In When Home Is a Photograph, Leigh Raiford asks how Black people use photography to make home in the world. Raiford focuses on a selection of Black American activists and artists, including Marcus Garvey, James Van Der Zee, Eslanda Goode Robeson, and Kathleen Neal Cleaver to explore the complex relationship between racialized subjects and the medium of photography. When Home Is a Photograph shows how these figures did not merely utilize photography to emplace themselves in the world—they demonstrated how the use of photography is itself a way to mediate one’s relationship to the world. Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and African and African American Studies at Harvard University writes, “It is impossible to read Leigh Raiford’s tour de force and ever think of world-making without the image ever again. When Home Is a Photograph is not just a masterpiece for the history of photography, black studies, and the humanities, it is a landmark necessary to understand the extraordinary act now seen as an everyday encounter—how photography allows us to craft a home in the world.”
The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.
We were sorry to learn of the death of Colombian painter Beatriz González on January 9, 2026, at the age of 93. According to Artsy, González was “known for paintings that exposed the traumatic impact of politics on everyday life.” Hyperallergic commented, “Though her iconography, derived from popular culture and mass-reproduced images, is often aesthetically associated with Pop Art, González maintained that this was a misunderstanding of her oeuvre. Her practice was rooted in the specificities of Colombian visual culture, which differed fundamentally from the American and European contexts.” In 2019, we published Ana María Reyes’s book The Politics of Taste: Beatriz González and Cold War Aesthetics, about Beatriz González and her friend and champion, critic Marta Traba. In honor of the artist, we share a short excerpt from the introduction here.
Today González remains one of the most powerful cultural figures in Latin America, continuing to produce as an artist, curator, and art historian. While her artworks have consistently engaged the institutional and discursive framing of culture, as a curator of the art and history collections at the National Museum of Colombia and as a highly influential member of the acquisitions committee for the Banco de la República, the largest cultural organization in the nation, she has become a powerful agent of the institutions that legitimize cultural patrimony. Yet during the early years of her career she staged a sharp critique of those very institutions, the modernizing discourses that served as their aesthetic compass, and the exclusionary social structures they buttressed. Her artistic engagements with lowbrow subject matter and materials, saturated with local, gender, and class references, stood in stark contrast to the demands for artists to produce sophisticated, “exportable” works as evidence of Latin American modernism, best represented by the rise to prominence of geometric abstract, kinetic, and op art, along with new technological media, during the post-World War II period. …
During the 1960s and early 1970s, González’s works helped critics revitalize a discourse of cultural authenticity, as reformulated from the urban marginal or geographic periphery, and not an idealized academically constructed folklore designed to articulate national unity. Precisely because González launched her career by successfully meeting the terms of cultural modernization, when she subsequently challenged and parodied those terms in explicit ways, she did so from a consecrated position. Therefore, critics could not easily dismiss her works and were obliged to react in support of or against them. González’s early exhibitions serve as privileged case studies because they managed to arouse passionate support and irritation, if not fright, from diverse historical actors. These responses demonstrate how people could express their positions on social and historical changes through the arts in ways that may not necessarily have been intelligible to themselves or socially permissible through other avenues. The varied responses to González’s aesthetic provocations on the battlefield of cultural and political realignments during the Cold War era demonstrate that her artworks challenged and aggravated many different cultural agents, including Colombian conservatives who were trying to preserve traditional patrimonial hegemony; progressive elites who enlisted culture in forging a modern nation; and European cultural agents who were competing with the United States for influence over the global South, among others. González’s artistic interventions with taste engaged with institutional categories of legitimate culture that attempted to fix and stabilize social distinctions; she parodied trends in the growing international art circuits in order to resist them.
Ana María Reyes is Director of the Center for Latin American Studies and Associate Professor of Latin American Art and Architecture at Boston University. You can read the rest of the introduction to The Politics of Taste on our website and you can purchase the book for 30% off with coupon F19TASTE.
Today we share a guest post by Executive Editor Courtney Berger, about touring the new Metropolitan Museum of Art show Superfine.
2006. I’m a new-ish acquisitions editor, and I receive a proposal from an up-and-coming scholar, Monica Miller, for a book on the cultural and literary history of the Black dandy. I knew straight away that this was a story that needed to be told—and I wasn’t alone. The manuscript received glowing peer reviews, and Monica did the hard work of revising and polishing the manuscript.
