Tag
Social Movements
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An Open Letter to Prison Officials on the Censorship of “Tip of the Spear”
Your censorship of my book must be understood within a broader context.
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The Limits of What Is Thinkable
One viewer at the Democratic Primary debate in Des Moines last October asked the candidates a question: “Do black lives matter, or do all lives matter?” The same question has been on the lips of many thoughtful Americans for more than two years. Yet even as it percolated up to the nation’s aspirational power brokers…
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On Frantz Fanon: An Interview With Lewis R. Gordon
This article was originally published by The African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), and is reprinted here with permission. Lewis R. Gordon is Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies at UCONN-Storrs; Visiting Professor of Philosophy and Government at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica; European Union Visiting Chair in Philosophy at Université Toulouse Jean…
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A Sit-In in the House of Representatives
I was fortunate enough, as an intern this summer for Rep. Marc Veasey (D-TX-33), to witness last week’s historic sit-in by Democrats on the House floor. I was at a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee when the sit-in began Wednesday morning. At one point I realized that there was only one Democrat left…
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A Black Power Method
A half-century ago this week, “Black Power” entered America’s mass consciousness. In early June 1966, James Meredith launched his “March Against Fear,” a one-man demonstration down the 220 miles of road between Memphis, Tennessee, and Jackson, Mississippi. Meredith hoped to inspire black men to exercise their voting rights, or at least to join him in…
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The Gay ’70s
Is being gay just about sex? It’s difficult to imagine anyone asking the question today. If the taglines used to market lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans to the country’s mainstream—“Love Wins,” “It Gets Better,” and “You Can Play”—have led to unprecedented levels of inclusion and visibility, it is precisely by shoving sex aside and…
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The Fabric of the Times
In recent years we have watched hoods become wholly emblematic of social uprisings, political movements, and unrest. Sometimes overt, at other moments they work silently in the background—not wholly involved, but present nevertheless. It’s hard to avoid them. Hoods infiltrate mass media, political discourse, supermarkets, school uniforms, New York Fashion Week, our homes—but it is…
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An Interview with Former Black Panther Lynn French
Lynn French was a member of the Black Panther Party from 1968–1973, working in Chicago, Berkeley, and Oakland. In the Party, she worked in newspaper circulation, labor …
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On Writing and Restaurant Labor
December 1, 2015 — In the late summer of 2010, Eleven Madison Park, a four-star restaurant in New York City catering to the tastes of the super-rich, decided to temporarily shutter and rebrand. Eleven Madison had been steadily scaling up its operation since opening in 1998 as a mid-range French bistro notoriously out of step…
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Streetwise in Weimar
Scholars of Weimar Germany have long wrestled with the fact that this period of unparalleled innovation in intellectual and cultural life was a time of economic and social crisis, brought to a close by one of the greatest political catastrophes in human history. Framed by this intimate conjunction of triumph and tragedy, the analysis of…
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A Letter to My Children about the Supreme Court’s Ruling on Marriage Equality
Many parents struggle with how to talk to their kids about marriage equality. In what follows, a former Supreme Court law clerk, top appellate litigator …
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Those Refugees
While most Americans were looking forward to this past Independence Day, an ugly scene was unfolding in Murrieta, California. Patriotic citizens, armed with placards that read “America has been invaded” and “Return to Sender,” blocked buses ferrying undocumented migrants to the town’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center. This was no ordinary display of xenophobia.…
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Toxic Literature
When all that is solid melts into air, the plot thickens. Darragh McKeon’s debut novel, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, and Heather Houser’s first monograph of literary criticism, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect, both explore efforts to go on in situations of pervasive toxicity. Indicating the saturation of a particular space by…
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Race and Campus Rape: Equal Under the Law?
It took me five years to muster the strength to report my rape. It was still within the (five-year) limitation period, and I told my story to a Philadelphia prosecutor armed only with the evidence of my memory. I had been a 17-year-old freshman in college at the time of my assault and been dating…
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Was That All There Was to the Left?
In the wake of Pete Seeger’s death in January, eulogies, memorials, and obituaries routinely mentioned his youthful communist affiliation. The famous folk singer had, like many of his contemporaries in the world of arts and music, joined the Communist Party (CPUSA) as a young man. He did so in the late 1930s—a time when not…
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Gandhi in Africa
The title of this biography, Gandhi Before India, glances backwards and forwards. It invokes Ramachandra Guha’s previous blockbuster India After Gandhi and suggests a likely title—Gandhi After India—for volume two of the Mahatma’s life story. Gandhi, India, before, after: these titles quadrate nation and leader, time and space—a rather tame-looking matrix perhaps but one that…
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Latin America’s Left: Between Demos and Kratos
On March 5, 2013, the Venezuelan government announced the death of president Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías. In the New York Review of Books, Alma Guillermoprieto, one of the most perceptive commentators on Latin American politics, wrote that he “mostly left behind a void.” It could not be otherwise, since Chávez “was All.” His loss, for…
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Hari Kunzru on Networks, the Novel, and the Politics of the Author
Hari Kunzru is a British-born writer who lives and works in New York. He is the author of four novels as well as numerous articles in publications including Wired, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the Times of India, and the New Statesman. His first novel, The Impressionist (2002), which won the Betty Trask Prize,…
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Animal Feelings
We read stories of how, after losing their companions, dogs and bunnies refuse to eat; ducks and horses exhibit nervousness and social anxiety; dolphins strand themselves …
