Tag
Global Black History
-
“Courage or Foolhardiness”: Talking Aimé Césaire with Alex Gil
“This way of going about prophecy sadly replaces the historical fact of Black victory with a timeless failed rebellion. Too bleak, if you ask me.”
-
“The World Didn’t Give It, but the World Can’t Take It Away”: Talking Black Joy and Black Freedom with Blair LM Kelley
“Joy is a uniquely interesting Black experience. We talk about joy a lot, we sing about joy.”
-
Excavating New Archives of the Enslaved
Three new books on how Africans shaped the Americas grapple with the politics of archival interpretation in constructing the histories of slavery and empire.
-
The Poverty of Homeownership
On both sides of the color line, to own one’s home remains synonymous with freedom—even as real estate has repeatedly been proven a relentless driver of inequality.
-
Tenuous Privileges, Tenuous Power
In “The Vice President’s Black Wife,” Amrita Myers paints freedom as a process in which Black women used the tools available to them to secure rights and privileges within a slave society.
-
Subterranean Worlds and Liberatory Futures
The metaphor of the underground as political is rooted in the spatial undergrounds of nineteenth-century America.
-
Enemy of the State
Félix Darfour accused the post-independence Haitian republic with corruption. He lost his life for it.
-
Counter-Plantation Nation
The language and culture of Kreyòl, as well as the Vodou religion, reveal a vision of Haitian sovereignty on behalf of those formerly enslaved.
-
Haiti: What Sovereignty?
After winning independence, the West rushed to teach Haiti a lesson so that their revolutionary experience would not recur on the continent. Haiti suffers the repercussions of such attacks to this day.
-
The U.S. Has Never Forgiven Haiti
For Frederick Douglass, and for Black activists across the United States, there was no place more important to global Black freedom than Haiti.
-
“We Have Dared to Be Free”
Haiti truly manifested the principles of liberty, but international resistance and racism have worked for 220 years to undermine its sovereignty.
-
How Haiti Destroyed Slavery and Led the Way to Freedom throughout the Atlantic World
Not the United States, Great Britain, France, or any other enslaver deserves credit for ending slavery. Atlantic abolition began with Haiti.
-
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.”
-
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.”
-
Morrison and Davis: Radicalizing Autobiography
Don’t question Angela Davis’ manuscript, Toni Morrison warned her publishing colleagues. Davis was not “Jane Fonda” but, rather, “Jean d’Arc.”
-
“We Plot to Undo the World”
Artist Simone Leigh curated a series of intellectual sermons directed by Black women who grieved, strategized, loved, and yearned for community.
-
When Panama Came to Brooklyn
“For those Afro-Caribbean Panamanian who had lived through Panama’s Canal Zone apartheid, Brooklyn segregation probably came as no surprise.”
-
The Dawn of Scientific Racism
In the 1740s, Bordeaux developed some of the first modern theories of racial difference, even as the city profited from the slave trade.
-
Until We Meet on the Dance Floor Again: A Playlist
Disco is much more than what they say it was. Grounded in multivocal Blacknesses—funk and gospel, rock and roll and rhythm and blues—with new technologies and new arrangements, the disco we follow here contains multitudes, no part of which is corny or anachronistic. Our disco later came to be called club music, then house (in…
-
One More Embrace: Octavia’s Future/Present
Butler’s work helps us see how time is a spiral, how the present moment is always layered with multiple pasts and underlying alternate futures.
-
Finding Black People in Antiquity: Talking the Future of Classics with Sarah Derbew
“It feels insensitive or dishonest to not acknowledge the ways in which our work is a part of a greater narrative.”
