Tag
Colonialism
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Resistance or Complicity? The Engineered Paradox of Digital Activism
As genocide unfolds in Gaza, we turn to platforms that profit from our witness. Are we fueling the very systems we seek to resist?
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“Parasite” and the Plurality of Empire
Bong Joon-ho’s critique in Parasite is less of “universal” capitalism than of the particular imperialisms that have shaped Korean life.
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Can Photography Be Decolonial?
Can the inherent contradictions of “whiteness” and the “decolonial” ever align with the reparative potential of photography?
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Public Thinker: Yarimar Bonilla on Decolonizing Decolonization
“Hurricane Maria ushered in a great deal of trauma and suffering, but it also allowed us to reassess the very nature of the political.” [none-for-homepage]
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Lessons from Haiti on Living and Dying
If he had to write The Black Jacobins again, C. L. R. James “would only give Toussaint [Louverture] a walk-on part.”
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Dead Cosmonauts, Space Cowboys
Heroes are in the skies. This was true for the Greeks, who named constellations for great hunters and queens; for First Nations astronomers, who told stories …
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Fathers of Empire
There is a moment early on in Hazel Carby’s Imperial Intimacies when she writes about the ways her mother Iris—as a Welsh woman—refused Englishness but still embraced Britishness. This is revealed in her mother’s dismay that …
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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 …
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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 the lived present of the author who reconstructs them. Done well, memoirs people the past, putting their reader in touch with affects, intentions, and relations…
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How Families Navigate Empire
Beginning at the end of the 1960s—in what we now call the start of the feminist Second Wave—women, especially black women, began making scholarly …
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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 …
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“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 to two islands intimately entangled by empire, Britain and Jamaica. Her new book, Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands, is her answer to that question. As…
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Public Thinker: Frances Negrón-Muntaner on Puerto Rico, Art, and Decolonial Joy
Frances Negrón-Muntaner is an innovative and multimodal thinker and artist, and a professor … [none-for-homepage]
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Decolonization Requires a New Economics
On October 15, 1968, the government of Jamaica banned a 26-year-old history professor from reentering the island nation. Walter Rodney, a lecturer at the …
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Membership, Citizenship, and Democracy
President Trump’s pernicious attacks on nonwhite immigrants have thrust a particular theory of political membership—white nationalism—to the forefront …
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Fill the Halls: Space and Possibility in Lahore, Pakistan
Lahore today can feel like a city of security checks and gated passages, tall walls and …
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Building Utopia in Space
Utopianism is having a moment. Everything from the box office success of big-budget science fiction films like Interstellar and The Martian to the groundswell of support for the Green New Deal …
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How Haiti Got Free
I vividly remember the rush I felt after my first encounter with the story of the Haitian Revolution. It was a sudden and miraculous sense that everything was not as it seemed …
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“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?
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Afterlife of the Troubles
In December 1972, 38-year-old Jean McConville, a widowed mother of 10, was abducted by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), never to be seen alive by her children again. Her remains weren’t recovered until 2003, when, along Shelling Hill Beach in County Louth, a man and his two children stumbled across her bones. This was…
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The Banality of Empire
One of the basic paradoxes of British imperialism is that even as it relied so fundamentally on violence, it insisted on presenting itself as opposed to violence, indeed as dedicated to stamping it out. In 1856, a London newspaper called the Examiner insisted that “wherever there are Europeans, no matter whether officials, merchants, or missionaries,…
