Books & ideas

Slave Ship Rebellions

Thomas Mareite — 2019-11-21T08:00:00Z

In 1841, the Creole, an American ship with 139 enslaved people onboard, was hijacked at sea by a group of determined rebels in their midst. Kerr-Ritchie's book sheds new light on this iconic episode of the Revolutionary Atlantic in the 19^th century, telling a tale of successful self-emancipation.

Kara Walker's Fons Americanus at Tate Modern

Vanina Géré — 2019-10-10T07:00:00Z

Visual artist Kara Walker's Fons Americanus is this year's commissioned work for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. While addressing the current debates regarding memorials, it goes beyond a mere rewriting or righting of history.

Penal Policy and Racial Prejudice in the United States

Manon Veaudor — 2017-04-27T07:00:00Z

After the war on poverty, the United States declared a war on crime. This history of penal policy since 1960 looks at the intellectual and political roots of the punitive treatment often reserved for minorities.

Chicago: A City on the Brink

Andrew J. Diamond — 2012-05-15T09:32:14Z

Originally scheduled to host the next G8 summit, Chicago has been bypassed in favor of Camp David. No wonder: the “the city that works” works no more. With a terrible youth unemployment rate and municipal governance that has consistently denied its African American residents the services and jobs they deserve, Chicago has fostered despair like no other city its size. Spring will be hot.

Post-Racial America?

Sarah Fila-Bakabadio — 2012-05-10T11:03:25Z

Obama cannot fully inscribe himself in a traditional vision of African American racial politics as the struggle of slave-descendants for equality. He is better approached as a participant of today's global reality. His trajectory invites a reconsideration of the connections Americans—and particularly African Americans—have maintained with other countries, continents and people.

The Fall of the House of Obama?

Pauline Peretz — 2011-12-30T10:36:17Z

Is there still room for hope at the White House?

Hopeful Sociology

Stéphane Tonnelat — 2011-12-06T10:50:31Z

An ethnography of Philadelphia takes up a problem rarely addressed by the social sciences: how to account for events that do not take place? In his latest opus, sociologist Elijah Anderson examines the absence of discrimination in a city market and looks at the conditions of possibility of cosmopolitanism.