Category: Articles

  • A Philippa Schuyler moment On an Overgrown Path 2011-08-02 John McLaughlin Williams Philippa Schuyler. Just hearing the name takes me back to a place in my childhood I have not revisited in memory more than a couple of times in decades. Philippa Schuyler’s name was but one of dozens lodged in my parent’s large sheet…

  • The Souls of Mixed Folk [Review: Samatar] Sofia Samatar 2012-02-05 Sofia Samatar This book, by Stanford professor Michele Elam, comes at you with a provocative title and a provocative cover. The title, a reference to the brilliant and still relevant 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E.B. Du Bois, is provocative because it…

  • Black, yellow, (honorary) white or just plain South African?: Chinese South Africans, identity and affirmative action Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa Number 77 (2011) pages 107-121 DOI: 10.1353/trn.2011.0043 Yoon Jung Park, Senior Researcher in the Centre for Sociological Research Humanities Research Village University of Johannesburg On 18 June 2008, while the country was still…

  • Film retells Lovings’ love story The Free Lance-Star Fredericksburg, Virginia 2012-02-06 Jonas Beals Mildred and Richard Loving were probably the last people you would expect to make legal history, but in 1967 they won a U.S. Supreme Court case that nullified laws against interracial marriage in Virginia and the 15 other states that still banned…

  • ‘The Loving Story’ to premiere in Caroline County The Free Lance-Star Fredericksburg, Virginia 2012-02-04 Jonas Beals Caroline County will get the red-carpet treatment Saturday evening. HBO, Comcast and the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia are hosting an invitation-only screening of the new HBO documentary “The Loving Story” at the Caroline County Community Services Center.…

  • Monstrous Sex: The Erotic in Naomi Mitchinson’s Science Fiction Michigan Feminist Studies Volume 16 (2002): Deviance Sarah Shaw “Oh fuck sex!” replied celebrated science-fiction novelist Naomi Mitchison (1897-1999) when Jill Benton, one of her biographers, asked for her views on the topic during the 1980s. Despite Mitichison’s attempts to move the discussion of her body…

  • Obama, Blackness, and Postethnic America The Chronicle of Higher Education 2008-02-29 David A. Hollinger, Preston Hotchkis Professor of American History University of California, Berkeley The Obama candidacy challenges our notions of identity politics In their support for Hillary Rodham Clinton over Barack Obama, prominent black leaders have made it clear that black skin color itself…

  • Black Is a Multiracial Country The Atlantic 2011-02-15 Ta-Nehisi Coates, Senior Editor Tami [Tamara Winfrey Harris] finds out she’s 30 percent white. This changes nothing: So, now, after discovering that I am 70 percent sub-Saharan African with cultural ties to Balanta and Fula peoples in Guinea-Bissau, the Mende people in Sierra Leone, and the Mandinka people…

  • Race, Forgetting, and the Law The Atlantic 2010-07-30 Sara Mayeux Peggy Pascoe’s What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America is a tour-de-force of archival research, bringing to light countless criminal prosecutions, civil cases, and bureaucratic decisions through which miscegenation laws were enforced not just in the South but throughout the…

  • Plein Air: Mapping Mary Ann Armstrong Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments Number 24 (Fall/Winter 2009) Deborah Fries, Editorial Board Member The first time I saw her picture, I wanted to know everything about her.  I wanted to know where she’d lived before she married my great, great grandfather in 1859.  I…