Those excluded from the publishing industry can ultimately overwhelm its bigotry—if they all work together.
Tag: History
Tracing Women: Haitian and Black Cuban Women Archivists
“On the roadside, in homes, or at the marketplaces, Haitian women studied women’s history, culture, and politics—all without formal education.”
What Makes a Prison?
Recent calls to bring back asylums suggest that confinement can be benevolent, even rehabilitative—but, in reality, “a prison is a prison is a prison.”
Where is the Archive, Anyway?: A Conversation about Empire and Filipinx Studies
“I love the moments where your books really linger on their encounters with power.”
Oil and Injury in Los Angeles
The city’s ports may be physically located in the imperial core—inside the barricades of the USA—but their tendrils span the globe.
Cristina Rivera Garza: “the traces that shelter us”
One novelist spotlights an object, feeling, or sensation where the relay between past and present, or present and future, becomes visible.
Slanting the History of Handwriting
Whatever writing is today, it is not self-evident.
What Really Makes Cities Global?
To ask what kind of city Los Angeles is today is, also, to wonder what kind of city it could be tomorrow.
Symonds’s Facts, Our Future
One Victorian historian realized that if ideas of sexual morality changed across time, then 19th-century Britain could change, too.
Socialist Nostalgia, Cuban State Power
Is it ever possible to reconcile clashing visions of national memory?
B-Sides: Colson Whitehead’s “Apex Hides the Hurt”
“Whitehead’s satire takes aim … at a capitalist system that senses the profits to be made from proclaiming that systemic racism is a thing of the past.”
Don’t Save Yourself, Save the World: A Dialogue with Vincent Lloyd
“I’m very skeptical about the ability of people in positions of power and privilege—including intellectuals—to name truths about the world.”
Dual Use: When Technology Both Helps and Hurts
The struggle between the use of math for benevolent or malevolent purposes carries from at least WWII into today’s debates on AI.
“Let Us Gather Together”
Capital violently forces dispossessed people into markets, workplaces, and prisons. But such forced meetings could end capitalism itself.
B-Sides: Reading, Race, and “Robert’s Rules of Order”
The famous guidebook of rules, motions, and meetings has a darker history than you might think.
Natalia Molina on “A Place at the Nayarit”
Writing Latinos is a new podcast featuring interviews with Latino authors discussing their books and how their writing contributes to the ever-changing conversation about the meanings of latinidad.
Death in Mexico Means Something Different Now
Mexico once cultivated a “special relationship” with death. But cultural globalization and rising violence is weakening that bond.
Armenia: Another Century, Another Genocide?
From the start of Armenia’s independence in 1991, Turkey took a hostile position toward its erstwhile victim of genocide. That hostility remains.
Armenia and Azerbaijan: That Other War
The radical simplifications that flow from nationalism shrink the possibilities to understand the other.
World Literature Comes Full Circle, 1522–2022
What can readers learn from five centuries of circumnavigation?