Reframing Resistance: A Review of Freedom Now!
...so later I probably saw the same photograph again, this time as a spread in Life magazine, the only mail I eagerly awaited and poured over, admittedly just for the...
Living with the Ghosts of Queer Pasts
Blog Post I recently bought a crumbling old house in a historically gay neighborhood in Roanoke, Virginia. I met my ex-lover in this house five years ago. At the time...
Joshua McCarter Simpson's "To the White People of America" (1854)
...The Emancipation Car. In dialect, Foster's song depicts enslaved people crying as they mourn the death of their former owner, rendering Simpson's ironic appropriation bitingly clever. "In my selection of...
Jim Crow Journeys: An Excerpt from Traveling Black
...it among the colored passengers." The food they sent, Pickens noted bitterly, only added "indigestion to insult." For seventy-five cents, you could get "a quarter of an impenetrable dried hen...
Along the Ulcofauhatche: Of Sorrow Songs and "Dried Indian Creek"
...told, this early spectacle lynching was staged as a warning to Native and enslaved Black people that any challenge to white rule would be swiftly and violently put down. We...
A Plague of Bulldozers: Celestine Sibley and Suburban Sprawl
...rich detail the emotional turmoil experienced by the grandmother-protagonist Sally. She also depicts Sally's daughter Leslie as a genuinely caring and devoted mother, though not someone who is always forthright...
Eggleston's South: "Always in Color"
...extensively in Louisiana. To be fair, Eggleston has never really been neglected by the art world. Early in his career, before his first major solo show, he won Guggenheim and...
The Place of Appalachia
...challenges activists faced in pursuing racial justice. Second, place matters because Goliaths like capitalism, neoliberalism, and globalization are produced in specific places, where the locally-specific but globally-interconnected matrix of social...
A Real American Horror Story: On Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave
...most notorious gadfly, is the most prominent and caustic critic of McQueen's nearly universally lauded film. White's opinions aren't frivolous and uniformed, and it isn't simple trolling when he calls...
Ecologies of the Sacred: A Review of Valérie Loichot's Water Graves
...so-called "rationality" and "civilization" implicitly accompany its evocation. Explicitly deconstructing the history and usage of "humanity" while signaling a plurality of humanities would not only eliminate the tension created by...