"That's no balloon.... it's a space station!"

1/5 🧵Time to give a summary of Biggar's "Colonialism" for those who've patiently put up with all my tweets on it: Biggar’s intention is to find ethical justification for colonialism - a phenomenon defined by OED as “the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political..

My initial review of Biggar’s ‘Coloniaism’ now published. It won’t get the attention of reviews from his friends in the right wing press but please disseminate as widely as possible? Sathnam Sanghera Kenan Malik William Dalrymple bellacaledonia.org.uk/2023/03/07/the…

Teaching Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala in my Russia and Asia class is one of life's great pleasures, especially since one of my students identified its undeniable influence on George Lucas' own meditation on the nature of empire later in the same decade

On Friday April 14 I’ll be speaking at NYU’s Jordan Center about Sino-Soviet film collaborations in the 1950s. In person and also on Zoom - sign-up details below!

This Friday, April 14, 2pm EST, I'll be speaking at NYU's Jordan Center on Sino-Soviet cinematic coproductions and the ghosts of empire. Please come along or register at the link for virtual Zoom attendance! jordanrussiacenter.org/event/screenin…

Tomorrow, at NYU and on Zoom!

Stuart Hall wrote this back in 1999: "The first task, then, is re-defining the nation, re-imagining 'Britishness' or 'Englishness' itself in a more profoundly inclusive manner. The Brits owe this, not to only us, but to themselves: for to prepare their own people for

I was lucky enough to review for Twentieth-Century China three excellent recent books on the Russia-China borderlands: Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey's On the Edge; Урбански | 吴若痕's Beyond the Steppe Frontier; and Mark Gamsa's Harbin. muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/…

For the TLS, I reviewed Philip Snow’s timely new history of Russia-China relations. If you want to find out who named their pig Brezhnev, read on!

Happening on Monday!

Thrilled that my book Internationalist Aesthetics has received an honorable mention for the MLA's Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies! MLA News Special thanks to Christine Dunbar and everyone Columbia Univ Press for all their support. mla.org/Resources/Care…

The following is a statement by faculty at the department of sociology at Columbia University. (1/16)

For our cluster on Cinemas of Soviet Peripheries, I reconstruct the tangled history of Sino-Soviet collaboration on Sergei Iutkevich's "Przhevalskii" (1951), a biopic of the famous Russian explorer that the Chinese side ultimately refused to distribute. tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

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For the TLS, I reviewed Nergis Ertürk’s Writing in Red, an engrossing account of Turkish writers and Soviet culture