Though the discussion here was not of our book, A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable’s Malcolm X, it does speak directly to the issue(s) we raise therein. During their exchange at this year’s Left Forum panel on Manning Marable’s reinvention of Malcolm X Amiri Baraka and Bill Fletcher (along with Haki Madhubuti at a panel…
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Lorraine Hansberry once cautioned against an artist seeking to ignore the specific nature of their racial categorization, history and experience. Her point was that to dismiss that particularity with the narrow, anecdotal tale of one’s own success was to damage the potential to interpret the reality of a broader community. To separate the conditions of Black people broadly…
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Mi Say WAR: Hip-Hop vs. The Bourgeois West … and ‘Hip-Hop Studies’? (A Review of Tricia Rose’s The Hip-Hop Wars, For Example) by Greg Thomas “It’s bigger than religion Hip-Hop It’s bigger than my nigga Hip-Hop It’s bigger than the government [Erykah Badu, “The Healer / Hip-Hop” (2008)] And it’s much bigger than academic criticism, for sure. Sylvia…
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