IMAGINE A FRAME: its powers of inclusion, exclusion, its ability to introduce subjects into our line of sight and force us to imagine-an imaginary mode of vision Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak describes later in this collection as "the ability to think something absent and not mine.
Thomas Sayers Ellis co-founded The Dark Room Collective in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1988 and earned an M.F.A. from Brown University in 1995. His work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Poetry, Grand Street, Tin House, Ploughshares and The Best American Poetry, 1997 and 2001.
IN 1929, ROKEYA SAKHAWAT HOSSAIN, a Bengali feminist, wrote a book called Abarodhbashini, published by the Feminist Press in English translation as "The Secluded Ones." (The more correct translation would be "Prisoner," in the feminine gender.) This is how she opens her book: "We have been imprisoned so long that we are quite used to it.
LONG BEFORE CARIBBEAN WRITERS began to discuss colonial and postcolonial identities in terms of William Shakespeare's The Tempest-way back, in fact, before Shakespeare was born-a black African trumpeter performed regularly in the English court. Treasurer's records mention a "black trumpet," variously identified as John Black or John Blancke, who, beginning in 1507, was paid eight pennies per day.
BODIES ARE MANIPULATED TO PRODUCE MEANING AND PURPOSE. They accumulate meaning by way of attribution, designation, authorization, and naming. But bodies are just as often made to be social and symbolic markers in life. The import of a live body is encountered in the world by way of the dynamic combination of both inscription and self-determined expression.
IN "THE NEW BLACK AESTHETIC," published in Callaloo in 1989, Trey Ellis identifies a rupture between the black aesthetics of previous generations, and the "new" aesthetics of black artists who came of age in a post-integration era. These younger artists, unfettered by concerns over racial authenticity or, more pertinently, black cultural traditions, borrow as easily from white culture as from black, and are therefore what Ellis refers to as "cultural mulattoes.
POOR CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. He spent the fateful year of 1492 bouncing around the islands of the American archipelago, convinced that Japan, or the ruler of China, or the riches of Asia were right around the corner. His only encouragement came from mistranslation of the natives' directions, and from the miseducation he had received from the geography schools of Salamanca, Spain.
Peter L. McLaren, UCLA Professor of education, and Nathalia Jaramillo, Assistant Professor of Cultural Foundations at Purdue University, recently co-authored Pedagogy and Praxis in the Age of Empire: Towards a New Humanism (Sense Publishers, 2007), a collection of essays that investigates corporate global capitalism and its relation to educational and social movements in the United States and abroad.