Courtney Berger and Monica Miller at the Superfine exhibit.
Jump to May 2024. I receive an email from Monica with top secret news. She’s guest curating an exhibit at the Met Costume Institute. It’s based on her book. Oh, and it’ll be tied to the 2025 Met Gala. This is huge! It’ll be a new life for the book, a public platform for Monica’s research, and an opportunity to shine a light on the cultural and political importance of Black fashion and expressive culture. Still, I had no idea how big it would be.
May 2025. A few weeks after the Gala, a friend and I meet Monica outside the Met before the museum opens. We’re some of the lucky few who get to enter early, and we head down to the exhibit. I’m feeling a bit choked up when I see the exhibit shop with copies of Slaves to Fashion piled up next to the exhibit catalog. I take a photo of Monica at the entrance, and she says that she’s getting used to having her picture taken. There has been so much publicity around the gala and the exhibit. So many events and interviews. Monica seems to be taking it all in stride.
Monica starts the tour. It’s a new ‘script’ that she’s trying out for the first time. She’s being called upon to give regular tours of the exhibit, especially to museum donors, celebrities, and other VIPs. It’s not often that an academic book editor gets to be a VIP, but I’m not complaining.
Superfine, Monica explains, is the book come to life in a different form. Where Slaves to Fashion was rooted in literary history, Superfine takes material form—from the livery outfits that Black men wore in the 18th and 19th centuries (older styles that distinguished them from the wealthy families they served) to contemporary fashion designs. She explains the decision making that went into the exhibit—the themes, the origins of the mannequins, the distribution of historical outfits and high fashion, and the long debates over lighting. The exhibit was created from whole cloth (pun intended). Much of what’s on display was acquired or borrowed just for this exhibit, and through it, we can see the power that fashion has as both a mode of self-expression and a mode of resistance to the experiences and legacies of enslavement and racism.
For the Black dandy, Monica explains, style—and the careful attention to crafting how one appears to the world—can be a way to command respect in a world that is often reluctant to give it. It is also a means of self-protection. All of this is on full display in the exhibit. We see it in André Leon Talley’s majestic military-inspired cape, in the figures of Ellen and William Craft, who escaped slavery by disguising themselves as a white man (Ellen) and his servant (William), and in Frederick Douglass’s iconic suit and glasses. The Black dandy’s style might be deliberate and self-conscious, but it can also be irreverent and gender-bending, and it’s a delight to see Prince’s flounced shirt, Grace Jones’s tux, and an array of conventionally ‘feminine’ fabrics and colors. Frills, flowers, and sequins abound.
Frederick Douglass’s coatGrace Jones’s tuxedoAndre Leon Talley’s military cape
As the exhibit starts to fill up with museum goers, Monica is getting recognized. We’ve got some folks surreptitiously following us, eager to hear her insights. As we reach the end of the exhibit, people start to come up and ask her questions. Someone brings a copy of Slaves to Fashion and asks her to sign it. Folks come up to tell Monica how much the exhibit means to them, how much it matters to have Black fashion and culture in the spotlight, how important it is to be seen.
As I took a second, solo stroll through the tour, I saw how many people had dressed up for the exhibit, strutting their own style, reminding us that Black dandyism is still very much alive and well. At this moment, when scholars and scholarship are under attack, this exhibit feels vital, necessary, and perilous. And I’m grateful for the reminder of how scholarship can wend its way, often unexpectedly, into a broader public and shape how we know and think about the world. Thank you, Monica and to all the people who made this exhibit happen.
You can get a virtual tour of Superfine: Tailoring Black Style on the Met’s website. The exhibit is open through October 26. You can purchase Slaves to Fashion on our website for 30% off with coupon SAVE30, or you can buy it at the museum gift shop, or wherever books are sold.
The new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, opens Saturday, May 10. The exhibition is inspired by Monica L. Miller’s 2009 book Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, and Miller is the guest curator of the show. The exhibition features over 200 items from the eighteenth-century to the present, including garments, paintings, photographs, and more from artists such as Torkwase Dyson, Tanda Francis, André Grenard Matswa, and Tyler Mitchell.
