Book Review: The Victims of Democracy: Malcolm X and the Black Revolution by Eugene Victor Wolfenstein
The Victims of Democracy: Malcolm X and the Black Revolution (2021) is a new rendition of Eugene Victor Wolfenstein’s 1981 The Victims of Democracy. It constitutes a biographical study of Malcolm X’s life, heavily drawing from the model that Alex Haley utilised in his 1965 The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Wolfenstein is in conversation with the fields of psychoanalysis, Marxism and critical race theory. He draws on Malcolm X’s published speeches and a number of different historical materials to support his main arguments.
Book Review: Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights by Samantha Pinto
In Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights, Samantha Pinto thinks about the ways in which black women come into political view by interrogating the premises of the female celebrity genre. She carefully considers what it means to be a political figure and situates the discourse of vulnerability at the centre of politics. Infamous Bodies consists of five chapters, each of which deals with a celebrity of the eighteenth or nineteenth century. Pinto thinks through five case studies, the private and public lives of Phillis Wheatley, Sally Hemings, Sarah Baartman, Mary Seacole, and Sarah Forbes Bonetta, and the ways in which they reverberate across different political moments and are taken up again in the following centuries.
Panel Review: ‘Lineages of Black Activism’, BAAS Annual Conference 2021 (Online)
Organized by the Digital British Association for American Studies, the 66th American Studies conference invited scholars to critically engage with American literature, history, culture and politics in North America, the United States and the Americas more broadly. All sessions took place remotely through a digital events platform, Zoom. In the context of the sixtieth anniversary of the Freedom Rides, an iconic and much-celebrated landmark of civil rights protests Dr. Hannah Jeffery, Dr. Astrid Haas and Dr. John Kirk explored counter-narratives to the official records of Black activism. More specifically, Dr. Jeffery (University of Edinburgh) used a series of murals as a narrative thread through her discussion of Black activism. She analyzed the significance of different murals which first appeared during the 1960s and subsequently turned into subversive cultural forms. More specifically, she focused on The Wall of Truth (1969) and the muralist Eugene Eda Wade that turned into sites of communal […]