In this interview, on the occasion of the publication of her new book, Rey Chow reflects on the public (as well as environmental and digital) humanities and the current status of Michel Foucault's thought, among other topics.

Iseeyou (2013) is a short film essay by Simon Gush, depicting Johannesburg’s representations of mining. The film deftly questions what is at stake in the visibility and invisibility of labor.

Kara Walker's public installations in New York and New Orleans ask, what can contemporary art do to reckon with its links to racial capitalism?

It is not a coincidence that distant reading does not deal well with gender, sexuality, or race. But if we re-commit ourselves to the project of exposing and interrogating power, we arrive potentially at a form of distant reading that is much more inclusive.

How the autism spectrum in the popular imagination overlaps with and feeds a particular feature of European-American whiteness: the bias toward independence and self-sufficiency. 

There has been a noticeable doubling down on critique in African American literary studies. But postcritique is thriving in less-recognized work in the field: namely, scholarship that is oriented around empirical analysis of textual objects and that is animated by theoretical and practical reflection on archival research.

The mainstream popularity of black culture today does not erase centuries of racial violence and oppression.

Drilling beneath recent headlines of violence and terrorism in Nigeria, one finds a country bursting with energy, life, and hospitality.

Advance publicity for Game Change, the new book by John Heileman and Mark Halperin about the 2008 presidential race, brought with it a furor about some reportedly "outrageous" racial remarks Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid apparently made about then-presidential candidate Barack Obama. 

A whole new generation of minority writers has come to prominence whose work signals a radical turn to a "postrace" era in American literature.