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 […]
I’m about to begin the second reading of a text that I read during the first year of graduate school, Edward Said’s Representations of the Intellectual, 1993 Reith Lecture series. I re-read the introduction and was immediately persuaded (again) to Said’s perspective on a kind moral office of the intellectual. It is expansive and generous. I […]
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 […]
Heureka! “Whereas I, on a lovely spring day in 1955, suddenly came to the realization that there exists only one reality, and that is me, my own life, this fragile gift bestowed for an uncertain time, which had been seized, expropriated by alien forces, and circumscribed, marked up, branded – and which I had to […]
I just read Citizen: An American Lyric and I was struck by the urgency with which it touched me, made me want to handle it, read it again as if I had never experienced her words. There was so much truth in this book that, for a moment, I didn’t understand that it was not written just […]
“6 Scholars Who Are ‘Reimagining Black Politics’: There’s a world of urgent discourse beyond Dyson, West, and Gates.” From Robin D.G. Kelley: I don’t play pundit because I’m not interested in ‘influencing popular opinion’ if it means sacrificing analytical rigor. Our job as intellectuals is to ask the hard questions, interrogate inherited categories, take nothing as self-evident, […]
The language must be careful and must appear effortless. It must not sweat. It must suggest and be provocative at the same time. It is the thing that black people love so much—the saying of words, holding them on the tongue, experimenting with them, playing with them. It’s a love, a passion. Its function is […]
I need to process this but I must first offer it to you…. A terrific essay by Rebecca Wanzo of Washington University: On the Passing of a Black Intellectual As Hall once framed the argument in a discussion of his own field, “against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God’s name […]
From “Introduction: narrating the nation” by Homi K. Bhabha, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha Nations, like narrative, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizons in the mind’s eye. Such an image of the nation–or narration–might seem impossibly romantic and excessively metaphorical, but it is from those […]