This year marks the 70th anniversary of the arrival of the SS Windrush on 22 June 1948 at Tilbury Docks, just outside London, with 492 West Indian ex-service personnel who had fought alongside British forces during the Second World War. Their arrival signaled the beginning of postwar Caribbean migration of […]
The recent union of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle served as a reminder of a much more long-standing union between theology and politics. As an originary power couple in the history of the West, theology and politics pervaded the spectacle of the royal wedding, illustrating just how much they retain […]
“Every utopia – let’s just stick with the literary ones – faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don’t fit in?” -Margaret Atwood The Winter 2018 issue of Radcliffe Magazine featured a picture of me on its cover. Over the last few years, I’ve deposited […]
for pianist, composer, poet – friend, and mentor, Cecil Taylor The following was delivered in tribute to the great artist, Cecil Taylor (March 25, 1929-April 5, 2018), at his funeral and Memorial Service, which took place on Tuesday, April 10, 2018, in New York City. A first and only note; […]
“Why has ‘Black Freedom’ become so precarious (yet again!) at this historical conjuncture?” Taking up that question, I have posed another: “What Kind Freedom is This?”1 There is a very particular provenance for this question, which I shall elaborate in a minute, as we say. At this moment, however, I […]
Take a leisure look back where it all was, the gapers and blozers, haggling whack offs standing on the platform waving so long as your train rolled past, carnival mayhem’s stale moments given to eternity. Grackles quarreling on roof tops banter much more eloquent than such nincompoops swilling malt beer […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Present Order: A NoteAugust 30, 2018
Ballot Box Terror and The Impossibility of the Black VoteAugust 30, 2018
California, the Beautiful, Or, Why the Killing and Incarceration of African Americans Won’t Budge the BallotAugust 30, 2018
Remembering Sally Hemmings. November 5, 2008.August 30, 2018