All tagged the united states
In Hidden Figures, Margot Lee Shetterly brings into fuller view the crucial role played by four African-American women at NASA during the segregated 1940s-60s, and she gives us a powerful, revelatory contribution to underwritten histories, essential to our understanding of race, discrimination, and achievement in modern America.
In Writing to Save a Life, John Edgar Wideman searches for Louis Till, father of iconic, young Civil Rights martyr Emmett Till, himself executed by the Army ten years before his son’s murder via lynching in 1955. The result is a searing conversation between generations, the living and the dead, fathers and sons.
In Ideas to Live For, Giles Gunn asks whether and how our sense of the human might be reconstructed, not around suspicion or antipathy toward others, but around an epistemological and moral need of them.
In The Intimacies of Four Continents, Lisa Lowe reads across historical archives and literary canons in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries to connect the liberal narrative of freedom overcoming slavery to the expansion of Anglo-American empire, observing that abstract promises of freedom often obscure their embeddedness within colonial conditions.
In Habeas Viscus, Alexander Weheliye studies the centrality of race to notions of the human, developing a theory of “racializing assemblages” that traces how race as a set of sociopolitical processes disciplines humanity, writ large, into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans.