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On White Hysteria

December 25, 2024 - By Jim Hicks

Editor’s note: A earlier version of this essay was published on December 25, 2019. It has been revised here in light of more recent events.

In her December 2019 preface to a New York magazine photographic portfolio by Mark Peterson, with less than a thousand words Claudia Rankine offered what was, for her, a typically eloquent and essential assessment of the state of our nation.

She began with Dylann Storm Roof, the young assassin that in 2015 killed nine African Americans at prayer in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina; she then notes Roof’s ongoing exchange of letters with Billy Roper,...

MR's Blog Is Moving to Substack

December 20, 2024 - By Staff

As of December 20, 2024, the Massachusetts Review will not able ble to uplaod new blogs onto our website. We are working to get this sorted and resolved before the Spring issue release on March 15, 2025, but we have decided to move our blog and Performance to a new Substack im the meantime. We will return to the website when we csn, but will maintain the Substack as well.

We hope that you will subsccribe to the Substack. All of our content will always remain free, but we are grateful for paid subscriptions, as this will support our writers and artists.  Thank you so much for sticking with MR and for helping us keep publishing important work.

We will be back-posting work from the past couple...

Readings from Our Gaza Issue

December 17, 2024 - By Staff

Editor's note: A video reading from some of the contributors to our Gaza issue, with poems in Arabic followed by their English translations. In order of presentation, Maya Abu Al-Hayat, Ibrahim Fawzy, Batool Abu Akleen, Wiam El-Tamami, Muhammed al-Zaqzouq, as translated by Elisabeth Jaquette, Nathalie Handal, Zena K.A. Elhout, and Anam Zafar.

A New Generation is Emerging, and Gaza is their Compass

December 10, 2024 - By Noura Kamal

Let me tell you a story about how working on knowledge production about Palestine in Austria is walking on a minefield. You can (and will) encounter a wave of ignorance and hatred that may explode your academic future, if you are not careful enough—and even if you are. The whole time I have lived in Vienna, and even before then, Palestinians in Gaza have faced continuous aggressions by the Israeli army—in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2019, 2021, and 2022. The most recent, horrifying attack started in October 2023. Of course, Palestinians outside Gaza—in Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarem, Hebron, and elsewhere—also encounter violence every day, at the hands of the Israeli colonial army.

I have been surprised to see how most academics in Austria detach themselves from the...

10 Questions for Marguerite Sheffer

December 9, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

Russ Brings all the wrong books to my hospital room, which is tucked into a corner of the birthing center. How was he to know I’d already finished that novel? Back at our house, all my books flounder in inscrutable piles. I hadn’t arranged them to be legible to anyone else. Of course, no one predicts a car accident; we didn’t expect to be T-boned on the way home from Costco, trunk full of perishables.
—from "Wire Nanosecond" Volume 65, Issue 3 (Fall 2024)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Ever?! One of the very first pieces I wrote, in 5th grade, was a historical fiction story about a girl in, I think, vaguely the 1500s. She was a peasant who worked in a winery and I remember I made her walk...