Butler’s work helps us see how time is a spiral, how the present moment is always layered with multiple pasts and underlying alternate futures.
Tag: Global Black History
Finding Black People in Antiquity: Talking the Future of Classics with Sarah Derbew
“It feels insensitive or dishonest to not acknowledge the ways in which our work is a part of a greater narrative.”
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.”
Cuba & the US: Necessary Mirrors
Exponentially more enslaved Africans were forced to the lands that now make up Latin America rather than the United States. Where is their story?
How to Live Among What Is Dead
“Octavia Butler teaches us,” explains Black playwright Ericka Dickerson-Despenza, “…that we have two options in Apocalypse: adapt or die.”
Thelma King and the Call for Revolution
In 1963, a Panamanian assemblywoman took to Cuban radio to condemn the United States and its control of the Americas.
Quilting: An Archive of Hand, Eye, and Soul
Once, Black women employed textile arts both as a mutual aid network, and as a safe space to envision a Southern Black liberated life.
Sembène’s “Black Girl” Is a Ghost Story
Few know the film—the first feature-length film by a West African director—was based on a real-life incident, a real tragedy lost in colonial archives.
Necessary Housework: Dismantling the Master’s House
White supremacy tells us we do not belong, but we do have a place in history.
How War—and Racism—Makes Monsters out of Men
In both World Wars, France used West African “colonial conscripts.” Deployed on the front lines, they were often the first to be killed.
Hilton Head Island—Haunted by Its Own History
Historical traces of racism and exclusion remain on the island. It’s just that new residents can’t—or won’t—read them.
Nobody Verzuz a Nation
Though a new phenomenon, Verzuz isn’t new. Black artistic, scholarly, athletic, and political spaces have always been made into battlegrounds.
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?”
Haiti’s New Political Worlds
Throughout its history, residents of Haiti, especially those of African descent, imagined and created their own possibilities for new social worlds.
Black Freedom Is the Seed for All Freedom
Even with colonialism and slavery ended, black life remains unfree. What will it take to go from emancipation to liberation?
What if Black Women Were Free?
The transnational struggles of Black women throughout history are different experiments in the practice of freedom.
Pay Attention When They Tell You to Forget
Remember that anti-Black violence has been the central dynamic of US history—and how Black women have struggled with this violence for centuries.
The Poetics of Abolition
For poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, as for the Black Romantics, history is the repetition of anti-Black violence that has yet to be abolished.
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.