Articles

New York Review of Books

Grant appears less as a neutral observer than as a nonviolent combatant in his memoir, I'm Black So You Don’t Have to Be

Read More
Guardian Review

Guardian Review

In this article, the Guardian review Colin Grant's sharp and nuanced memoir: I’m Black So You Don’t Have to Be

Read More

Got to keep those good vibraniums

Marvel’s follow-up to the successful Black Panther Wakanda Forever suggests that the Wakandan and Talokan custodians of vibranium, similarly to subjugated native peoples whose resources were exhausted by colonialism, have most to fear from rising tides and temperatures.

Read More

What Sidney Poitier stood for

A new documentary on the exemplary activist and Hollywood star Burdened by the expectations of black people around the world, the Oscar-winning actor embodied grace even under fire

Read More

Eureka Day: No one is a villain

The struggle between vaxxers and anti-vaxxers in a US school Though first staged in 2018, before the onset of the Covid-19 outbreak, this is a play that speaks to the upheaval and the ethical dilemmas, personal and public, that have arisen since 2020. Ostensibly this is a contemporary tragicomic drama about an outbreak of mumps […]

Read More

Nope: A hybrid of horror and alien invasion films

It draws on a catalogue of alien invasion and horror film tropes, but is Nope dope? Jordan Peele has established his signature as a writer/director of smart and knowing horror films such as Get Out and Us that have exposed white Americans’ fear of retribution for the litany of crimes committed against their black compatriots […]

Read More

And Finally: Matters of Life and Death

Humility lessons from the retired neurosurgeon, Henry Marsh The ever candid neurosurgeon reflects on his own mortality, as well as the failings of his profession, in this enthralling third volume of memoirs

Read More

Return of the Glue Gun Revolutionaries

After the lost years of Covid, yes man, Carnival wheel and come again; it’s back! Carnival has too many friends to fail; it gives shape and meaning to too many lives, renewed each year; Carnival has not just proven a vital bridge between Britons, it has come, in some ways, to signify an ideal of […]

Read More

In the Black Fantastic

Timelines, narratives and communities reimagined by artists of the African diaspora Decades before Hollywood’s popular Marvel movie Black Panther, the fabulously outrageous jazz musician Sun Ra set out the stalls for what would come to be called Afrofuturism in Space Is the Place. 

Read More

The Enigma of Nonarrival

Though Roy Heath spent most of his life in Britain, he returned again and again in his fiction to Guyana. Like many of his pioneering generation, he stayed in Britain until his death in 2008; in his fiction, though, Heath returned again and again to Guyana. He hardly wrote about Britain; his focus was always […]

Read More

Wheel and Come Again

“Wheel and come again” is how Ethlyn once described this circular migration, back and forth from the island, from somewhere to elsewhere, to turn around and start all over again.

Read More
John Akomfrah on Stuart Hall

John Akomfrah on Stuart Hall

The artist is revisiting his three-screen film about the legendary thinker and activist, which takes in jazz, Vietnam, and the family trauma that haunted Hall

Read More
A Country Out of Control

A Country Out of Control

In Wole Soyinka’s laceratingly satirical new novel, Nigeria has lost its way and is inured to corruption and violence.

Read More