BY CEDRIC JOHNSON (The Neoliberal Deluge and Revolutionaries to Race Leaders) AND THOMAS JESSEN ADAMS Excerpt from article published in Jacobin: The rains over Corpus Christi and Houston have finally stopped, and floodwaters are beginning to recede. Some residents are still stranded, while others — tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands — won’t be able to … More The Coming Storm
Albert Murray (1916–2013), renowned jazz historian, critic, writer, social and cultural theorist, and cofounder (with Wynton Marsalis) of Jazz at Lincoln Center, would have turned 100 years old today. We remember him with an edited excerpt from Murray Talks Music: Albert Murray on Jazz and Blues (May 2016).——-“In order to know what the statement is, … More Remembering the fierce thinker and jazz historian Albert Murray, who would have turned 100 today.
A view of flooded New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, September 2005.It’s been ten years since, and yet it left lessons that remain to be learned. BY CEDRIC JOHNSONAssociate professor of African American studies and political sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago It has been ten years since New Orleans was … More Hurricane Katrina, ten years later: When the investor class goes marching in
The streets of New Orleans are pictured Aug. 30, 2005, in the aftermath of HurricaneKatrina and the city’s levee failures. Ten years later, much commentary has surfaced,but what of it has effectively addressed the event’s social injustices? BY JOHN (JAY) ARENAAssistant professor of sociology at the City University of New York’s College of Staten Island … More Whose History Will Be Commemorated? New Orleans, Katrina, and the Continuing Struggle for A People’s Reconstruction
Recent events in America including the #BlackLivesMatter movement areforcing white Americans to look at race in a way that’s uncomfortable—but also much more realistic.Image taken in November 2014 of a demonstration in New York City. Credit: Flickr. BY JULIA LEEAssistant professor of English at University of Nevada, Las Vegas According to a recent poll, nearly … More Examining America’s rhetoric of postracial progress.
Children sit together on a tree limb in an uncredited Seventh-Day Adventist image. From Louis B. Reynolds and Charles L. Paddock, Little Journeys into Storyland: Stories That Will Live and Lift (Nashville: Southern Publishing Association, 1947). BY KATHARINE CAPSHAWAssociate professor of English at the University of Connecticut 2015 marks the 50th anniversary of the Voting … More The effect of Civil Rights photobooks in transforming the social consciousness of young people
Ralph Waldo Emerson ca. 1857. Photograph: George Eastman House Photography Collection BY MARTHA SCHOOLMANAssistant professor of English at Florida International University I. Toward a New New Abolitionism Abolitionism, the movement formulated in the United States north to bring about an immediate end to slavery in the US south, was, in its moment, the watchword for … More Ethical Geography: How abolitionists used spatial practice to reject their own authority
Since the early 2000s, the phenomenon of the “down low”—black men whohave sex with men as well as women and do not identify as gay, queer, or bisexual—has exploded in media and popular culture. Wordle image source. BY C. RILEY SNORTONNorthwestern University Many of the ideas in Nobody is Supposed to Know emerged from hours … More Black sexuality, the glass closet, and how the "down low" can never be one specific thing.
After more than thirty years, the intriguing story behind the battle to bring Love in Vain: A Vision of Robert Johnson to the big screen still marches on. What follows is a final summation of the decades-long struggle to create a film out of “Love in Vain: A Vision of Robert Johnson,” a screenplay by … More Calling Hollywood’s bluff: Summing up the wild "Love in Vain" saga (Part 3 of 3)
Born in 1911 and deceased in 1938 at age 27, much about American blues singer Robert Johnson’s birth, life, and death remain a mystery. Here, Alan Greenberg discusses his decades-long journey to bring a screenplay about Johnson’s life and the culture of the Mississippi Delta and blues music during the 1930s to the big screen. … More Patience & chaos: The battle to bring "Love in Vain: A Vision of Robert Johnson" to the big screen. (Part 2 of 3)
