Tag
History
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What Happens When Belief Stops Mattering?
“From the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 to the advent of Gorbachev’s glasnost in the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union was sustained not by terror or conviction, but by something harder to name: a routinization of participation.”
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“Caste, Class, and Race” @70
As we pass the 70th anniversary of Trinidadian American sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox’s Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics, his message …
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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,…
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Public Thinker: David Blight on Frederick Douglass, Abolition, and Memory
Puzzling out the meaning of the Civil War and its aftermath has been David Blight’s lifelong work … [none-for-homepage]
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From Slate to Silicon?
Everyone loves to hate school. Jean-Jacques Rousseau certainly did. In Émile (1762), his treatise on the nature of education, he declared vociferously that he “hate[d] books” and that reading was the “curse of childhood.” The irony …
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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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Algiers: Capital of Revolution
In 2018, it is difficult to imagine what it felt like to live through a genuinely revolutionary moment, one that connected hopes for the Third World with dreams …
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Citizens: 150 Years of the 14th Amendment
It is possible to tell the story of the 14th Amendment’s adoption as one driven by the maneuvering of highly placed lawmakers—judges and members of …
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Are Sharp Women Enough?
Twitter was a medium made for Dorothy Parker—alas, a century too late. Her famous poem “Resumé” is 141 characters. Her breakout feature in Vanity Fair, a series of Hate Songs, begs for a hashtag …
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Muses Explain Things to Me
The feminist muse is an artist, too. No silent sitter, she swaps the easel-facing chaise for a work space wholly hers, sloughing off the obligation to inspire …
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The Revolution’s Failed Promise to Women
On a recent research trip to Tbilisi, I stayed with a retired math professor and master storyteller named Tsiala in the communal apartment she’d remade …
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Free the Most Oppressed First
Do we still need to talk about identity politics? In the wake of the 2016 election and amid the ongoing parody that is the Trump administration, the subject has …
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“Slave Old Man” in English, English in “Slave Old Man”
Linda Coverdale’s English translation of the 1997 novel L’esclave vieil homme et …
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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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B-Sides: Alexei Tolstoy’s “Road to Calvary”
If you are a Russian writer called Tolstoy, you forever lurk in the great shadow cast by your namesake. After all, what could compare to War and Peace? Now …
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Zora Neale Hurston Against the World
Throughout her life, Zora Neale Hurston held fast to a belief in the individual’s power against seemingly insurmountable forces, especially institutional racism …
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Zora Neale Hurston in the Making
Zora Neale Hurston’s second trip to Africatown was a chance for redemption. An earlier visit to the settlement outside Mobile, Alabama, had produced …
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We See You, Race Women
When I was in graduate school, whenever a black woman scholar presented her work a peculiar phenomenon emerged: peers always and only remarked on the speaker’s person, rather than on her ideas. At almost no time did auditoriums or classrooms pour out with chatter about the scholarly intervention we’d just witnessed. Instead, fellow students talked…
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May 1968 @50
On April 27, 2018, a hundred people showed up at Columbia University to talk about the French student and worker revolts of May–June 1968. Many such conferences are taking place around the world to celebrate the 50th anniversary of that eventful and turbulent year. What made this meeting distinctive was that throughout the afternoon heady…
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Ondaatje’s Long War
In a scathing review of The English Patient, Hilary Mantel called Michael Ondaatje’s most feted work “uneven, unresolved, unsatisfactory.” Her criticism has since become a regular complaint about the …
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Public Thinker: Keisha N. Blain on Black Women’s Intellectual History
Keisha N. Blain has quickly become one of the most innovative and influential …
