Tag
Global Black History
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“Courage or Foolhardiness”: Talking Aimé Césaire with Alex Gil
“This way of going about prophecy sadly replaces the historical fact of Black victory with a timeless failed rebellion. Too bleak, if you ask me.”
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The Black Rebel Athlete: Spectacle and Protest
As more and more protests make clear, the bodies of Black people playing sports are not outside history. Indeed, they never have been.
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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?”[none-for-homepage]
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Translating Italy, Translating Blackness
For two Black womxn translators, bringing Afro-Italian stories into English is an act of radical self-love and resistance.
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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?
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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.”[none-for-homepage]
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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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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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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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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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A Black Counternarrative
Master narratives become the background music of our lives, undercurrents so ingrained that the violence they often engender is rendered unremarkable. One master narrative is the tale we tell about the United States being a welcoming country to immigrants, about how the “bootstrap” mentality enables one to build and sustain a life here. Another is…
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Fairy Tales of Race and Nation
In its own allusive way, Helen Oyeyemi’s Gingerbread considers the imminent departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union. A textbook in …
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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 …
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And the Women Shall Lead Us
Our historical and contemporary images of black nationalism privilege the masculine. This is true whether in distant or recent memory. Images of black men dressed …
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Black Speculation, Black Freedom
Many black scholars—especially those who study black life, history, and culture—would recognize an uncomfortable and familiar situation that epitomizes …
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Black Women Leaders, Then and Now
In August 1966, Ebony magazine published an entire issue devoted to “The Negro Woman.” In it was an article by television personality and journalist …
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Expanding the Black Geopolitical Imagination
In the wake of Michael Brown’s heinous murder, news of protests and social unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, captured the attention of viewers around the globe. In the Middle East, Palestinians took to social media to express solidarity with Ferguson’s protesters by sharing advice on how to protect themselves from state-sanctioned tear gas attacks. In response,…
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The Devil Wears Pravda
In the mid-1930s, amid the Second World War and the Great Depression, competing forms of internationalism—the Communist International, Black Internationalism, the League of Nations—defined the political zeitgeist. In the United States as elsewhere, writers, artists, and activists weighed the possibilities and constraints of these and other formations, as individuals felt increasingly compelled to take a…
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Rewriting the History of Racist Ideas
While first reading Ibram X. Kendi’s kaleidoscopic and admirably lucid Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas, I had a flashback to my days as a graduate …