The press preview of the exhibition is being held today, followed tonight by the annual Met Gala with the theme “Tailored for You,” inspired by the exhibition’s focus on menswear and dandyism.
In an interview last month with the New York Times, Monica Miller said, “Dandyism is a practice that’s not just about clothing, dress, accessories. It’s often about the strategic use of those things in particular political moments, around particular cultural nodes.” Miller told The Guardian that the exhibition is especially important now because dandyism is “a sartorial style that asks questions about identity, representation, mobility—race, class, gender, sexuality and power. . . . It’s about understanding that the present moment is always informed by both history and our aspirations.”
Slaves to Fashion, a pioneering cultural history of the black dandy, from his emergence in Enlightenment England to his contemporary incarnations in the cosmopolitan art worlds of London and New York, is available at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s bookstore, on our own website, and wherever books are sold. Since the announcement of the exhibition last fall, the book has stayed on our bestseller list, and we hope many more readers will see the exhibition and want to delve more deeply into the history behind it. The exhibition is open through October 26, 2025.
Abstract A rash of fire-centered artistic practices—whether featuring live flames and smoke or charred wood and ash—were among the most sensational phenomena sponsored by institutions of contemporary art in Japan in the 1980s. This “fire art” flourished in an affluent period for Japan that was frequently termed the economic bubble due to skyrocketing real-estate prices which proved unsustainable when the bubble burst in the early 1990s. This economy also spurred sharp increases in energy consumption and the production of greenhouse gases leading to global warming. The Tokyo-centered art world was interlaced with transnational currents, and artists visiting from overseas helped satiate its appetite for artistic flames. The five Japanese and non-Japanese artists studied in this article had very different reasons for igniting fires, and the expressive sensibilities of their burnings ranged from the grim specter of an incinerated sarcophagus to the dazzling mountaintop explosion of gunpowder. Nonetheless, collectively their works may be assessed as a unique genre of fire art that was both critical and symptomatic of the promethean Japanese contributions to the Great Acceleration.
Since its establishment in 1945, Archives of Asian Art has been devoted to publishing new scholarship on the art and architecture of South, Southeast, Central, and East Asia. Articles discuss premodern and contemporary visual arts, archaeology, architecture, and the history of collecting. To maintain a balanced representation of regions and types of art and to present a variety of scholarly perspectives, the editors encourage submissions in all areas of study related to Asian art and architecture. Every issue is fully illustrated (with color plates in the online version), and each fall issue includes an illustrated compendium of recent acquisitions of Asian art by leading museums and collections. Archives of Asian Art is a publication of Asia Society.
The Weekly Read is a feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.
Are winter blues getting you down? Cheer yourself up with one of the great new titles we have coming out in February!
In Under Pressure, Max Brzezinski tells the story of David Bowie and Queen’s 1981 hit song “Under Pressure” and outline the political, cultural, and socioeconomic conditions from which it emerged.
Hyaesin Yoon examines the entanglements of humans, animals, and technologies across South Korea and the United States at the turn of this century in Prosthetic Memories, outlining alternate modes of memory and connection that can enact feminist and decolonial politics.
Scholar and musician Jessie Cox foregrounds the experience of Black Swiss through sound and music, showing how work by Black Swiss musicians opens up new ways of hearing and exploring the radical potential of Black thought in Sounds of Black Switzerland.
In Ne me quitte pas, Maya Angela Smith follows the long and varied journey of Jacques Brel’s classic song “Ne me quitte pas,” showing how it gains shifting artistic cultural significance as it travels across languages, geographies, genres, and generations.
Speculative Light, edited by Amy J. Elias, brings together scholars, critics, and artists who analyze the stylistic and historical import of James Baldwin’s and Beauford Delaney’s works, showing how their lifelong friendship fundamentally shaped their ideas about art and life.
Examining the Palestinian refugee camp as a political object, The Time beneath the Concrete by Nasser Abourahme argues that settler colonialism is always as much a conquest of time as it is a conquest of land; it is everywhere a fraught struggle over time.
