How “Hip Checks” Betray Our Gender-Mediated Gaze
Erica Rand applies the sports method, “hip checks”, to explore race and gender bias in ‘The Small Book of Hip Checks’.
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Sundance 2021: Rebecca Hall’s Visually Gorgeous ‘Passing’ Is Cerebral But Cool
Rebecca Hall's Passing has a distance to it affirms the film's message but it doesn't necessarily make for appealing cinema.
Black in the Middle: An Anthology of the Black Midwest (excerpt)
In this excerpt of Black in the Middle, PopMatters' Mark Reynolds compares the nearly identical racial divides in his cities, Cleveland and Chicago, that to this day are stubbornly entrenched.
Nicholas Buccola’s ‘The Fire Is Upon Us’ Is Obscured by the Smoke
Nicholas Buccola's The Fire Is Upon US is, at times, marred by glibness, impatience, and ahistorical tendencies that suggest, to an extent, it is also a reflective of the deteriorating conditions that mark our public discourse in 2020.
Zadie Smith’s ‘Intimations’ Essays Pandemic with Erudite Wit and Compassion
Zadie Smith's Intimations is an essay collection of gleaming, wry, and crisp prose that wears its erudition lightly but takes flight on both everyday and lofty matters.
Performing Race in James Whale’s ‘Show Boat’
There's a song performed in James Whale's musical, Show Boat, wherein race is revealed as a set of variegated and contradictory performances, signals to others, a manner of being seen and a manner of remaining hidden, and it isn't "Old Man River".
Debut Essay Collection ‘Some of Us Are Very Hungry Now’ Takes a Slice from the Americana Songbook
Although Andre Perry's essays in his debut, Some of Us Are Very Hungry Now, traverse various geographical journeys, they are, overall, ballads, images from the self, the man isolated and marginalized in other countries and in his own land.
Judgment Day!: Social Protest and Censorship in EC Comics
Scholar Qiana Whitted's EC Comics: Race, Shock & Social Protest explores a different path in EC Comic's history: their work with social justice stories and the resulting censorship in 1950s America.
‘Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom’ Is as Monumental as the Man It Chronicles
Noted historian David W. Blight offers readers the fullest portrait of Frederick Douglass yet in this "biography of a voice".
TIFF 2018: Papi Chulo
Papi Chulo's heart is in the right place. The problem is, from the Latino perspective, the "friendship" in this story could be the basis of a horror movie.
“We are all Rachel Dolezal”: on Asad Haider’s ‘Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump’
Among other critiques of identity politics, Haider believes that we each can slip between identities at will. Indeed, it's a universal human condition.
