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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Public Thinker: Marcia Chatelain on Feminism, Fast Food, and First Gens
“Being in community with people and teaching and learning outside of the confines of our classroom: I still actually really believe in that.”[none-for-homepage]
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Settler Fantasies, Televised
House-hunting and home-improvement TV shows are premised on the settler fantasy of property ownership—and that fantasy’s relationship to whiteness.
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“Somewhere in This Brain”: Memories of Segregation, Soul Music & “Macbeth” with Al Bell
“A song was written through me, and I say that because I didn’t write it. The words were given to me.”[none-for-homepage]
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All the World’s a Page
Paper was never simply a writing surface, but a complicated substance that folded itself into the fabric of culture and consciousness.
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What’s in a Name?
Stanley Lieberson wrestled with the problem of causation throughout his prodigious research career, but nowhere more ingeniously than in A Matter of Taste.
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Tele-visionary Blackness
Black folks can call into being an alternative relationship to TV, one that prompts a shift in consciousness and just possibly alters the future.
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Public Thinker: Geraldo Cadava on the Past and Future of Hispanic Republicans
“I was shocked to learn that Hispanic conservatives celebrate Cortes’s arrival in Mexico.”[none-for-homepage]
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Whose Spanish, Anyway?
Policing the borders of the Spanish language was a tool of religious and racial discrimination. Yet Spanish is not inherently imperial.
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Democracy’s Long Game: An Interview with Paul Starr
“You have to think … about how you’re going to make the changes stick.”
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Reading Against the Line: Translation, Fascism, Erasure
I’m just wary of the tendency to glorify revolutionary violence and masculinity.
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The False Hopes of Homeownership
The American Dream of private home ownership has fueled a system that preys on Black people for profit.
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The Kleist We Need
Heinrich von Kleist teaches how to resist heteronormativity, as well as how to imagine gender fluidity and a less restrictive masculinity.
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Patricia Banks on Supporting African American Museums
Studies of museum patronage mostly focus on social class. That’s not the whole story.
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We Other Victorians
The late 19th and early 21st centuries share a common loss of technological innocence.
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Public Thinker: Kevin Gannon Sets the Record Straight
A professor of history at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa, and the …
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B-Sides: Denis Williams’s “Other Leopards”
Denis Williams was a painter in London, a novelist in the Sudan, an art historian in Nigeria, and an archeologist in his native Guyana: the polymath’s polymath …
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Whose Brooklyn?
In 1939, the editors of Fortune planned a special issue of the magazine on New York City. They tasked James Agee—who had recently filed another Fortune assignment, which would culminate in the …
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B-Sides: Mary Borden’s “The Forbidden Zone”
Mary Borden’s taut masterpiece has long been overshadowed by the other Great War books of 1928–29 (All Quiet on the Western Front, A Farewell to Arms …
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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…
