“You can wear something to be cool,” you told me, “or because another person likes it. You don’t have to be truly ‘yourself,’ or whatever.”
Tag: Identity
“Having to Explain Who You Are”: Caryl Phillips on Baldwin, Fiction, & Sports
“The first thing he said is, ‘Don't call me Mr. Baldwin. My name is Jimmy.’ I thought, this is ridiculous, at the very least he's James.”
The World Latinx Athletes Make
Latinx athletes have forged new identities, cultivated community, and anchored themselves in spaces that were not created for them.
Long Live the Gay Bar
Many think the loss of discrete queer spaces is bad, even as the loss of the need for them is good. What is the nature of that loss?
The Asian American Novel in Our Time of Hate
What does it mean to write—and read—an American novel in the wake of anti-Asian racism and hate crimes, events connected to a history of Asian exclusion?
Electric Laboratory
“What are the compartments that have been placed around how we understand slavery and genocide and its impact on our lives and the world?”
What Birders Don’t See
Rather than studying birds—and birders—in isolation, the time has come to see both as linked to the crises of racism and climate change.
The Metalyrical Moment
Three recent poetry collections have cemented the rise of what we might call the “metalyrical”: poetry that interrogates the conditions of its own expression.
Public Thinker: Geraldo Cadava on the Past and Future of Hispanic Republicans
“I was shocked to learn that Hispanic conservatives celebrate Cortes’s arrival in Mexico.”
Black Poetry after Beyoncé
How do black feminist artists negotiate their own work in the wake of commercial success beyond contemporary poetry’s wildest dreams?
Imperial Couplings
Hazel Carby’s Imperial Intimacies explores the couple, and intimacy, as foundational historical categories in postcolonial and decolonial studies. At the heart of her narrative lie Carl, a Jamaican ...
Homing Empire
Family memoirs are a special kind of historical offering. They have the power to tell fine-grained stories of the past, of epochal events—wars, migrations, empires—and to intricately connect them to ...
Identity, Islands, and Hazel V. Carby
What histories do we inherit? In the current crisis of Brexit—which points to larger global shifts toward nationalism and xenophobia—there is no more urgent a ...
“Who Inherits?”: A Conversation between Tao Leigh Goffe and Hazel V. Carby
Over the decades of her transatlantic career, distinguished Yale University professor emerita of American and African American studies Hazel V. Carby has considered how one negotiates ancestral ties ...
A Fairy’s Tale
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl tells a series of stories that we already know, but it achieves its familiar ends through decidedly unfamiliar means. Andrea Lawlor’s first novel presents us with ...
“Am I Not One of the ‘Disappeared’?”
Zahia Rahmani’s « Musulman » roman hinges on a question that has gathered force in recent years: a witness is speaking, but will she ever be heard?
Bake, Britannia
Eighteen years ago, in Borneo, Kelly Wiglesworth told a camera crew that she didn’t come to make friends, she came to win. This iconic moment from Survivor defined much of the nearly two decades of reality TV that would follow ...
Inside and Out in Paris and France
A year ago I was a recent college grad living in Toulouse, in southern France. My generous host family ...
Michelle Obama’s Embrace
I told Michelle Obama that I admired Becoming for its courage, honesty, risk taking, and optimism. But my admiration went further, because in her story I had seen myself, and not just in the book’s main character ...
Citizens to Come: Building Beyond the 14th Amendment
On the 150th anniversary of the 14th Amendment we are called upon ...