As a longtime cultural policy wonk, I’ve been perpetually frustrated at the persistence of American exceptionalism, our stubborn insistence on our own unique superiority, our stubborn refusal to look beyond our own borders for inspiring examples and new ways of seeing. This is usually accompanied by some type of smug assertion about the superiority of …
I woke up with history on my mind. Not the polished history of textbooks but the felt sense of living in the past. In rapid succession, I saw myself in a series of moments, in a series of places I had never lived: Germany in the thirties, Korea under Japanese rule, apartheid South Africa. The …