March/April 2016
Robin D. G. Kelley leads this issue’s forum by suggesting that grassroots political education would strengthen the black student movement, while also questioning the movement’s reliance on the language of personal trauma. Michael Eric Dyson, Randall L. Kennedy, Christopher Lebron, Aaron Bady, and others respond. Major Jackson offers a surreal, arresting take on police violence in his new poem, “Ferguson.” Anne Fausto-Sterling notes how racist stereotypes are embedded in medical school curricula, and Peter James Hudson critiques recent books on slavery and capitalism for overlooking the vital contributions of radical black scholarship. Joy James reviews a long-lost nineteenth-century memoir that reveals the roots of black incarceration, and Carina del Valle Schorske notes the importance of the historical archive (or lack thereof) to black American poets. Plus, Sarah Hill offers a tribute to her teacher, Sidney Mintz, who made vital contributions to scholarship on the black Atlantic; Stephen Kinzer interviews Andrew J. Bacevich about how we will lose the war for control of the Greater Middle East; Jonathan Kirshner skewers Niall Ferguson‘s voluminous new book on Kissinger; and erica kaufman celebrates Eileen Myles‘s skill as a poet.
Forum: Black Study, Black Struggle
Opening
The university is not an engine of social transformation. Activism is.
Also in this issue:
A tribute to one of the century’s great anthropologists and teachers.
Black people get sicker because of stereotypes taught in medical schools.
A debut short story by an emerging Nigerian writer. Winner of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers.
The United States will lose the war for control of the Middle East.
Recent histories of slavery and capitalism ignore radical black scholarship.
Niall Ferguson’s protestations aside, Henry Kissinger was the quintessential foreign policy realist.
A nineteenth-century memoir sheds light on the origins of the modern prison.
M. NourbeSe Philip combs history for the black American experience.
Poetry
Once there was a boy who thought it a noble idea to lie down in the middle of the street and sleep. . . .