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Arlene Dávila and Yasmin Ramirez are the co-editors of Nuyorican and Diasporican Visual Art: A Critical Anthology, a new collection that provides a critical survey of Puerto Rican art production in the United States from the 1960s to the present. If you’re in New York City, you can view an exhibition associated with the book at New York University (January 31-May 2, 2025). In this post, they share five exhibitions, archives, and texts that have influenced their work and which will enhance readers’ understanding of Nuyorican art. You can save 30% on the book with coupon E25NYRCN.
The Museum of the Old Colony exhibit at James Madison University, 2022
2024 will be remembered as a breakthrough year for Diasporican artists. To begin with, Pablo Delano’s multimedia installation, The Museum of the Old Colony, was critically acclaimed at the 2024 Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere. Staged to resemble an ethnographic exhibition, Delano’s archivally-based display examined enduring colonial structures in Puerto Rico after the U.S. took possession of the island from Spain in 1898. The trove of rarely seen documentary photographs and films on view were fascinating in themselves. But, what made the exhibition so visually alluring, were the surreal, politically provocative curio cabinets and faux period pieces that Delano placed around the room that threw into question the historical veracity of museum displays. “The Museum of the Old Colony is at once sardonically funny and painfully embarrassing,” wrote Daniel Cassady, “a sort of looking glass through which people can see how a century of misconceptions of an entire culture have influenced perceptions of the island.”
Stateside, works by Disasporican/Latinx artists have been increasingly on view in the permanent collection galleries of major museums like the Smithsonian American History Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Portrait Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum—to name a few. Our current favorite is Shifting Landscapes, a beautifully installed new acquisitions show at the Whitney Museum of Art.
Art on display at the Shifting Landscapes exhibition, Whitney Museum of Art
In a section titled New York Cityscapes Jean-Michel Basquiat’s rough-hewn untitled painting of an air plane circling over the city —airplanes being a symbol Basquiat used at that time to reference his diasporic identities as a Black/Haitian/Puerto Rican—serves a focal point to re-examine the intersectionalities among practitioners of street based art, poetry, and documentary photography. In addition to well-known figures in New York’s 1980s downtown art scene like Basquiat, Tseng Kwong Chi, and Keith Haring, the curators displayed a small, well considered roster of artists associated with The Nuyorican Art Movement: Hiram Maristany, Miguel Luciano, Pedro Pietri, Diane Burns, Sophie Rivera, Rigoberto Torres and Martin Wong. The inclusion of these multi-disciplinary artists based in marginalized areas like East Harlem, Loisaida and the South Bronx provided a much-needed revision of the city’s cultural landscape in the late 20th century.
We almost created an artist index of Diasporican artists to accompany the book—until we realized we didn’t have to! Our friends at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies already have Diasporican Art in Motion, which serves this purpose—and so much more!
The DAM initiative is a digital archive and community mapping project documenting the impact of Puerto Rican migration on visual culture and community-building through profiles of contemporary diasporic Puerto Rican artists. Highlighting a century of socio-political movements and institution-building, it celebrates the pivotal role of Puerto Rican artists in shaping cultural identity. Even more excitingly, the archive is enriched by voluntary submissions from artists, ensuring it is diverse and representative across regions, genres, generations, and more.
For those of us who have followed Centro’s evolution, this initiative is a welcome development, marking the institution’s renewed commitment to the arts and humanities under its first Black, U.S.-born Puerto Rican female director, Yiomaira Figueroa. Her leadership has centered decolonial perspectives in Centro’s programming and placed a greater emphasis on the arts.
We highly recommend this archive to anyone interested in exploring the range and scope of contemporary Diasporican artists. Curators and scholars, in particular, should consult its contents to ensure the inclusion of Nuyorican and Diasporican artists in exhibitions, archival projects, or research initiatives.
TheSouth Bronx Family Album documents the history of one of the most culturally significant, yet most misrepresented boroughs in the history of Nuyorican life through the photographs of progressive photojournalist Ricky Flores. The 420-page monograph features over 450 images that document life in the Longwood and Hunts Point sections of the South Bronx during the “fire years” from 1979 through the 1980s.
