I was a big fan of Coates when he was writing and blogging for the Atlantic, where he often had a fruitful back and forth with Andrew Sullivan, but was cool to his evolution as one of the voices of what I would call bleak racial essentialism. I was also not nearly as impressed with Between the World and Me as everyone else on the left was, perhaps... See more

tions, “world literature” itself may yet be made exilic, a form of reading (and of course writing) that seeks to defamiliarize the world as much as it does literature and explores the possibility of those noncoercive forms of knowl edge often invoked by Said, in Orientalism and elsewhere.