Everybody’s A Critic, Nobody’s A Critic

Welcome back to Sylly, a podcast for the curious and critical. We’re your hosts, Mbiye Kasonga and Tembe Denton-Hurst. In episode 20, we dig into criticism as a practice and what actually separates a critique from a review, a hot take, or a close reading, using Tembe’s review of Marlon James’s The Disappearers for Vulture as our jumping-off point. We talk about Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation, why Toni Morrison’s work gets read as “horror,” and why we think fiction needs more unapologetically racist characters. We also get into the growing panopticon around what we read in…