Avidly. Here are some excerpts. Follow the link to the complete article. Thanks, Gordon, for bringing this to my attention.
Julia Quinn’s
Bridgerton novels are mostly populated with white people like the regency-era England where they take place. The London of Shonda Rhimes’s
Bridgerton tv series for Netflix, in contrast, is a multicultural mecca, sprinkled with Black characters of various skin hues, as well as a smattering of east and south Asians walking around silently in the background. There is even a Black queen and a Black duke.
In the world of fiction whether on the page, stage, or screen such ahistoricity does not necessarily have to be an issue. We should not evaluate a work of art by how well it matches reality, or how faithful it is to history. But a work of art can and should be judged by the inspiration behind its creator’s vision. And this is where
“To the general public, it might seem like a buried history, but the Caribbean is so much more than tourism,” said Marlene Daut, professor of African American and African Studies and an
expert on Haiti who helped create the new program on Caribbean literatures, arts and cultures.
When Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World, he hit these islands first. Over the years and the subsequent trips that Columbus and other Europeans made, the indigenous populations were almost entirely exterminated on many islands, due to a deadly combination of resistance through warfare with the conquistadors and smallpox, which the Europeans brought with them to the Americas.
John McGowan
7:00 pm EST
John McGowan (Fellow, 2017–18), John W. and Anna H. Hanes Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Host: Marlene Daut (Fellow, 2016–17), Professor and Associate Director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, University of Virginia
In
Pragmatist Politics, John McGowan suggests that perhaps the best response to the cynicism and despair that permeate contemporary American politics is a return to pragmatism. Offering an expansive vision of what the United States should be, McGowan combines the thinking of philosophers like John Dewey and William James with the ethos of comedy to imagine what American life could be like if we more fully embraced values such as love, forgiveness, and generosity that are too often left out of our political discourse.
Samedi, 12 Décembre, 2020 - 22:12
Toussaint Louverture, according to the scholar Sudhir Hazareesingh, was “the first black superhero of the modern age.” Louverture was born enslaved on a sugar plantation on Saint-Domingue, a French colony on the island of Hispaniola, sometime in the early seventeen-forties. He was emancipated in adulthood and, at about fifty, led the most important slave revolt in history, effectively forcing France to abolish slavery, in 1794.
Next, he united the island’s Black and mixed-race populations under his military command; outmaneuvered three successive French commissioners; defeated the British; overpowered the Spanish; and, in 1801 despite having been wounded seventeen times in battle and having lost most of his front teeth to a cannonball explosion authored a new abolitionist constitution for Saint-Domingue, asserting that “here, all men are born, live, and die free and French.” Napoleon Bonaparte first sent twenty thousand men to overthro