What is meant by ‘story’ and ‘state’ in the context of what follows? ‘Story’ means the history of a nation or people, both actual(often inconvenient) and official(aka the dominant narrative). ‘State’ here means the natural state of things regardless of the story of events. Suppose a skyscraper was built. The ‘story’ would be the telling... Read More

Contrary to the impression viewers have been getting lately from films like 12 YEARS A SLAVE(not without a certain degree of masochistic ‘white guilt’ self-righteousness), the lives of black slaves in the South were not uniformly bleak, cruel, and inhuman. While there were cruel and sadistic slave-owners, there were also many kindly and decent ones... Read More