Critical Inquiry

I. The first impending signs of Saint-Pierre’s May 1902 cataclysmic event became visible weeks prior, in the latter half of April. Months earlier, however, there were faint intermittent rumbling sounds and steam coming from the direction of Mount Pelée. The steam persisted, travelling outward to the town adjacent to it, St. Pierre. The residue of the spewing gas left a foetid odour in the air and this kept on for weeks before worsening. This was followed by an increasingly loud banging like that of a thunderstruck or cannon fire, but negligent authorities continued to overlook the power of one of…

The best time to catch pigeons in action is when the sun is up. Like us, these diurnal birds carry out most of their essential activities under the sun. When it sets, they retreat back to their warm and hidden shelters. Pigeons are also very hardy and are known to be unfastidious when selecting their homes; almost any spot that provides them with some kind of temporary cover, such as roofs, trees, and building ledges, will suffice. I used to always find excuses whenever friends asked to come over to my place after school. After I turned 18, I gradually…

I Oreka James’ Untitled 1 sculpture features fabric stretched over plywood fastened to a brushed aluminum anchor. The sculpture bursts out of star-shaped soil to come to a star-shaped point. The structure spins continuously, flashing between two abstract paintings that evoke the beginning of life. As the pulsing sound of the motor mimics the relentless tide of the ocean and fills the room, I am moved to a beginning when our life was first dreamed up and summoned out of primordial sea. I see the sun as it shines down and pulls earth up from out of the abyss and strikes it…

Noo was a fashion blogger until June 2020. Then she wrote a piece on the removal of the infamous statue of English enslaver Edward Colston by Black Lives Matter protesters in England. Someone popular shared her blog piece on Twitter. The viral blog post was her reaction to the language the media used in describing protesters’ removal of the statue. “They use words such as FALL, TOPPLE, DEFACE, TORN DOWN, TARGETED, VANDALIZE,” Noo wrote. “These words work to turn the real act and force of violence on its head. They signal that protesters’ removal of the statue is a violent…

On both the Anglophone and the Francophone sides, Africa was on the podium of literary delight in 2021. It is true as in the words of Samira Sawlani that African writers took the world by storm. Boubacar Boris Diop won the 2022 Neustadt International Prize for Literature for his book titled, Murambi: The Book of Bones, which explores the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. It is the fifth decade of the prize and Diop is among the few Africans who have won the prestigious award organized by World Literature Today of the University of Oklahoma. The Ghanaian writer, Meshack Asare, also was a recipient of the Children’s Literature category in…

On Interstate-94 between Minneapolis and southern Wisconsin, flattened farmland gradually gives way to sandstone buttes. 18,000 years ago, this ground held a glacial lake. When the glacier receded, an ice dam broke, unleashing a violent flood that forged the buttes’ contours. Eventually, in the flood’s wake, the Waterpark Capital of the World™ would be built. Since the first waterslide was installed in 1980, “the Dells”—shorthand for this area—has become a land of “COUNTRY’S ONLY” and “PLANET’S BIGGEST”. Among these achievements is the United States’s largest inverted monument: the Upside-Down White House. This imitation of the presidential palace is the reason…

Doomscrolling through my Instagram newsfeed as a habituated ritual of self-sabotage, I surf past public personas seamlessly blending amongst literal fake people. Developing a public persona online is as old as the internet. But what happens when we depart from the highly augmented self and invoke a world of bots? Artificial humyns1 deployed as virtual influencers, or ‘bots’, are on the rise, and the interchangeability of their preferred nouns yield audiences who are just as intrigued as they are confused. Incidentally, when referring to some of these influencers as bots, one is also referring to their process of development. These online apparitions, used…

A discussion on Brit Bennett’s ‘The Vanishing Half’ The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett’s lauded sophomore novel, celebrated its first birthday this spring but it already feels like a timeless classic. All the praise and discussion it has accumulated since its release has been beyond valid. It is the kind of fiction generations to come will continue to study and write book reports on. Merely reading and containing it within yourself won’t feel enough. The novel inherently elicits us to read, reassess, share, and have conversations with others. It gives us a lot to think and ponder over. Bennett spent five…

In the Nevada desert you may soon be able to log every single thing you do on blockchain, from obtaining a marriage license to paying for your groceries. There, a largely unknown cryptocurrency magnate named Jeffrey Berns is hoping to install a “smart city” that his company, Blockchains, LLC, will control with the same rights as any municipal government. You will follow their laws. You will pay taxes they have designed. And you will use their technology. “For us to be able to take risks and be limber, nimble and figure things out like you do when you’re designing new…

I Confession: Around late March last year, as many of us found our lives dissolving further into a science fiction reality, I felt myself pivoting from the already increasingly digestible and ubiquitous TED talk corner of the web and into videos of graduation keynote addresses. Videos of motivational pep talks soon followed, along with supercuts of film scenes showcasing hard-won redemption with platitudinous speeches like: “No matter how hard life gets, you keep pushing.” More and more, as I lost myself in the overflowing sea of thoughts spurred by these charismatic pronouncements, I felt glad to be living alone. There was…