Series: Two Works

In her stirring essay Art on the Frontline, scholar and activist Angela Davis asked, 'How do we collectively acknowledge our popular cultural legacy and communicate it to the masses of people, most of whom have been denied access to the social spaces reserved for arts and culture?' Looking to the cultural forms born of Afro-American struggles, Davis insists that we...

In 1997, during a symposium at Centre Pompidou, Leo Bersani presented a prescient critique of the assimilative tendencies that made 'gays melt into the very culture they like to think of themselves as undermining.' Mired in micropolitics, for Bersani, queer activism had relinquished the radical task of reconfiguring the horizon of the possible. Later published as Gay Betrayals, Bersani's intervention...

In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois's text The Souls of Black Folk made history as a work of sociological thought, and would go on to become a cornerstone of African American literature. In it, Du Bois combined music, history, and memoir to advance a vital message of resistance in the uniquely dehumanising context of the so-called 'Jim Crow' era. It was...