If the sharp end of critique’s job is to name injury, then it also has a soft lining that is oriented around recovery and repair. Even if a particular critical project stays with injury rather than ...
Tag: Slavery
B-Sides: Edward P. Jones’s “All Aunt Hagar’s Children”
A Jones story can break just about every writing workshop edict in its handling ...
How Haiti Got Free
I vividly remember the rush I felt after my first encounter with the story of the Haitian Revolution. It was a sudden and miraculous sense that everything was not as it seemed ...
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 ...
Turning History Inside Out
It’s not hard to imagine the Hollywood pitch meeting for an adaptation of Esi Edugyan’s new novel, Washington Black. “It’s 12 Years a Slave meets Jules Verne ...
“Slave Old Man” in English, English in “Slave Old Man”
Linda Coverdale’s English translation of the 1997 novel L’esclave vieil homme et ...
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 ...
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 ...
Picturing Freedom
Freedom Over Me: Eleven Slaves, Their Lives and Dreams Brought to Life by Ashley Bryan enriches a fragmentary archive by tapping into something we know for sure about the enslaved but seldom allow ourselves to explore ...
Darwin’s Early Adopters
During the icy winter of 1860, Franklin Sanborn preferred to stay indoors. The bad weather in Concord, Massachusetts, was cause enough, but the young political activist had another reason: he feared ...
When Slaveholders Ran America
In 1837, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina strode into the US Senate chamber and thundered that slavery was a “positive good.” Black bondage was ...
@X: Making America White 200 Years Ago
In January 1817, more than three thousand African Americans gathered in Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia ...
Free Is and Free Ain’t
Are novelists who write about slavery reminding us of its ongoing effects, or using the past to illuminate problems specific to the present? Are they arguing that slavery never stopped shaping ...
Black Lives Under Surveillance
Modern capitalism has always placed an undue burden on black bodies. Slavery, forced labor, and dispossession have moved hand in hand with forces of surveillance and the power of the state. In cities ...
Code-Switching: An Interview with James Hannaham
Might a stand-up comedian discuss slavery in America with considerable doses of humor? Happens all the time. A contemporary novelist? Not so much. It is the rare writer who is willing to approach the ...
“Every Negro Walk In A Circle”: Commuting With Marlon James
Biking alongside Manhattan’s West Side Highway two winters ago, I ran into a group of demonstrators. That evening Officer Daniel Pantaleo had been acquitted, after infamously choking Eric Garner to ...
Today’s Stories of Yesterday: Recent Historical Fiction
Contemporary historical fiction occupies virtually every point on the history–fiction spectrum: fictional stories of real-life people; narratives of real-life events experienced by fictional ...
International Forum on the Novel: Keywords
Every year, the International Forum on the Novel in Lyon, France, invites authors to speak on a “keyword” of their choice. The following videos and accompanying text are drawn from this year’s forum ...