Tag: race
Interracial Couples as Outcasts in Loving
In the 2016 movie Loving, the interracial couple of Richard Loving (Joel Edgerton) and Mildred Loving (Ruth Negga) experience discrimination under segregation in 1950s and 1960s Virginia. Outside forces (i.e., people in the community and institutions) continuously try to separate the couple, making it difficult for them to be together. These outside forces use a
Teaching Race with Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric
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.
Resurrection: Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground Then and Now
“The Man Who Lived Underground” was first published as a short story in Edwin Seaver’s Cross-Section: An American Anthology of New American Writing in 1944, and again posthumously in Wright’s 1961 short story collection Eight Men (Literary Classics 22). This version of the narrative begins with an unnamed protagonist already on the run from the
Countercurrents: Book Review of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
Christina Sharpe’s 2016 book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, published by Duke University Press, examines various representations of Black life including the literary, cinematic, visual, and everyday life experiences of Black people. She offers a cipher to navigate the unspeakable and unknowable realities of existing in the violent afterlives of transatlantic slavery. To
“Isn’t That All in the Past?”: History and the Privilege of Cultural Amnesia
As I’ve been stressing throughout this month’s series of posts, privilege works in a number of pernicious and insidious ways in our everyday lives. Much as we might collectively like to believe that it doesn’t exist, it is only by dragging it kicking and screaming into the piercing light of day and scholarly/critical inquiry that
“Thank You, Officer:” The Everyday Privilege of Whiteness
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine asked me when I first became aware of my white privilege. Caught somewhat off-balance by the question, I answered that I would need to give it some thought in order to respond to this inquiry with the complexity and deliberation that it deserved. However, try as I
“Show me a good time”?: Madonna, Drake, and Police Brutality
If you’re fortunate enough to have the self-control to avoid at least moving your cursor over the “trending” links on Facebook: apparently, Madonna kissed Drake at Coachella, and to paraphrase Drake “it was it was [sic] not the best.” I base that reading on Drake’s body language: stunned immobility, a wide what is happening gesture,
About being a well-meaning, presumptuous neighbor
She asked me, “Is it true? Do your people wear loin cloths on a daily basis? Also, what about snakes? Do they slither around everywhere, like on the streets and stuff?” Having heard that, you’d expect me to be apoplectic with rage and indignation. You’d expect me to rant about India being a developing nation
Rude Wastes of Space: Race, Class, and the Othering of the British Hoodie
One of the more interesting parts of writing my dissertation so far has been investigating the phenomenon of the British hoodie. My dissertation focuses on the post-2000 British horror resurgence, and the hoodie horror cycle has been one of the more prolific cycles within the more general boom. Menhaj Huda’s 2006 film Kidulthood is often
Feminism doesn’t (t)werk that way: “Booty Culture,” race, and pop feminism
As Pippa Middleton recently remarked, “What is it with this American booty culture? It seems to me to be a form of obsession.” Who doesn’t love the booty?** Whether we’re talking about Miley Cyrus’s twerking, Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda,” Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass,” Jennifer Lopez and Iggy Azalea’s “Booty,” Kim Kardashian’s “break the internet”