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ERIN PINEDA |
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For several weeks following the publication in the British newspaper the
Guardian of a three-part exposé on the U.S. National Security Administration's
domestic surveillance programs, a curious and rather heated debate
circulated around the Internet about whether or not we could consider the
actions of Edward Snowden—his leaking of classified documents—civil
disobedience or not. Snowden, at the time an employee at the technology
security consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, gathered documents and
information on a range of Internet surveillance and metadata collection
programs with the intention of leaking them to the press. Contacting first
the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald and then filmmaker Laura Poitras, Snowden
provided them thousands of documents through the spring of 2013, an overview
of which was first published later in May. By then, Snowden had left
his position in Hawaii for Hong Kong. As details of the leak became public
throughout summer 2013, the Obama Administration was quick to condemn
Snowden, claiming serious damage and risk to national security. Then, on
June 14, 2013 federal prosecutors officially charged him with theft of government
property and violations of the 1917 Espionage Act. There were others,
however, who questioned whether the leak really constituted a threat, and as
of two recent federal court rulings, the constitutionality of the NSA programs
remains unclear and disputed.
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DANIELLE BOBKER |
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These days it sometimes seems as though the only legitimate way to come
out as gay or lesbian, whether famous or not, is in front of a camera before
an audience of millions. Our investment in the mass media as crucial sites
of gay and lesbian visibility came into sharp relief during the speech Jodie
Foster gave when she accepted the Cecil B. DeMille award at the 2013 Golden
Globes ceremony and in the responses that the speech elicited. Foster teased
viewers by promising a very personal revelation, but then refused to deliver
the anticipated punch line: "So while I'm here being all confessional, I guess
I have a sudden urge to say something that I've never really been able to air
in public [. . . . ] But I'm just going to put it out there, right? Loud and proud,
right? So I'm going to need your support on this. I am single."  Following this bait and switch, Foster commented on the expectations she had subverted:
"[This is not going to] be a big coming-out speech tonight because I already
did my coming out about a thousand years ago back in the Stone Age, in
those very quaint days when a fragile young girl would open up to trusted
friends and family and co-workers and then gradually, proudly, to everyone
who knew her, to everyone she actually met."
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KEYA GANGULY |
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In his 1952 essay, "Philology and Weltliteratur," Erich Auerbach notes the centrality
of a point of departure in literary-historical investigations as follows:
"In order to accomplish a major work of synthesis, it is imperative to locate
a point of departure [Ansatzpunkt], a handle, as it were, by which the subject
can be seized. The point of departure must be the election of a firmly circumscribed,
easily comprehensible set of phenomena whose interpretation is
a . . .
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JOSEPH MASSAD |
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In Orientalism, Edward Said's efforts were dedicated to uncovering how the
"Oriental" other of the Occidental self was formed and conjured up. His
seminal book would also explicate the constitution of this Occidental self,
an explication that would become generative of a large body of literature that
followed in its footsteps. In this brief contribution, I argue that the lasting
and ongoing impact of Orientalism is its uncovering . . .
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ANDREW N. RUBIN |
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At the very end of the introduction to Orientalism, Edward W. Said makes the
peculiar observation that as he was writing the book, he "found himself by
some inescapable logic writing the history of the strange, secret sharer of
Western anti-Semitism." The historical, political and philological implications
of this allusion to Joseph Conrad's short story, "The Secret Sharer,"
did not occur to me until sometime around 2007. . .
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