Racist Humor: Exploratory Readings
An introduction to the history and theory of racist humor and the social role it plays in Western societies.
Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt
Centered on the Stein-Toklas household and written from the point of view of their gay Vietnamese cook, Binh, this novel tells a story of converging queer diasporas.
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God: Annotated
Jonathan Edwards’s sermon reflects the complicated religious culture of eighteenth-century America, influenced not just by Calvinism, but Newtonian physics as well.
Grand Illusions
By the time L. Frank Baum introduced the world to Dorothy and the gang, he’d already made his name as a shop window dresser par excellence.
Comparing Editions of David Walker’s Abolitionist Appeal
Digitization allows researchers to trace editorial and authorial changes in archival content. Both are central to the study of this famous abolitionist pamphlet.
“I Have a Dream”: Annotated
Martin Luther King, Jr.'s iconic speech, annotated with relevant scholarship on the literary, political, and religious roots of his words.
Donald Goines, Detroit’s Crime Writer Par Excellence
The writer used hard-boiled fiction as a wide lens to accurately capture the widescreen disparity of Black life in the 1970s.
In Defense of Kitsch
The denigration of kitsch betrays a latent anti-Catholicism, one born from centuries of class and ethnic divisions.
Alondra Nelson: Leave More Genius Work Behind
How do those who have been the objects of scientific study and medical experimentation become the agents or the producers of scientific knowledge?
The Patron Saint of Bookstores
100 years ago, Sylvia Beach, the first publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses, opened the doors to her legendary bookstore, Shakespeare & Co.