Saidiya Hartman Archive

“Is this the truth of our historic encounter?”: Museums in Literature

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Not all representations of museums overtly highlight the way they structurally rely on certain power dynamics, and yet the adherence to a certain normalizing discourse is always there, lurking, even when the explicit intention of the museum is to reconnect with a lost past.

Being An Irish Story

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“As” is a love poem, after all. It’s a sidelong devotion—all wordplay and switchbacks. Its essence is decocted from its original artifacts, lost and now found, a reverse transit of its multiple parasitic meanings. It feels something like being in the archives, in a family, in love.

The Best Poem I Read This Month: Jayy Dodd’s “Black Philosophy #3”

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“Black Philosophy #3,” Dodd’s new poem from the first issue of The Shade Journal, poses a series of “if…then…” questioning statements regarding blackness, black boys, death, dead boys, living boys, pretty boys, prettiness, and a manner of interrelating, interlocking, and uncompromising conditions between those terms.