Vol. 1 No. 2

Convergence / Vol. 1 No. 2

Convergence 2: Styles of Governance: What’s in it for Me?

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 Enchantment of Being
Convergence / Politics / Vol. 1 No. 2

The Enchantment of Being

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 […]

“Like Rain, Like Thunder, Like Lightning, Like Fire”
Arts & Culture / Politics / The Reading Room / Vol. 1 No. 2

“Like Rain, Like Thunder, Like Lightning, Like Fire”

By the time James Baldwin took the stage at the University of Chicago in May 1963 to speak on the subject of “The Moral (or Social) Responsibility of the Artist,” an impatient authority was immediately discernible. This recently unearthed recording of the novelist, essayist, playwright, and poet, reveals a weary […]

In the Crawlspace: Hill, Franken, and #MeToo Pain
Arts & Culture / Health / Politics / The Reading Room / Vol. 1 No. 2

In the Crawlspace: Hill, Franken, and #MeToo Pain

On December 6, 2017, a coalition of women Democrats led by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand—Senators Kamala Harris, Claire McCaskill, Patty Murray, Mazie Hirono, Tammy Baldwin, and Maggie Hassan—demanded that Al Franken give up his senatorial seat as a result of sexual misconduct accusations from eight different women.1 One day later, Franken […]

Symphony of Combs
Arts & Culture / Politics / The Reading Room / Vol. 1 No. 2

Symphony of Combs

Prelude: Victoria Santa Cruz Me Gritaron Negra! Negra Soy! They yelled at me: Black! Black I am. And black, here, is feminine, of necessity. They yelled at me, Black Woman; they called me Black Woman. Even the men in the film shout it, dance it, are swept up in its […]

Some Thoughts on Citizenship and Poetics
Arts & Culture / International / Politics / The Reading Room / Vol. 1 No. 2

Some Thoughts on Citizenship and Poetics

As a poet and essayist, I think of poetry as creative heuristics, a means to investigate the world and experience through language, community, identity and politics. In poetry, writer and reader engage the contents of our categorical thinking, formally and informally (in custom and usage), as well as the limits, […]

Beyond Idiocy, Towards Involvement
Convergence / Politics / Vol. 1 No. 2

Beyond Idiocy, Towards Involvement

“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 […]

Cliff Notes (or Notes for Going Over One)
Convergence / Politics / Vol. 1 No. 2

Cliff Notes (or Notes for Going Over One)

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 […]

To Shake or Be Shook Down
Arts & Culture / The Reading Room / Vol. 1 No. 2

To Shake or Be Shook Down

Once as a girl, she dreamed an urban kingdom. In the time of the dream, women of the kingdom were squatting over toilets, over gold chamberpots. There was one man—he was understood as the king—in all the imagined city. And this “king” walked among the women and among the pots. […]

The Hudson River: An Autobiography
Arts & Culture / The Reading Room / Vol. 1 No. 2

The Hudson River: An Autobiography

PART IV: VISIONS IN HISTORY This town’s edge, a collapsing shore, seems always to be where live the poor. In my mother’s time, they called us river rats,/ now the words mix insults/ of race, stones on our tongues we spit at others. * * * * * History’s latest […]

At Shakespeare’s Bed
Arts & Culture / The Reading Room / Vol. 1 No. 2

At Shakespeare’s Bed

Among the rubble of our wounded nation the vibrant image of a lyric warrior haunts my fragile solitude, the canopy above his sleep after long years’ scribbling blank as silent centuries since departed. Plays and poems do not heal politics. A writer’s skyward reach, earthly guesswork’s intuition, gathers straw and […]

Banana Boat Moon Selection: Five Poems
Arts & Culture / The Reading Room / Vol. 1 No. 2

Banana Boat Moon Selection: Five Poems

Banana Boat Moon And a hibiscus behind your ear like the exotically melancholy singer though you are a mad cap trickster who changes your birthday from hurricane time to June 11 on a spring whim in route to the place you claim to be born in it rolls off your […]