We envision the design and construction of 292 single-family residences, with plans to engage families that have committed not only to sustainable design in uniquely constructed one and two story container homes, but also collective economics, donating portions of their construction and future energy savings to the renovation of existing vacant properties, a total of […]
Ryan Cecil Jobson reviews John Jackson Jr’s book Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem
It is telling that Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem, a monograph that so blatantly defies ethnographic convention, opens on an airplane en route to the Holy Land. As John Jackson later details, the classical anthropological trope of the “arrival scene” is an authenticating gesture, but one that finds little purchase […]
Petal Samuel reviews Tsitsi Jaji’ s book Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity
Tsitsi Jaji’s elegant study opens with an anecdote at once personal and emblematic: her interlinked memories of celebrations of Zimbabwe’s independence and the broadcasting of Bob Marley’s “Buffalo Soldier” on the radio. By examining such instances of black diasporic music’s circulation in continental Africa, Africa in Stereo demonstrates the role of music as a site […]
Kaneesha Parsad reviews Salamishah Tillet’s book Sites of Slavery
Salamishah Tillet’s Sites of Slavery examines the ways in which post-Civil Rights African American writers and artists return “to the site of slavery” (Tillet 2) in order to grapple with the ongoing exclusion of African Americans from full citizenship and to pose racial futures. Tillet analyzes diverse texts, ranging from legal documents to plays and films. All share what […]
Documentary Film by Kalyne Coleman & Mulu Habtemariam
Students Kalyne Coleman and Mulu Habtemariam’s documentary called Africana at Upenn can be seen here.
Interview with Maya Angelou by Stephanie Renee
“Angelou: I’m going to give you something which is going to delight your heart as long as you live. There’s a statement, “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto” which is, “I am a human being. Nothing human can be alien to me.” This statement was made by Terance. When you look in your […]
The Soles of Black Folk: Blackness and the Lived Experience of Relation by Jonathan Howard
“In consideration of this after-life especially, we will consider how the experience of passage, and the black experience to which it gave rise, point us towards a more just way of thinking the human not in terms of isolation, but in terms of relation and the imperative to loose ourselves (that is, to shed the Western project of the self while […]