...
“The Logic of Plunder” | An Interview with Verónica Gago
The Drift
Over the past five years, leftist political parties have swept into power across Latin America, in what has been called a “pink tide.” In Mexico, Honduras, Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia, and Chile, politicians have channeled collective anger against reactionary regimes, catastrophic debt, and violence against women and Indigenous people into broad political victories. Verónica Gago is a professor of social sciences at the University of Buenos Aires and the National University...
“A Desperate Situation Getting More Desperate” | An Interview with Rashid Khalidi
The Drift
Since Hamas’s gruesome attack on October 7, we’ve watched as Israel has — with our government’s blessing and material aid — bombarded the captive residents of the Gaza Strip and displaced more than a million people. As protesters around the globe have expressed outrage at Israeli violence, a series of debates has played out on the American left: over whether mourning the deaths of 1,400 Israelis lends cover to Israel’s...
“Not Really Disciplined About Disciplines” | An Interview with Cathy Park Hong
The Drift
In her Dispatch for this issue, the scholar Marta Figlerowicz steers readers to Cathy Park Hong’s 2014 essay, “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde,” a lyrical and polemical piece that concludes with a rousing call to other poets of color: “Fuck the avant-garde. We must hew our own path.” Hong’s essay appeared in Lana Turner, which calls itself a “Journal of Poetry & Opinion,” and in the near-decade since,...
