A belated recap of what I read last month: Farbe bekennen, edited by May Ayim, Katharina Oguntoye, Dagmar Schultz; Freedom’s Soldiers edited by Joseph P. Reidy, Leslie S. Rowland, 1919 by Eve Ewing
Tag Archives: usa
January Wrap-Up: Race, Nation and the Black Atlantic
Here’s what I read this January; Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury, The Fateful Triangle by Stuart Hall, Just Us by Claudia Rankine, Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi.
Just Us in 2021
I finished Claudia Rankine’s Just Us: An American Conversation yesterday (coincidentally on Martin Luther King Day). Just Us is once again a fascinating mix of poetry, art, criticism and (personal) essay on the current state of race and racism in the United States. The title is (probably) adapted from a Richard Pryor quote Rankine also …
The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
“So I just think about all the children who have been separated from their parents, and there’s a lot of us, past and present, and some under more traumatic circumstances than other – like those who are in internment camps right now – and I just imagine us as an army of mutants. We’ve been …
Continue reading “The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio”
Fantasy Baseball At The End Of The World
https://youtu.be/E-z9djgthqE New(ish) John K. Samson song about fantasy baseball, fascist fuckers, the end of the world, demolished hope and helping “to organize something better, something beautiful”. So basically about the summer of 2020.
“Post-” by Jeff Rosenstock First popculture highlight of the year. Punk rock for waking up to a nuclear dick measuring contest and weird, appeasing NYT op-eds and immediately becoming tired again. Listen on spotify or get it on bandcamp
In America the question has long since ceased to be whether or not we should go to war. Instead, we argue over how we go about maintaining and expanding an already endless landscape of wars. What We Do Best Patrick Blanchfield on the acceptance and depoliticization of war in US (political) life.
Until now, the Republican Party has mainly drawn its leadership from the secular right. The Christian right has been a powerful presence during the past few decades, but mainly at the local and state level. And it has distanced itself from the xenophobic right, at least publicly. Trump is changing all of that. Understanding Trumpism by …
You cannot pledge allegiance to a nation state and its flag in the name of God, for God has no political boundary. God is love, period. God is universal, nameless, faceless, and with no allegiance to anything other than love. A “Christian Nation” is absolutely heretical. Christ did not come into this world to become …
Why, then, does anyone consider him a “populist”? It’s basically all about affect, about coming across as someone who’ll stand up to snooty liberal elitists (and of course validate salt-of-the-earth, working-class racism.) Maybe some protectionism; but there’s no hint that his economic program will look anything like populism abroad. The Macroeconomics of Reality-TV Populism by …
