Category Archives: news
At Last! #Daredevil In #SheHulk
The Official Trailer Of Marvel Studios’ “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”
42-Word Review of “The Woman King”
If only this film wanted to be free. But as a Hollywood product, the pitch meeting was clear: Sarafina! + Soap Opera=Black Panther 1.5. Viola Davis will get at least one Oscar nomination for this film that she produced with the best intentions.
Book Micro-Review: Alone, Together
Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik.
Columbia University Press, 464 pp., $32.
In the first of an apparent two-volume work, James demystifies the iconoclastic McKay by immersing him in the colorism, colonialism and capitalism of his native Jamaica. Because his upbringing is so intellectually, culturally and personally fierce, to be fully awake is a choice that would have been difficult for him not to make, even though many around him actively preferred the blissfulness of social slumber. A wide-eyed search for the perfect space leads to intellectual daydreams of a far-away land filled with hammers and sickles, items that would become the ideological tools of many, many 20th-century Caribbean, African and Black radicals. The origin story of a poet who, regardless of the racial and classist fires all around him on both sides of the Atlantic, refused to stay in an inglorious spot.
Spider-Man Turns 60
#JaredBall And I Discuss The Life And Legacy Of Lerone Bennett Jr. w/ Bennett Biographer E. James West
Hands-down, one of my favorite BPM discussions.
26-Word Review Of Amazon’s “Thirteen Lives”
Director Ron Howard excels at this kind of dramatic story about brave-but-not-reckless leadership. He strains to prevent a White Savior narrative, and I think he succeeds.
Book Mini-Review: The Glossy Raised Fist
Our Kind of Historian: The Work and Activism of Lerone Bennett, Jr.
Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 328 pp., $27.95.
West uses his mastery of the histories of Black Chicago and Ebony/Jet well here, significantly building on and adding to his previous work on the topic. An author explains an author in a wonderful intellectual history that sticks to very exciting facts: Lerone Bennett rises in a rising time, gaining knowledge and experience and pointing them toward what he would call in print the Black Revolution. He transforms himself from journalist to historian, from moderate, Kappa Morehouse Man to Pan-Africanist revolutionary. Absolutely necessary for those who want to understand 20th-century Black press history and, perhaps more importantly, how one “Black-famous” author’s Black history texts–all the outgrowth of one national Black magazine, a 20th-century legend once on every Black American coffee table–were significant weapons in the Black struggle before African-Americans had full access to local and national broadcasting and now international streaming.
Drums in the Global Village 