Commemorating 60 Years of Brown v. Board of Education - A Symposium (SC): Race and Representation in Media and Culture

(available in print)

In Sites of Slavery, Salamishah Tillet examines how contemporary African American artists and intellectuals turn to the subject of slavery in order to understand and challenge the ongoing exclusion of African Americans from the founding narratives of the United States. She explains how they reconstruct "sites of slavery"--contested figures, events, memories, locations, and experiences related to chattel slavery; by claiming and recasting these sites of slavery, contemporary artists and intellectuals provide slaves with an interiority and subjectivity denied them in American history, register the civic estrangement experienced by African Americans in the post-civil rights era, and envision a more fully realized American democracy.

(available in print and online)

Representing the Race tells the story of African American lawyers who, during the era of segregation, confronted a tension between their racial and professional identities. Their untold stories pose the unsettling question: What, ultimately, does it mean to represent a minority group in the give-and-take of American law and politics?