In the same year that Michael Brown and Eric Garner’s murders at the hands of the police sparked national protest, Claudia Rankine published her book Citizen: An American Lyric. Originally published in 2014, Citizen consists of poems, monologues, lyrical essays, artwork, and photographs, all of which explore microaggressions and their broader relationship to systemic racism. In a 2020 interview...
Upon the release of Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz’s Antebellum (2020), the film was met with mixed reception. Antebellum follows a young Black woman author, Veronica Henley (Janelle Monaé), who, after leaving her home and family to complete her book tour, “wakes up” to find herself enslaved on what appears to be a cotton plantation in the antebellum south. In the film, viewers watch as...
In my last post, I examined Fortnite’s March Through Time, an interactive experience inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.’s 17-minute “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. While most of the critical backlash against March Through Time has centered around the project’s “tonal dissonance,”—the seeming incompatibility of civil rights imagery and Fortnite’s...
In August of this year, Epic Games collaborated with TIME Studios to host a special, virtual event dedicated to the 58th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Fortnite’s March Through Time, an interactive experience inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.’s 17-minute “I Have a Dream” speech, is accessible through the free-to-play game’s creative mode. Creative mode...