Might a stand-up comedian discuss slavery in America with considerable doses of humor? Happens all the time. A contemporary novelist? Not so much. It is the rare writer who is willing to approach the ...
Stephen Best
Stephen Best is a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (University of Chicago Press, 2004) and None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life (Duke University Press, 2018). 
Virtual Roundtable on “Empire”
After it debuted last January on Fox, Empire quickly became one of the most talked-about shows on television. Its Shakespearean portrayal of family life, its stylized window onto the hip-hop ...