This is the epigraph to Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. I just purchased this text and haven’t had the opportunity to read it yet. It is a mixed-media project and along with her work in Citizen: An American Lyric, I am excited to read this as I think about public intellectuals and […]
It was only after I read Edwidge Danticat’s chapter on Basquiat in Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artists at Work that I really became interested in Basquiat. The Brooklyn Museum is hosting an exhibit of his work that runs through the end of August. Can I make it there with my other obligations this summer. In “Jean-Michel Basquiat’s ‘Unknown […]
“How do we reckon with what modern history has rendered ghostly?” —Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological lmagination Gordon explains that “[t]he ghost is not simply a dead or missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life. The ghost […]
This is the obituary of the cultural critic and sociologist published today in The Guardian. A good document that explores some of the same themes that I do in my article on Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londonders. That is, the ‘familiar stranger,’ a trope that is the inheritance of diasporic peoples from the German sociologist, Georg […]