Intimate Citizenship: The Influence of Marriage, Sexuality, and Transience on National Membership

In Spike Lee’s 2006 crime drama, Inside Man, a mysterious group of robbers with an apparent political agenda hijack a downtown NYC bank holding dozens of employees and customers hostage. Though the movie focuses primarily on the travails of embattled NYPD police detective Keith Frazer (Denzel Washington), Lee delivers a movie that encapsulates the stunning diversity of New York.  Even minor characters with small moments provide useful insights into the various racial, ethnic, and religious conflicts and tensions that embody twenty first century urban life. In particular, Lee’s treatment of Sikh American cab driver, Vikram Walia (Waris Ahluwalia) illuminates the ambivalent place of South …

Life in the Fast Lane: An American Catholic’s Experience of Ramadan

Photo by Nathan Hartle Ramadan, while quite familiar to well over one billion Muslims, represents a religious practice more universal and extreme than most Americans have ever experienced. The rules of the month-long fast are intimidating; during daylight hours, participants are not allowed to eat, drink any kind of liquid, smoke or have sex. For Muslims, the month of fasting represents a chance for self-reflection and to practice self-discipline. For a non-Muslim in a Muslim country, the experience of Ramadan is eye-opening. I was a visitor in Morocco during the month of Ramadan in 2011. I had never been to a place so religiously monochromatic—about 99% of the population of Morocco is …

Bergman on Mars: Lars von Trier’s Melancholia

On the way out of Lars von Trier’s new film Melancholia, a slightly dazed patron asked me and my friends what the whole thing was about. “It was about a director who’s a depressed asshole and wanted to make a movie about himself,” I said. Well, I got that, the man replied. But what else was it about? “Everything and nothing” is a tempting answer. One can see it as an expression of von Trier’s own crippling depression, embodied in the spectacle of a limp, lifeless Kirsten Dunst being dragged to and draped on the bathtub by her patient sibling (Charlotte Gainsbourg). The director’s wife has said that such scenes were based on her own experience of dealing with her husband’s …

Essence Precedes Existence? The Problem of Identity Politics in Hurewitz’s Bohemian LA

What does it mean to “be” white, or black, or gay, or working-class? How might a Jewish Ethiopian-American who grew up in poverty but now has a big bank account define himself? Which identity matters most – the current status of wealth and privilege, the experience of coming from a hardscrabble background, or Jewishness or Africanness or national identity (native or adopted)? Does one dimension of identity actually have to subordinate the others? Our current president is almost always described as being black, despite having one white parent and growing up almost entirely with a white family. His own experience is far more complex than our contemporary framework of race and identity …

The Great Capitalist/Christian Resonance Machine

Capitalism, particularly over the past three decades, has become a “god” of American society, politics, economics and culture. When capitalism experiences crises (and it does experience many) it is not the system itself that is called into question, but intrusive government, regulators and other violators of the purported self-equilibrating “invisible hand of the market.” Furthering the deification of capitalism is its ties to Christianity. These ties have been examined, perhaps most famously and trenchantly by Max Weber, but the two have become intertwined and imbricated in new and destructive ways in our neoliberal era. According to William Connolly, it is this assemblage of …

Mountain Goats and the Music of Survival

Sometimes we’re not prepared for adversity. When it happens, sometimes we’re caught short… Sometimes, we don’t know just what to do when adversity takes over. And I have advice for all of us, I got it from my pianist Joe Zawinul who wrote this song, and it sounds like what you’re supposed to say when you have that kind of problem. And it’s called “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy.” - Cannonball Adderley This line comes from the opening of one of my favorite records of all time, and it sums up one musical and philosophical response to suffering – to recognize one’s own insufficiency and turn to a greater power for some kind of relief. Whether Joe Zawinul was himself a religious man …

From Bethlehem to Baku: Bandali Jawzi and the Origins of Postmodernism

In Interpreting Islam: Bandali Jawzi’s Islamic Intellectual History, Tamara Sonn brings new attention to a figure who has been mostly forgotten in Western historiography, at least until recently. The details of Bandali Jawzi’s life remain murky, but its trajectory offers a remarkable vantage point on the political and cultural convulsions that roiled the early twentieth century. With little more evidence than an unpublished dissertation from an Azerbaijani university and a footnote in a 1973 text, Sonn had to piece together the writer’s origins. One scholar had heard that Jawzi was a born a Tatar in the Russian city of Kazan. Another source indicated that Jawzi was an Arab Christian …

Dreams of Redemption: The Quasi-Religious World of Conspiracy Theory

Leave it to Americans to invent a religion based on paperwork. Credit card bills. Birth certificate bonds. Form W-8BEN. The Titles of Nobility Amendment. These are the magical totems invoked by followers of something called the Redemption movement, a strange ideological offshoot of White Supremacist and tax resister causes that has ensnared thousands of Americans in a far-reaching conspiracy theory. I was reminded of the Redemptionist subculture in the aftermath of Saturday’s horrific rampage in Tucson, Arizona, which killed six people and critically wounded a Democratic Congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords. For many liberals, thoughts immediately turned to the rhetoric of Tea Party …