Such Is Our Challenge

February 23, 2018 Richard Wright introduced by Scott McLemee

The English translation of Richard Wright’s address to the Revolutionary Democratic Assembly in Paris in December 1948 seems to have escaped the notice of the biographers and literary scholars who have otherwise been extremely thorough in documenting the author’s life and work. And that neglect is all the more remarkable given the speech’s substance. A major defense of radical political and cultural principles at a moment when the Cold War was turning downright arctic, it is also a credo, a statement of personal values, by the preeminent African-American literary artist of his era.

Black Art Matters: A Roundtable On the Black Radical Imagination

July 26, 2016 Walidah Imarisha, Robin D.G. Kelly and Jonathan Horstmann interviewed by Red Wedge

The art of Emory Douglas, remixed for Black Lives Matter

Can America ever truly face its racism – both past and present – for what it truly is? Or is the history of forced migration, bondage and slave labor, legal apartheid, incarceration and horrific state violence too much for it to survive such a revelation? Can it endure the psychic shock and endeavor in some kind of pursuit of truth or reconciliation? Or will it simply implode, come apart at the seams and make way for something new? Something which, hopefully, would not have genocide running through its veins? Langston Hughes tells of a man urging us to “let America be America again,” but Hughes is not so sure such an America ever existed. Neither should anyone today.

The Petrified and the Proletarian (part 1)

December 28, 2015 Joseph G. Ramsey

Richard Wright, Ta-Nehisi Coates and James Baldwin

Since appearing last summer, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book Between the World and Me has sparked enthusiastic discussion, from Democracy Now! to the Daily Show, from The Atlantic to Facebook, from classrooms and hallways to street corners and barbershops. The text has become a NYT #1 best-seller, has now won the National Book Award for non-fiction, and has no doubt been largely responsible for earning its author a prestigious MacArthur “genius” grant.

Among the many questions being widely discussed is one of literary lineage: Is Ta-Nehisi Coates the new James Baldwin?

Toni Morrison prompted this question with an exuberant back cover blurb, perhaps singlehandedly guaranteeing that Between the World And Me would climb the best-sellers list...

WINTER ISSUE

Most Recent