The story of race in America is as much a story about American institutions as it is a story of individual and collective behaviors, beliefs, and ideals. The transformation of party positions on race equality and the development of institutional capacities to track, shape, and make “race” are central to […]
Somewhere below ground in Waco, Texas, the doomed moderate Belton Piedmont addresses the secretive all-black government in the final chapters of Sutton E. Griggs’s 1899 Afrofuturist novel Imperium in Imperio. A self-avowed patriot, Piedmont hopes to stave off the armed race war envisioned by his friend and revolutionary rival, Bernard […]
In the clash of motives that it inscribes, the term “freedman” and the conditions of existence that it signals are poignantly alluded to in the epigraph that Richard White chooses to inaugurate his exhaustive study of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age: “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless […]
Populations around the world today suffer considerable anxiety at the hands of rulers who exercise power at the expense of the governed. Whatever stability of the global order appeared to be regnant in the aftermath of WWII—between 1945 and the rearrangements of power that roiled the colonial synthesis across Africa, […]
The scene of writing has become for me a scene of hurting. As an African American woman, as a Muslim, as the single mother of a teenaged Muslim black boy, as a black feminist scholar and presumably an expert in black literature and culture, I feel summoned by language and […]
“It is not a matter of governing; still less of being governed.” Marcel Havrenne Hannah Arendt reminds us that “…to the Greeks, private life seemed ‘idiotic’ because it lacked the diversity that comes with speaking about something and thus the experience of how things really function in the world” (Arendt […]
Though it would be hard to say in a single sentence, let me try to understand this: shortly before the holidays, Politico reported that a rogue band of Republican Congressmen had been convening under cover of darkness for several weeks in the shadow of the duly appointed bipartisan House investigative […]
Increasingly, since the Supreme Court some thirty-plus years ago ruled to allow unlimited funding by private and corporate interests, the United States has steadily moved toward political degeneration and corrupting abuse of democracy’s frameworks. This issue stands at the forefront of any discussion regarding democracy’s present and future reality. I […]
Why does being “unapologetically black” matter now? The Black Lives Matter movement put these words “unapologetically black” in motion through their written statements and the embodied signage of t-shirts, bags, and other body work. A Black Lives Matter t-shirt with the “nutritional facts” label for “Unapologetically Black” declares: “Serving Size: […]
the A-Line: a journal of progressive thought will highlight, by way of the feature called “Convergence,” problems for thought and practice at least monthly, beginning with the launch issue of the journal. We will regularly solicit short pieces of writing from several of our contributors, contributing editors, as well as guest […]
Arts NowAugust 1, 2019
Black Feminist Regard – as Ethics, as AestheticsAugust 1, 2019
a prefatory noteAugust 1, 2019
evolutionAugust 1, 2019