Two boys, pink in their manhood, lean over a balcony, full of teeth. Below: a brown man, skin tired of holding his bones. Work falls in shadows around his feet. The Puget Sound is bluer than any dream or sky. The boys loom, pink.
Are there still documentaries? A glance at this year’s Oscar nominees, a thriving festival circuit, and my own Netflix history makes the answer plain. And yet the question persists. It squats at the end of long days spent consuming “real”...
As Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in his 1762 treatise, The Social Contract, humans are free but are everywhere in chains: literal chains, made of forged steel; or perhaps metaphorical ones, made of gold and silver, illusion, ignorance...
One of the undercurrents of the migration narrative is the story told by the objects of exodus, that economy of objects transformed by the trip itself—relics of a former life that are sold or hidden away; keepsakes that molder, heirlooms...
in the selfie he is currently texting to “Lula Mae,” the man next to me on flight 4853 to Columbia, dressed in a black turtleneck and a thick double chain,
There is a strain of Black campus novel that is obsessed with “realness.” I can trace its origins to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, in which the narrator leads his college’s white trustee on a darkly comic and ill-fated tour of the Black...
