“I’m very skeptical about the ability of people in positions of power and privilege—including intellectuals—to name truths about the world.”
Tag: Blackness
Sarah M. Quesada on “The African Heritage of Caribbean and Latinx Literature”
“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.”
Lorgia García Peña on “Translating Blackness”
In this latest episode of the Writing Latinos podcast, we discuss how some Afro-Latinas argue that the US census needs to accept that Latinos are not a race.
Public Thinker: Ruha Benjamin on Uprooting Oppression and Seeding Justice
“Keep your cosmetic change, if you’re making no attempt to deal with the underlying practices that perpetuate harm.”
More Than Hearts and Minds?
Armageddon Time is undercut by the very forces it hopes to expose: white complicity, forged through the exploitation of Black life.
Reading “Lote”
Shola von Reinhold’s novel is central to any reckoning with the politics of the archive, not to mention contemporary literature itself.
The Dawn of Scientific Racism
In the 1740s, Bordeaux developed some of the first modern theories of racial difference, even as the city profited from the slave trade.
An Uncommon, Unconquerable Mind: Our Friend, Julius S. Scott III (1955–2021)
“Are there ways in which Black North Americans connected to places and things that were outside of the world we thought they were in?”
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.”
(A)I, Rapper: Who Voices Hip-Hop’s Future?
If we accept AIs crafting rap, we repeat the same exploitation that currently separates Black and brown artists from the fruits of their labor.
“Now Is the Time of Help”: On Claudia Rankine
A new play centers on a Black woman who stops “accommodating white people” and, instead, asks them “about their love affair with my death.”
B-Sides: Jesmyn Ward’s “Where the Line Bleeds”
Novelist Jesmyn Ward is known for historical grandiosity, but her long-overlooked book “Sing, Unburied, Sing” turns away from realism into the realm of generic strangeness.
To Teach Shakespeare for Survival: Talking with David Sterling Brown and Arthur L. Little Jr.
“Nostalgia is not what Shakespeare represents for me; I don’t want to make Shakespeare great again. He doesn’t need that, and neither do we.”
Nikki Giovanni on Rest, Love, and Care
“There is nothing supreme about being white.”