Category: Literary/Artistic Criticism

  • The Pose as Interventionist Gesture: Erica Lord and Decolonizing the Proper Subject of Memory E-Misférica Decolonial Gesture, Volume 11, Issue 1, 2014 Colleen Kim Daniher School of Communication Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois This article investigates the decolonial politics of the pose in the photographic and installation work of mixed-race Native Alaskan artist Erica Lord. Refiguring…

  • More Than “Black-ish”: Examining Representations of Biracial People For Harriet 2014-11-08 Aphrodite Kocieda Being biracial can be an uncomfortable subject to talk about, especially because it highlights a sensitive history of colorism, racism, and favoritism within the Black community. The unapologetic presence of biracial people in contemporary media culture is beginning to spark questions about…

  • 241F Performances of Passing, Performances of Resistance Hamilton College, Clinton, New York Spring 2014 Yumi Pak, Ph.D., Visiting Assistant Professor of Africana Studies An examination of the historical practice of passing in the United States. While the practice has most commonly referred to the history of racial passing for light-skinned African Americans in the early…

  • Jean Toomer: Race, Repression, and Revolution University of Illinois Press July 2014 336 pages 6.125 x 9.25 in. 10 black & white photographs, 1 chart Cloth ISBN: 978-0-252-03844-0 Barbara Foley, Professor of English Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Newark Political and personal repression and its effect on the work of a Harlem Renaissance…

  • Am I ‘black enough’? Cable News Network (CNN) 2014-10-27 Gene Seymour Editor’s note: Gene Seymour is a film critic who has written about music, movies and culture for The New York Times, Newsday, Entertainment Weekly and The Washington Post. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the writer. (CNN) — I am…

  • The “Dear White People” syndrome: Why movies are obsessed with light-skinned black characters Salon 2014-10-23 Morgan Jerkins This isn’t the first film to relegate dark-skinned actors to the sidelines — but it may be the most frustrating For Princeton University’s recent Black Alumni Conference, an advance screening of “Dear White People” took place at the…

  • Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial by Ralina L. Joseph (review) [Ardizzone] African American Review Volume 46, Number 4, Winter 2013 pages 787-790 DOI: 10.1353/afa.2013.0105 Heidi Ardizzone, Assistant Professor of American Studies Saint Louis University, St. Louis, Missouri Joseph, Ralina L., Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the…

  • “I am on the Coloured Side”: The Roles of the White Suitor and the Black Mother in the Tragic Mulatta Narrative University of Massachusetts at Amherst 2013 Shannon D. Luders Manuel What I propose to add to the already established dialogue regarding the tragic mulatta narrative is an investigation into the commonalities of the genre’s endings,…

  • The Black, British Atlantic: Blackness in Victorian Literature University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 2014 Donghee Om My dissertation is about transnational aspects of the Victorian era from the vantage point of what Paul Gilroy described more than two decades ago as the “black Atlantic.” Looking at various ways in which the black Atlantic was at…

  • William Makepeace Thackeray: Racist? OUPblog: Oxford University Press’s Academic Insights for the Thinking World 2011-07-18 John Sutherland, Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus of Modern English Literature University College, London We can never know the Victorians as well as they knew themselves. Nor–however well we annotate our texts–can we read Victorian novels as responsively as Victorians read…