Part of “Seis del Sur” collective of photographers born and bred in the Bronx, that also included Angel Franco, Joe Conzo, Francisco Molina Reyes II, Edwin Pagán, and David Gonzalez, Flores like his colleagues have been using the camera as a tool to confront misrepresentation, capturing images that reclaim truth and challenge distorted narratives of the Bronx. This beautiful volume captures these images—adding significance to a life of photographic activism. The book is graced by an essay by artist/journalist David Gonzalez. The book is additionally significant because it echoes and is in direct conversation with the growing photographic projects that are increasingly taking place in the digital realm such as Nuevayorkinos, nuyoricanmag, nuyoricosocialclub, and Documentingthenameplate. Sourced from community voluntary contributions, they constitute living archives that confront the erasure of Nuyorican, Diasporican life in dominant archives.
One of the key takeaways from our book is the innate interdisciplinarity of Nuyorican art—rooted in poetry, spoken word, performance, and, certainly, music. Regarding music, this is an area where, unfortunately, we did not find contributors. However, we look forward to future research, and this is where this remarkable book comes in.
The product of over a decade of research and analysis by a brilliant cultural studies scholar, it not only traces the cultural history of salsa from the establishment of Fania Records in 1964 but also provides analytic tools to theorize the commodification of Nuyorican culture. It delves into the working-class, anti-racist, and decolonial imaginaries of Nuyorican culture, offering insights that will help scholars across disciplines analyze other aspects of Nuyorican creativity—not only in music but in the visual arts as well. You can save 30% on Made in NuYoRico with coupon E24NGRON.
Start off the new year with some new books! Here are our great new titles coming out this January.
Kevin Adonis Browne blends literary, visual, and material forms to present a narrative of Caribbean Blackness in A Sense of Arrival.
Nuyorican and Diasporican Visual Art, edited by Arlene Dávila and Yasmin Ramirez, provides a critical survey of Puerto Rican art production in the United States from the 1960s to the present.
In The Second Battle for Africa, Erik S. McDuffie establishes the importance of the US Midwest to global Black history and radicalism, tracing the influence of Garveyism and its legacies from the 1920s onward.
Feminism and the Cinema of Experience by Lori Jo Marso examines a diverse group of feminist film and cinema to show how filmmakers scramble our senses to open up space for encountering and examining the political conditions of patriarchy, racism, and existential anxiety.
In Carnalities, Mariana Ortega presents a phenomenological study of aesthetics grounded in the work of Latinx artists, theorizing that photography is an affective medium crucial for processes of self-formation, resistance, and mourning in Latinx life.
Giorgio Biancorosso’s Remixing Wong Kar-wai examines how filmmaker Wong Kar-wai’s use of pre-existing music to create the soundtracks for his films constitutes a practice of musical remixing that challenges conventional notions of musical composition.
In Poetics of Repair, Katarzyna Pieprzak examines how contemporary visual, literary, and performance art of the Maghreb has the potential to change the terms, histories, and imagined futures of mass housing in North Africa.
Mario Blaser proposes a new lens for combatting the momentous challenges the world currently faces in For Emplacement, arguing that solutions to major crises should be based in the specificities of the places they emerge from rather than a single approach that only exacerbates the problem.
Momentum, edited by Inés Katzenstein, María del Carmen Carrión, and Madeline Murphy Turner, is a guide to understanding the relationships between art and ecology, focusing on the unique contributions of Latin America, presented through the perspectives of artists, art historians, curators, and intellectuals.
In How We Make Each Other, Perry Zurn draws on archival work and oral histories at the Five Colleges in Massachusetts to outline how trans students, faculty, and staff make and live their lives at the edges of higher education.
Jordache A. Ellapen’s Indenture Aesthetics examines the visual and performance art practices of feminist, queer, femme, and gender nonconforming Afro-Indian and South African black artists to understand the paradoxes of freedom in contemporary South Africa.
In Slavery and the Invention of Dutch Art, Caroline Fowler examines the fundamental role of the transatlantic slave trade in the production and evolution of seventeenth-century Dutch art.
Atiya Husain reconceptualizes the relationship with Islam in the United States in No God but Man, by theorizing race as an epistemology using the FBI’s post-9/11 Most Wanted Terrorist list and its posters as its starting point.
In Doom Patterns, Maia Gil’Adí takes up Latinx and Latinx-adjacent speculative fiction as a site for theorizing Latinx identity across national and ethnic borders as it is informed by historical trauma.
