Month: July 2016

  • Prize-winning Hong Kong-born poet Sarah Howe makes verse of city’s Basic Law South China Morning Post 2016-07-07 Clare Tyrrell-Morin Having played down her Chinese side while growing up and studying in the UK, Howe, now at Harvard, has turned to it again as she makes an ‘erasure poem’ out of Hong Kong’s mini-constitution We meet…

  • La Esclava Blanca: The New Telenovela Rewriting Colombia’s History of Slavery AAIHS: African American Intellectual History Society 2016-07-06 Yesenia Barragan Columbia University, New York, New York This is a guest post by Yesenia Barragan, a historian of race, slavery, and emancipation in Colombia, Afro-Latin America, and the Atlantic/Pacific worlds. She recently received her Ph.D. in…

  • Will Precision Medicine Move Us beyond Race? The New England Journal of Medicine 2016-05-26 (Volume 374, Number 21) DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1511294 Vence L. Bonham, J.D., Senior Advisor to the NHGRI Director on Genomics and Health Disparities National Human Genome Research Institute, Bethesda, Maryland Shawneequa L. Callier, J.D., Professorial Lecturer in Law Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. Charmaine…

  • A DNA Test Won’t Explain Elizabeth Warren’s Ancestry Slate 2016-06-29 Matt Miller You’re not 28 percent Finnish, either. Our genes dictate certain things about us, but ethnicity is not derived from a single gene. Scott Brown, the former Massachusetts senator who lost to Elizabeth Warren in the 2012 election, has decided to dredge up old…

  • Efún: “White Love” and Modernity in Guinea Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 19, 2015 pages 33-54 DOI: 10.1353/hcs.2016.0026 Kathleen Connolly, Assistant Professor of Spanish Western Oregon University, Monmouth, Oregon This paper analyzes the award-winning novel Efún (1955), by Liberata Masoliver. The novel, a romance-adventure set in Equatorial Guinea, stages a cosmopolitan, white identity…

  • The Pain of Passing Reviews in American History Volume 44, Number 2, June 2016 pages 264-269 DOI: 10.1353/rah.2016.0028 Renee Romano, Professor of History, Africana Studies, and Comparative American Studies Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio Allyson Hobbs. A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014. 382 pp. Figures,…

  • Drawing Black History Bostonia Fall 2015 Rich Barlow, Staff Writer Artwork by Joel Christian Gill Graphic novels bring forgotten stories to life Home to about 50 mixed-race descendants of a freed slave, Malaga Island off the coast of Maine seemed an oasis of racial harmony in 1912. But then the state, lobbied by ostensible “reformers”…

  • The Cuban writer Nicolás Guillén has traditionally been considered a poet of mestizaje, a term that, whilst denoting racial mixture, also refers to a homogenizing nationalist discourse that proclaims the harmonious nature of Cuban identity. Yet, many aspects of Guillén’s work enhance black Cuban and Afro-Cuban identities.

  • Strange Fruit: Uncelebrated Narratives from Black History Fulcrum Publishing May 2014 176 pages 8 X 10 Paperback ISBN: 9781938486296 Joel Christian Gill Strange Fruit Volume I is a collection of stories from early African American history that represent the oddity of success in the face of great adversity. Each of the nine illustrated chapters chronicles…

  • Essence Fest: How Prince helped Misty Copeland discover artistic freedom The New Orleans Times-Picayune 2016-07-02 Chelsea Brasted, Lifestyle and Culture Reporter Misty Copeland recounted her own Prince tribute Saturday (July 2) during an Essence Fest weekend full of them. But for the first African American woman to be named principal dancer at the American Ballet…