Category: Literary/Artistic Criticism

  • Mat Johnson: Black & White & Read All Over The Austin Chronicle Austin, Texas 2015-06-18 Wayne Alan Brenner Our interview with the Houston-based author This is an interview with Mat Johnson, who wrote the acclaimed Pym – which is somehow a popular favorite and a cult favorite, simultaneously, we’d swear – and who is most…

  • Beyoncé, Creoles, and Modern Blackness University of California Press Blog 2016-02-29 Tyina Steptoe, Assistant Professor of History University of Arizona Tyina Steptoe is the author of Houston Bound: Culture and Color in a Jim Crow City (2015). Beyoncé is a black woman. This isn’t exactly earth-shattering news; after all, the 34-year-old, Houston-born entertainer has one…

  • That girl doesn’t have an ass.” The words hurled through the thick, humid air as if lobbed by a knife-thrower and struck me for reasons I couldn’t quite place at the time, reasons deeply rooted in my struggle to navigate my identity and subjectivity.

  • The Professors vs. The President: Has Obama Done Enough for African-Americans? NBC News 2016-02-28 Perry Bacon Jr., Senior Political Reporter Michael Eric Dyson and Eddie Glaude Jr., two well-respected black intellectuals and professors, make the same argument in books they have released over the last month: President Obama hasn’t done enough on policy to help…

  • On Creoles, Colorism and Confronting our Triggers Black and Blewish 2016-02-13 TaRessa Stovall By now everyone with media access knows of (and likely has an opinion about) Beyoncé’s new “Formation” video and Super Bowl halftime performance. She dropped the video on an otherwise slow news Saturday, February 6, and on the very next day, she…

  • Charles W. Chesnutt’s Stenographic Realism MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. Volume 40, Number 4, Winter 2015 pages 48-68 Mark Sussman Hunter College, City University of New York Speaking before a meeting of the Ohio Stenographer’s Association on 28 August 1889, Charles W. Chesnutt declared: “The invention of phonography deserves to rank, and does rank,…

  • Nella Larsen Reconsidered: The Trouble with Desire in Quicksand and Passing MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States Volume 41, Number 1, Negotiating Trauma and Affect (Spring 2016) Published 2016-01-25 pages 165-192 DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlv083 Rafael Walker, Assistant Professor of English Baruch College, City University of New York Winner of MLA’s 2016 Crompton-Noll Award for Best…

  • A Critical and Comprehensive Sociological Theory of Race and Racism Sociology of Race and Ethnicity Published online before print 2016-02-23 DOI: 10.1177/2332649216632242 Tanya Golash-Boza, Associate Professor of Sociology University of California, Merced This article contests the contention that sociology lacks a sound theoretical approach to the study of race and racism, instead arguing that a…

  • Arcade Fire Exploited Haiti, and Almost No One Noticed The Atlantic 2013-11-12 Hayden Higgins Arcade Fire / JF Lalonde The band has a deep, sincere relationship with the Caribbean nation. But even so, Reflektor’s marketing campaign has perpetuated stereotypes. Months before Arcade Fire’s new album came out, I learned of its existence when social media…

  • This issue considers the oeuvre of Haitian writer Marie Vieux-Chauvet (1916–1973) as a prism through which to examine individual and collective subject formation in the postcolonial French-writing Caribbean, the wider Afro-Americas, and beyond.