Some of the most recent articles from open access anthropology journals (beta)
By Patrick Sullivan Funk is neither an essence nor a Black metaphysics but rather should be seen as a complex musical and aesthetic form that was created by Black artists to respond to and mediate Black experience at the end of the Great Migrations (19…
By Michelle Ann Stephens I have always been someone who is most comfortable in her head. Whether daydreaming, fantasizing or developing an idea, time spent creatively in my own mind has always come easily. In these strange times, as we all live through…
By Anne Anlin Cheng In Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact and Exoticism in Modern America, a study of early Asian American sociologists who contributed to the birth of the famous Chicago School of Sociology, Henry Yu addresses the paradoxes of and …
By Heather V. Vermeulen October 27, 2019 Dear Hazel, I’ve decided to write you a letter. When I think about being your student, I think first of our conversations—in office hours, over coffee, via email—so this makes sense to me as a form.1 You are not…
By Kathryn A. Mariner Featured Image: Protest at RPD, Rochester NY, May 2020, Copyright Erica Jae. As I was preparing comments for this roundtable toward the end of 2018, I felt a bit like an interloper because I realized I had never—at least in my for…
By Cilas Kemedjio Featured Image: Pool of Freedom, Washington DC, August 2020, Copyright Erica Jae. The late Professor Francis Abiola Irele (1936-2017) delivered an inaugural lecture at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria on November 22, 1982, which trad…
By Matthew Omelsky Featured Image: Protester at the Rochester Public Safety Building, June 2020. Photo by Martin Hawk, part of Pressure Gradient. There’s a place in her 2009 essay, “Becoming Modern Racialized Subjects,” when Hazel Carby’s focus feels v…
By Brianna Theobald Featured Image: Two young Mexican-American protesters at the 2020 Indigenous People’s Day rally at the Seneca town of Canawaugus. Photograph courtesy of Michael Leroy Oberg. In January 2019, the University of Rochester hosted …
By Darren Mueller Featured image: I won’t be quiet so you can be comfortable, Washington DC, August 2020, Copyright Erica Jae. Let our rejoicing riseHigh as the listening skies,Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.—James Weldon Johnson, “Lift E…
by Will Bridges Featured Image: Protestors on the steps of Rochester City Hall, September 7, 2020. Photo by Quajay Donnell. The promise is of “world-wide welcome” for the homeless and those yearning to breathe free. But Trump has no words of welcome fo…
By Hazel V. Carby Featured image: Windrush Stories exhibition at the British Library, 2018. Photo courtesy of Leon van Kemenade. I dressed conservatively; I did not appear to be a disruptive or unruly researcher. I was indistinguishable from the o…
By Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva Featured image: Black Lives Matter, Washington DC, August 2020, Copyright Erica Jae. “If someone I found disappeared without explanation from a subsequent record, I hoped they ran, ran fast and far and re-named themselves s…
By Miranda Mims Featured image: Inscriptions at MLK Park community installation “The Empire Strikes Black,” created by public artist Shawn Dunwoody. Photo by Quajay Donnell. There should be a space for alternative realities, alternative way…
By Joel Burges, Jerome Dent, Alisa V. Prince, Patrick Sullivan, Jeffrey Allen Tucker, with Hazel V. Carby Hazel Carby was the University of Rochester’s 2018/2019 Distinguished Visiting Humanist. Since 2012, the Distinguished Visiting Humanist program h…
Reviewed by Malaika Sutter, University of Bern James Voorhies, Beyond Objecthood: The Exhibition as a Critical Form Since 1968. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2017. 288 pages. In James Voorhies’ first monograph, Beyond Objecthood: The Exhibition as a Critic…
Reviewed by Stella Gatto, Independent Researcher Klara Kemp-Welch, Networking the Bloc: Experimental Art in Eastern Europe 1965–1981. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2019. 480 pages. The theory of “Six Degrees of Separation” (or perhaps more humorously known…
Reviewed by Luke Urbain, University of Wisconsin-Madison Ariella Aïsha Azoulay. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. London: Verso Books, 2019. 656 pages. With the urgency of a manifesto and the volume of a brick, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s recent b…
Reviewed by Anthony Ballas, University of Denver Jessica Horton. Art For an Undivided Earth: The American Indian Movement Generation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. 312 pages. In the shadow and in the wake of settler colonialism, a parallel shape…
At the occasion of the launch of IVC 30 Poetics of Play and the “Breaking Boundaries with Video Games 3” conference held at University of Rochester on April 18-19 2019, we asked VCS alumna Aubrey Anable to share with us her experience of wr…
Reviewed By Jayme Collins Julia Bryan-Wilson. Fray: Art and Textile Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. 326 pages. We are all experts on textiles, Julia Bryan-Wilson compels us to remember in her groundbreaking Fray: Art and Textile P…
Iasmin Omar Ata is a Middle Eastern & Muslim award-winning comics artist, game designer, and illustrator who creates art about coping with illness, understanding identity, dismantling oppressive structures, and Arab-Islamic futurism. Their recent g…
By Oscar Moralde “We do not say that we have learnt, and that anything is made new or beautiful by mere lapses of time; for we regard time itself as destroying rather than producing, for what is counted in time is movement, and movement dislodges…
Written by Grant Bollmer In this essay, I present a history of the graphic adventure genre of video and computer games and its attempts at achieving a kind of cinematic realism through the registration of the body. In reviewing the history of this genr…
By Nicole Kurashige Introduction Though most digital humanities scholars readily agree that game developers need to offer more progressive functions and options to enhance player agency, such recommendations for further research or action often ignore …
By Kaelan Doyle-Myerscough The Last Guardian is a 2016 single-player adventure game that follows the relationship between an unnamed young boy and a giant gryphon-like creature, referred to as Trico, as they navigate the ruins of an ancient, apparently…