“For those Afro-Caribbean Panamanian who had lived through Panama’s Canal Zone apartheid, Brooklyn segregation probably came as no surprise.”
Tag: Diaspora
Public Thinker: Imani Perry on How to Understand “Souths Plural”
“At the end of the day, the America project was about an encounter with abundance that was responded to with greed and brutality.”
“Mississippi Masala” @30: Revisiting a Film Classic in Authoritarian Times
What might it mean to forge a politics explicitly based in the places we are, rather than a politics of the places from which we came?
You Can Call It “The Cuban”: Miami, Florida
The fall of 2018 in Miami saw the grand opening of an institution you would’ve thought the city already had. The ...
Exile Is Treading Water in a Strange Sea
Two recent stylistically unconventional novels by Iranian authors in diaspora explore the particular cultural loss of the exile, as distinct from that of the ...
Moods of Betrayal in the Story of Palestine
A few years ago I read a collection of personal reflections on what it means to be a Palestinian in the diaspora. Two entries in particular stayed with me. The first ...
Theorizing Race in the Americas
In this interview, Francisco Herrera talks with Juliet Hooker about her new book, Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and …
@X: Making America White 200 Years Ago
In January 1817, more than three thousand African Americans gathered in Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia ...
Free Is and Free Ain’t
Are novelists who write about slavery reminding us of its ongoing effects, or using the past to illuminate problems specific to the present? Are they arguing that slavery never stopped shaping ...
What’s in a Face?
According to Jewish tradition, before each of us was born, we were visited by an angel who taught us all that is known and all that will be known. We were wise, in utero. And then, in the very last ...
Afrofuturism: Everything and Nothing
Whence the “Afro” in “Afrofuturism”? In the 1994 interview with Samuel R. Delaney that inaugurated the term, Mark Dery defines Afrofuturism as “speculative fiction that treats African American themes ...
Origin of a Species: The First Indian to Publish a Book in English
This essay was originally published in The Caravan. It was 2002, four years before the Jaipur Literature Festival kicked off in Diggi Palace, when I was picked by the British Council to be a ...
A Map of Lost Longings
This is an archive. I’ve found the remains of his voice, that map of longings with no limit. —Agha Shahid Ali, “The Country without a Post Office” It has been a peculiar month to be an Indian ...
Illegals
At the height of the refugee crisis in Germany, the following slogans made their appearance on the Hamburg streets: Wir sind alle illegal (We are all illegal) paired with Kein mensch ist illegal (No ...
O My Swineherd!
The last century may have ushered in an epoch of wars that have no end, but Homer’s Odyssey continues to inspire. You do not have to be James Joyce or Derek Walcott to find the story of a man’s ...
Prajwal Parajuly and the Responsibilities of Fiction
“The Chaurasi is a curious event,” writes Prajwal Parajuly in the author’s note to his new novel, Land Where I Flee, “not many Nepali-speaking Hindus in India, especially people of my generation ...
“It’s When There Are a Lot of Them That There Are Problems”
The sorrow and outrage provoked by the attacks on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were underwritten by an all-too-familiar grand narrative: These were not the cowardly misdeeds of a group ...
All Dovlatov’s Children:Recent Soviet Emigré Literature
To say that Russians love the late Soviet writer Sergei Dovlatov is like saying they love breathing. Born in 1941, Dovlatov worked as a prison guard and journalist before starting to “publish” short ...
For the Love of Israel
In 1963, after the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt exchanged a series of tense letters. Scholem, a renowned scholar of Jewish mysticism and himself a critic of ...
Lahiri, High and Low
Before beginning graduate school, I promised myself that I would never write about Jhumpa Lahiri. I had studied Lahiri’s debut novel, The Namesake (2003), in a maddening undergraduate literature ...