Title: Boogie Man
Year: 2012
Issue: 108
Cover image: Sound Suit, Nick Cave. Photo by James Prinz, Chicago. Courtesy of artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
In issue 108, our authors take “the long view from the levee” and survey the muddy flow of African/American history. From the banks of the Mississippi to the jungle roads of Ivory Coast, manmade dams and barricades block access to our homelands. But the past has a way of leaking through: West African aesthetic forms in the work of an American sculptor, old soul food joints in the New Newark, the scars of racism in contemporary Cuban art, and the sweet sound of the Gospel Train replaced by Soul Train, a form of secular testifying that taught us to moonwalk down the line.
Featured Article: “Tense and Tender Ties”:
A Review of Janny Scott’s A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother (2011) #OpenAccess
by Kimberly DaCosta
Psychologically conflicted, confused, traitorous, tragic, and deracinated: the public vocabulary used to describe multiracial people has hardly changed since the days when state laws banned marriage between black and white. Zeroing in on interracial kinship, DaCosta close reads Janny Scott’s biography of Barack Obama’s mother.
Contributors: Reniqua Allen, María Elena Álvarez, Pedro Álvarez, Manuel Arenas, Belkis Ayón, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Nick Cave, Kimberly DaCosta, Alejandro de la Fuente, Juan Roberto Diago, Alexis Esquivel, Kip Fulbeck, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Émile Hunt, Mara Jebsen, Sargent Johnson, Armando Mariño, Siddhartha Mitter, Ana Patricia Palacios, René Peña, Douglas Pérez, Marta María Pérez Bravo, Laurence Ralph, Elio Rodríguez Valdés, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Hank Willis Thomas, Shirley Thompson, José A. Toirac, ChristianTundula.