The Mobility of Faith: Cross Sections of Haitian Religion in Miami
[author_affiliation] Overview Review In Crossing the Water and Keeping the Faith, sociologists Terry Rey and Alex Stepick map the vibrant diasporic religious cultures of Miami, the site of the largest Haitian-descended population outside Haiti itself. Well aware that prevailing academic and popular narratives ascribe Vodou practice to all Haitian citizens and expatriates, Rey and Stepick […]
2014 Phillis Wheatley Poetry Reading
[author_affiliation] Overview Greetings by Natasha Trethewey Natasha Trethewey introduces the 2014 Callaloo Conference. I am Natasha Trethewey, the Director of the Creative Writing Program and I’m pleased to welcome you to this year’s Phillis Wheatley Reading, an annual event co-sponsored by the Creative Writing Program and the Department of African-American Studies at Emory University. We’re […]
Unquiet Emmett Till
[author_affiliation] Overview Review Emmett Till continues to torment our imaginations. How could two (and almost certainly more) grown men, veterans, over six feet tall, see a fourteen year old kid as such a threat to “the southern way of life” that they tortured and killed him? How could a Mississippi court exonerate them? The story […]
Mississippi: State of Confession
[author_affiliation] Overview Review The Museum of Mississippi History and the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum mock-up from the 2 Mississippi Museums Project Fact Sheet, 2013. Mississippi says it is ready to confess some of its sins. Its new complex of Mississippi history museums, set to open in 2017, will prominently feature the Magnolia State’s ferocious resistance […]
Lift Every Voice and Sing: The Quilts of Gwendolyn Ann Magee
[author_affiliation] Overview Lift Every Voice and Sing, 2004. © Gwendolyn A. Magee. Pieced, quilted, stitched, and appliquéd fabrics, with cording. 41.5″x53″. Courtesy of Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Photography: Dave Dawson Photography. Introduction The art flows through me, but does not belong to me alone. It speaks for those who have no voices, whose […]
Kara Walker’s Blood Sugar: A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby
[author_affiliation] Overview Review frozen, photograph inside Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, Brooklyn, New York, June 6, 2014. Photograph by Eric Konon. Courtesy of Eric Konon. Oh ye who at your easeSip the blood-sweeten’d beverage —Robert Southey, Poems of the Slave Trade, Sonnet III1Robert Southey, The Poetical Works of Robert Southey (New York: D. Appleton and Co., […]
Race, Capitalism, and the Rise and Fall of Black Beach Communities
[author_affiliation] Overview Review Building on a rich literature that explores the spatial dimensions of US race relations and capital formation, Andrew Kahrl’s The Land Was Ours traces the histories of African American beach communities and leisure culture from the late-nineteenth to the late-twentieth centuries. Kahrl sets his narrative against the growth of “coastal capitalism,” an […]
A Real American Horror Story: On Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave
[author_affiliation] Overview Review At the 2013 New York Film Critics Circle Awards (NYFCC), English filmmaker Steve McQueen was named Best Director for his stunning adaptation of Solomon Northup’s 1853 memoir Twelve Years a Slave. While McQueen didn’t pick up the same trophy at the Golden Globes a few weeks later, he arguably took home that […]
Low-Wage Legacies, Race, and the Golden Chicken in Mississippi: Where Contemporary Immigration Meets African American Labor History
[author_affiliation] Overview Introduction Scott County chicken farm, Mississippi, 2005. Photograph by Angela Stuesse. Courtesy of Angela Stuesse. It’s dusk, and the putrid odor of chickens heading to and from slaughter floats through the warm evening air, just as it has all summer. It is July 2005 and Pablo Armenta, a father of four from Veracruz, […]
Rethinking the Geography of Lynching
[author_affiliation] Overview Review “Lynching of Negroes is growing to be a southern pastime,” declared the Reverend D. A. Graham of the A.M.E. church in a sermon preached in Indianapolis, Indiana, as part of a nationwide protest against the practice, organized by the National Afro-American Council in 1899.1Rev. D. A. Graham, “Some Facts About Southern Lynching,” […]