Anthropologist and dancer Maya J. Berry examines the popular Black working-class dance rumba in Defending Rumba in Havana,as a way of knowing to account for the embodied spiritual dimensions of Black political imagination in contemporary Cuba.
Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World brings together five artists, thinkers, and writers from different geographies and disciplines—Phoebe Boswell, Saidiya Hartman, Janaína Oliveira, Joseph M. Pierce, Cristina Rivera Garza—who propose new ways of being, illuminating our path toward a beautiful world.
In Emergent Genders, Michelle H. S. Ho traces the genders manifesting alongside Japanese popular culture in Akihabara, a renowned area in Tokyo for the fandom and consumption of anime, manga, and games.
Gyanendra Pandey explores the complex and varied ways in which men in colonial and postcolonial India navigate their domestic lives across stratified castes and classes in Men at Home
Never miss a new book! Sign up for our e-mail newsletters, and get notifications of new titles in your preferred disciplines as well as discounts and other news.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced today that the Costume Institute’s spring 2025 exhibition will present a cultural and historical examination of the Black dandy, from the figure’s emergence in Enlightenment Europe during the 18th century to today’s incarnations in cities around the world. Entitled Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, the exhibition is inspired by Monica L. Miller’s 2009 book Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity. Miller, Professor of Africana Studies at Barnard University, will serve as guest curator for the exhibition. She will be the first Black curator of a Costume Institute exhibition.
Superfine is also the Met’s first fashion exhibition to focus solely on the work of designers of color, as well as the first in more than two decades to focus explicitly on men’s wear. Miller told the Washington Post, “It’s a big moment for the country. For acknowledging where we are and where we want to be. … We’re at a crossroads as we think through what it means for all of us to be here together. I’m happy that we can talk about complicated history, about slavery, and revolution.” She told the New York Times that the show is “an opportunity for everyone on the curatorial team to really understand how many Black designers, historically and contemporarily, are out there.”
Slaves to Fashion is a pioneering cultural history of the black dandy, from his emergence in Enlightenment England to his contemporary incarnations in the cosmopolitan art worlds of London and New York. Interpreting performances and representations of black dandyism in particular cultural settings and literary and visual texts, Monica L. Miller emphasizes the importance of sartorial style to black identity formation in the Atlantic diaspora. It was widely praised when it was published by general interest and scholarly publications alike. The beautiful cover image is a detail from “Yellow Book” by Iké Udé from Yellow Book and Savoy Covers: Make Life Beautiful!An informal introduction to the Dandy in Photography, 2003. It was used courtesy of Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, England, and Stux Gallery, New York.
The annual Met Gala, held the first Monday in May, will also highlight the Superfine theme of Black dandyism and will be co-chaired by Colman Domingo, Lewis Hamilton, A$AP Rocky, Pharrell Williams, and Anna Wintour, along with honorary co-chair LeBron James. Perhaps they’d like to carry copies of Slaves to Fashion down the red carpet?
Read this article for free through October 15, 2024.
Abstract The Kenyan-born, US-based artist Wangechi Mutu is fascinated by the human body and its nonhuman possibilities. In Mutu’s collaged works, human forms are repeatedly ripped apart and reassembled within fantasy landscapes that speak of decomposition and regrowth. This article analyzes the significance of trees to Mutu’s project of dismantling the human. Drawing from critical plant studies, forest ecology, cultural anthropology, and the mycological turn, it argues that Mutu’s artworks forcefully reclaim the nonhuman as a site of Black expressive culture. These artworks blur ontological distinctions between the human and the arboreal through xyloid sexuality, a weirding of human eroticism and reproduction that pushes desire, procreation, and sexual fulfillment beyond species boundaries. Mutu’s use of xyloid sexuality can be understood as a radical utopian gesture to supplant the violence of the colonial gaze with a powerfully more-than-human Black gaze.
Moving beyond the boundaries of race, gender, and class, Cultural Politics examines the political ramifications of global cultural productions across artistic and academic disciplines. The journal explores precisely what is cultural about politics and what is political about culture by bringing together text and visual art that offer diverse modes of engagement with theory, cultural production, and politics.
The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.
Duke University Press News 