“This is a book that explores how African history—political history, cultural history, literary history—weighs and therefore haunts some of the stories that we tell ourselves about latinidad.”
Tag: African Diaspora
“Black Genius Against the World”
In 1937, a newspaper trumpeted two speculative fiction stories—“Black Internationale” and “Black Empire”— as dramatically as if they were news.
“We Plot to Undo the World”
Artist Simone Leigh curated a series of intellectual sermons directed by Black women who grieved, strategized, loved, and yearned for community.
Black Space Beyond Nation
“When did everyone become Black and not of specific nations themselves? Why did being Black mean not belonging to a place?”
When Martinique Cannibalized Colonialism
What to do with Confederate statues in the US South? Martinique didn’t just destroy its colonial-era statues—it rebuilt them into something else.
Making Black Lives Matter in Italy: A Transnational Dialogue
“So, dear sister, do you think that Black Italian movements have changed qualitatively in the wake of George Floyd?”
Translating Italy, Translating Blackness
For two Black womxn translators, bringing Afro-Italian stories into English is an act of radical self-love and resistance.
Building Black Futures in Italy
When will new generations of Afro-Italians finally be heard and recognized as full and active members of Italy’s culture and society?
Atlantic Slavery: An Eternal War
Both violent surveillance and disease risk were integral to Atlantic slavery. That same war against Black people continues today.
Public Thinker: Annette Joseph-Gabriel on Black Women, Frenchness, and Decolonization
"The women in my book really disrupted France’s ideas about citizenship, about who belongs. I’d like us to be similarly disruptive."
B-Sides: Denis Williams’s “Other Leopards”
Denis Williams was a painter in London, a novelist in the Sudan, an art historian in Nigeria, and an archeologist in his native Guyana: the polymath’s polymath ...
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 ...