Museum of Modern Art: “One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North” (through Sept. 7). In the early 20th century, tens of thousands of African-Americans left the rural South for the industrial North in search of jobs, homes and respect. Officially, this MoMA show is meant to mark the […]
“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 […]
I gave a conference paper on (Re)Mapping the Black Atlantic at DePaul University in 2013. It was on the anniversary of Paul Gilroy’s seminal work The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. I spoke on Sam Selvon’s short novel The Lonely Londoners and the idea of a desiring language – one that Frantz Fanon named as the urgency of ‘reciprocal recognitions.’ […]
Much of my writing and teaching gravitates toward the idea of the unhomely. I take it from Homi Bhabha and Martin Heidegger as cited in the introduction to Bhabha’s The Location of Culture: To be unhomed is not to be homeless, nor can the ‘unhomely’ be easily accommodated in that familiar division of social life into […]