Tag african american studies

Ep. 80 – Exploring Black Visual Satire

Tracing a historical line from commedia dell’arte, Hogarth and others to modern and contemporary artists including Ollie Harrington, Robert Colescott, Spike Lee, and Kara Walker, we discuss Black visual satire with Duke professor Richard J. Powell. YaleUniversity · Exploring Black Visual Satire Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify |

Challenging Stereotypes about Black Women

Melissa V. Harris-Perry— Eliza Gallie was a free black woman living in Petersburg, Virginia, before the Civil War. She was divorced, owned property, and had financial resources that made her unusual among free blacks in the Confederate South. In 1853 Gallie was arrested and charged with stealing cabbages from a

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Books on the History of Race Relations

We have all heard the news, read the stories, watched the footage—America has reached a crossroads on racial injustice. The path forward may be challenging, but as a contributor to the global understanding of human affairs, we hope our books will help inform the public consciousness and promote tolerance for

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African Americans and Africa

Nemata Amelia Ibitayo Blyden— My father, born in Sierra Leone, used to tell us stories about being a student at Lincoln University in the 1940s. A historically black college, Lincoln was founded in 1854 to provide an education in arts and sciences for young men of African descent. Accomplished African

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Abolitionists are American Democracy’s Unsung Heroes

Manisha Sinha— Most Americans greeted Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew’s decision to put Harriet Tubman, the abolitionist heroine of the Underground Railroad, on the front of the twenty-dollar bill and relegate the Indian hunting President Andrew Jackson to its back with approval. The ironies abound. Fugitive slaves like Tubman most feared

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Multimedia Masquerade—Masks and Disguise in Contemporary Art: Interview with Pamela McClusky by David Ebony

David Ebony— As Performa 15, the performance art biennial, gets underway this week in New York, on the West Coast, Los Angeles’s Fowler Museum at UCLA hosts “Disguise: Masks and Global African Art,” an extraordinary look at the use of masks in contemporary performance art, sculpture, photography, installation and video.

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Imagining Black America

To begin with, some basic biology. Human beings share fully 99.5 percent of our DNA. In other words, the individual difference between us – in height and weight, in skin color, in hair texture – are shaped by a mere 0.5 percent of our genetic material. This is how Michael

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Ralph Ellison In Progress

Ralph Ellison has often been cited by literary scholars as one of the 20th century’s most tragic examples of writer’s block: after the immense success of 1952’s Invisible Man, the author lived for more than 40 years without ever publishing a second novel. Yet, in Ralph Ellison In Progress: From

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The Deep Blues of Bill Traylor

Peculiarly, the story of Bill Traylor is both intensely local and transnational. Born into slavery in 1854, Traylor spent most of his life in the nearly unknown town of Benton, Alabama, just outside of Montgomery. As a self-taught artist, he moved to the state capital in 1935 when he was

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“Michelle” Excerpt from Melissa Harris-Perry’s Sister Citizen

Following the announcement of her new MSNBC show, starting in February, Melissa Harris-Perry appeared on Comedy Central’s Colbert Report this Monday to discuss her book, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America, addressing the four common stereotyped characters that shape African American women’s identities and how they affect

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