Monzur Patwary of the Task Force for Global Health presents an array of tailored cultural responses to COVID-19 developed in his native Bangladesh. Underfunded centralized health services collaborate with NGOs in the creation of lively public service announcements in local dialects, video endorsements by faith leaders, and works of popular theater, art, and visual culture.
A Green Democratic Revolution offers the most appropriate strategy for articulating the many democratic struggles against different forms of domination, exploitation, and discrimination with the defense of the habitability of the planet. Excerpted from Chantal Mouffe's Towards a Green Democratic Revolution: Left Populism and the Power of Affects (London: Verso, 2022) with the permission of the publisher.
In nineteenth-century Santiago de Cuba, the island of Cuba's radical cradle, Afro-descendant peasants forged freedom and devised their own formative path to emancipation. Drawing on understudied archives, this pathbreaking work unearths a new history of Black rural geography and popular legalism, and offers a new framework for thinking about nineteenth-century Black freedom. Santiago de Cuba's Afro-descendant peasantries did not rely on liberal-abolitionist ideologies as a primary reference point in their struggle for rights. Instead, they negotiated their freedom and land piecemeal, through colonial legal frameworks that allowed for local custom and manumission. While gradually wearing down the institution of slavery through litigation and self-purchase, they reimagined colonial racial systems before Cuba's intellectuals had their say. Long before residents of Cuba protested for national independence and island-wide emancipation in 1868, it was Santiago's Afro-descendant peasants who, gradually and invisibly, laid the groundwork for emancipation.
In this media-enhanced excerpt from Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021), Daphne A. Brooks delves into Zora Neale Hurston's 1939 experiences as the only Black woman on the staff of the Federal Writers Project's Florida Guide. A keen listener, interviewer, and ethnographer, Hurston, as heard in these recordings, was also a sonic interpreter of vernacular voices and performance styles.
In October 2022, during oral arguments in a US Supreme Court case concerning reapportionment, Justice Samuel Alito suggested from the bench that racial bloc voting in Alabama is a partisan, ideological difference, unrelated to race. Steve Suitts reviews this voting rights case and briefly explains how Alito ignores Alabama's long history of race-based voter suppression and why, if adopted in future cases, Alito's ahistorical assertion could devastate Black voters' chances to win voting rights challenges across the nation.
In 1849 a mob of white supremacists eager to seize anti-slavery mailings attacked the US Post Office in Pendleton, South Carolina. They burned leaflets and letters in a bonfire on the village green to make clear their stance against incendiary ideas. This essay explores the context of these events by considering an initial spate of mailings that happened in 1835. This examination includes: their author, William Brisbane; the Calhounist culture of Pendleton that fueled this demonstration; the sad fate of the young man, John Barrett, who was arrested for the distribution of such materials; and those held captive in the middle of it all, the enslaved African Americans of Pendleton.
Melissa Creary brings together a decade of experience as a health scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, years of extensive field work in Brazil, and her current work as a professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan to provide a comparative analysis of the role culture plays in the efficacy of public health systems in the United States and Brazil. Creary’s interdisciplinary analysis underscores differences in national beliefs about healthcare as a fundamental right and the critical impact of those beliefs when a life-threatening virus spreads rapidly across a population. Questions of health equity and justice, racial and regional disparities in healthcare, state responsibility, and partisan politics permeate her reflections on the ongoing crisis.
Stephanie Rountree examines the relational possibilities of queer performance in Max Vernon's The View UpStairs, a play that dramatizes the 1973 Up Stairs Lounge fire in New Orleans. Rountree contextualizes the fire within the scope of the twentieth century gay liberation movement and explores how the play's various production sites both embody and transcend the time and place of the tragedy.
