Category: Book/Video Reviews

  • Kathleen Collins’s ‘Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?’ Books of The Times The New York Times 2016-11-29 Dwight Garner Kathleen Collins, Elizabeth Alexander (fore.), Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? (New York: Ecco, 2016) When the filmmaker, playwright and fiction writer Kathleen Collins died of breast cancer in 1988, at 46, she left behind a wide body…

  • Zadie Smith’s Swing Time is a dance to the rhythms of womanhood iNews 2016-11-02 Salena Godden Zadie Smith, Swing Time (New York: Penguin Press, 2016) Swing Time is a quiet and rhythmic book. Just as the title suggests, this book swings, oscillating from past to present, like the steady rhythm of a pendulum. This is…

  • Caitlyn Jenner, Rachel Dolezal and instability in gender and race Maclean’s 2016-12-04 Sujaya Dhanvantari Sociologist Rogers Brubaker examines transgender and transracial differences TRANS By Rogers Brubaker In Western culture, gender and race were traditionally thought to be unchangeable and fixed for life. Black or white, male or female: These were forever separated by the binary…

  • ‘Born a Crime,’ Trevor Noah’s Raw Account of Life Under Apartheid The New York Times 2016-11-28 Michiko Kakutani, Chief Book Critic Trevor Noah, host of “The Daily Show,” in 2015. His memoir provides a harrowing look at life in South Africa under apartheid and then after that era. Credit Chad Batka for The New York…

  • Review: “Krazy” by Michael Tisserand Know Louisiana: The Digital Encyclopedia of Louisiana and Home of Louisiana Cultural Vistas 2016-12-02 (Winter 2016) Lydia Nichols There is nothing more American than passing, the act of projecting a racial identity other than that assigned. At no other time and place in American history have necessity and opportunity so…

  • A United Kingdom: Love In The Time Of The British Empire Media Diversified 2016-11-28 Shane Thomas Once the year in film began with #OscarsSoWhite, was it coincidence that 2016 is closing – and 2017 beginning – with a raft of movies featuring people of colour? We have Hidden Figures, Lion, Fences, and the magnificent Moonlight to…

  • Amma Asante’s A United Kingdom gal-dem 2016-11-18 Grace Barber-Plentie Image via Telegraph The characters and scenarios in Amma Asante’s A United Kingdom are like ghosts – they’re long gone, long dead, and yet there is still a resonance and urgency to them that keeps pushing through to our subconscious, never letting us quite forget. Regardless…

  • Zadie Smith’s Rhythmic Play in Shadow and Light Los Angeles Review of Books 2016-11-17 Walton Muyumba, Associate Professor Assistant Director of Creative Writing Indiana University Zadie Smith, Swing Time (New York: Penguin Press, 2016). I FINISHED READING SWING TIME, Zadie Smith’s new novel, her fifth, around the time the Swedish Academy announced that Bob Dylan…

  • Half and Half Sunday Book Review The New York Times 2007-02-11 Bliss Broyard David Matthews, Ace of Spades, A Memoir (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2007). Twenty minutes into David Matthews’s first day of fourth grade in a new school in a new city, his classmates surround him and demand to know what he…

  • Black and British by David Olusoga review – reclaiming a lost past The Guardian 2016-11-17 Colin Grant David Olusoga at St Michael’s Church, Burgh-by-Sands. Photograph: Des Willie/BBC/Des Willie Olusoga’s insightful ‘forgotten history’ amounts to much more than a text to accompany a TV series. Yet despite its many attributes, is it too temperate? How do…