Gayatri Devi | Candyman, Director Nia DaCosta, Written by Jordan Peele, 2021. Thirty years ago, I almost completely missed the blatant racism of the first Candyman film (1992) because of the intentionally revolting imagery of the film that triggered not only a psychosomatic fear and horror, but also aversion and disgust in the viewer.
Sharon Carson | Here in North Dakota, we have recently endured watching one of those “Ban the Teaching of Critical Race Theory” bills fly through a special session of the legislature, complete with high-pitch handwringing in our majority party by people who clearly can’t define Critical Race Theory but who
Bill Caraher | Last week, I spent a few days in Greensboro, North Carolina on a trip to visit family in the southland. Despite the miasma of COVID hanging in the air, I managed to visit a few local landmarks including the International Civil Rights Museum located in the Greenboro Woolworth’s
Sharon Carson | A copy of French writer Didier Eribon’s beautifully crafted memoir Returning to Reims recently landed in my mailbox thanks to the U.K. based Left Book Club (more on the LBC below). Here’s the trademark yellow-jacketed LBC edition. Originally published in 2009, Returning to Reims has been available in English translation since
Sharon Carson | We at NDQ are delighted to help spread the good news of Joy Harjo’s appointment as Poet Laureate of the United States. From the official announcement made on 6/19/2019 by the Library of Congress: “Harjo is the first Native American poet to serve in the position –
Sharon Carson | Shifter magazine (https://shifter-magazine.com/) has created some intriguing possibilities in collaborative publication, starting as an online publication and morphing more recently into a multi-platform project, including a turn to print. In some ways, they have followed the opposite track direction as NDQ: we started and ran for decades
Sharon Carson | The Nation recently announced that D.D. Guttenplan would be taking over as editor, following a 25 year tenure in that role by Katherina vanden Heuvel. Here’s a bit more about that transition and Guttenplan’s background as a journalist and writer. Guttenplan has long focused on social analysis
Sharon Carson I had a welcome memory spark during a recent graduate seminar discussion of Omar ibn Said’s 1831 autobiography, The Life of Omar ibn Said, a text written in Arabic and an account of his enslavement in the United States. The Arabic text and English translations are available online at the
The Vietnam War. Dr. Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Perf. Peter Coyote (Narrator), Huy Duc, Duong Van Mai Elliott, et al. Florentine Films, 2017. Documentary. Review by Matt Masur America’s war in Vietnam, which ended almost fifty years ago, has never really faded from the country’s memory. Every American military intervention
Bill Caraher The past two decades have seen an explosion in work on the environmental history and a growing interest in materiality. These two trends intersect in the work of scholars who have come to question whether the division between humans and nature is a useful paradigm for understanding the relationship between the bundle
