Race Archives - Public Seminar

Art & Design

The Gaza Biennale

A global exhibition shaped by Palestinian artists

March 3, 2026 • by Nate Masso

The walls of Recess, a quiet Brooklyn studio space, held more than art this winter—they held testimony. The Gaza Biennale is a global exhibition shaped by Palestinian artists working under a genocidal siege that places creative expression at the forefront of collective witnessing. Presented worldwide across decentralized partner sites, last ...

Colonization

A House in the Middle of the Road

The cannibal colonization of homes and roads during Palestine’s Great Revolt

March 2, 2026 • by Chris Harding

I spent the summer of 2025 in Bayt Lahm (Bethlehem), conducting archival research in the Jacir family’s historic dar, a beautiful two-story home built in the nineteenth century from Jerusalem stone. Taking a break one afternoon, I watched a short film, Mehdi Amel:The Colonial Mode of Production (2024), by the ...

Genocide

Attacks on Women’s Bodies Reveal the Logic of Genocide in Sudan

Sexual violence and the destruction of medical infrastructure are not separate catastrophes

December 2, 2025 • by Ayotunde Giwa

On October 28, 2025, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) overran the Saudi Maternity Hospital in El Fasher. Satellite images show what Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab identified as bodies scattered across the hospital grounds. Videos filmed by RSF fighters themselves show militia walking through ransacked wards, stepping over piles of dead ...

Genocide

Palestinians in Their Own Words, Their Own Genres

A review of Gaza: The Story of a Genocide

November 14, 2025 • by Coleson Smith

With the release of Gaza: The Story of a Genocide (Verso, October 2025), editors Fatima Bhutto and Sonia Faleiro bring us a powerful addition to a lamentable literary genre: the genocide anthology. Comprising more than 20 works of poetry, art, essays, and reportage by 23 contributors—many of them Palestinian—this volume ...

Palestinians in Their Own Words, Their Own Genres

Colonization

Frantz Fanon and Africa’s Postcolonial Predicament

A plea for a blank slate and a new beginning

October 9, 2025 • by Kwach Abonyo

Of all the ways Frantz Fanon has been misinterpreted, none is more persistent or consequential than the misunderstanding of his theory of violence. His reflections, especially as represented in The Wretched of the Earth, have drawn intense debate and condemnation, particularly from liberal and post-Enlightenment humanist circles. Among his most notable ...

Frantz Fanon and Africa’s Postcolonial Predicament

Activism

A Lost Utopia

A review of Göran Rosenberg’s Israel: A Personal History

October 7, 2025 • by Coleson Smith

In a speech delivered to the United States Congress on July 25, 2024, Benjamin Netanyahu issued a sharp retort to protestors against Israel’s genocide in Gaza: They call Israel a colonialist state. Don’t they know that the Land of Israel is where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob prayed, where Isaiah and Jeremiah ...

Activism

Looking Back on the Zapatistas’ Revolutionary Fashion

Liberation movements like the Zapatistas and the Black Panther Party teach us to unite political, artistic, and cultural ideas in how we dress

October 1, 2025 • by Mike Harrington

The so-called “first postmodern revolution,” the Zapatista uprising of 1994, came at a time when the internet was becoming a worldwide phenomenon. And with this Pandora’s box of widely accessible imagery and information newly opened, people were able to witness the uprising in more-or-less real time. Based in Chiapas, the southernmost ...

Looking Back on the Zapatistas’ Revolutionary Fashion

Genocide

The Pulse of Palestinian Identity in New Jersey

Reflections of a genocide survivor

June 24, 2025 • by Anonymous

As a genocide survivor who had relocated to New York from an open-air prison in Gaza in August 2024, I wondered what it would mean to be a Palestinian from the perspective of Palestinian Americans. Was there a space in America that kept them connected with their Palestinian identity? Where was ...

The Pulse of Palestinian Identity in New Jersey

Climate & Ecology

Reimagining Ecological Repair

A review of Laura J. Martin’s Wild by Design

May 26, 2025 • by Mairéad O’Donnell

The Disney Wilderness Preserve in Florida began as a corporate-led initiative to counteract wetland destruction caused by Disney’s expansion in the Orlando area. Launched in the early 1990s, the project aimed to restore nearly 12,000 acres of wetlands and uplands degraded by decades of cattle ranching, fire suppression, and hydrological ...

Colonization

How Israel Freezes Palestinian Salaries

Clearance revenues have got to go

May 14, 2025 • by Lamees Farraj

Israeli occupation of Palestine oppresses the Palestinian people using every possible tool and method—including control over people’s livelihoods. Some of this economic warfare is highly visible: the destruction of economic infrastructure in Gaza, the prevention of Palestinian laborers from accessing the Israeli job market, and the restriction or denial of ...

Latin America & Caribbean

The Working-Class Venezuelans at the Center of Trump’s “Crisis”

Xenophobic rhetoric divides immigrant communities

May 2, 2025 • by Erick Moreno Superlano

Alex was trembling when he entered the café. He had agreed to participate in my research on Venezuelan immigration in New York and we had decided to discuss his story over coffee. But as he walked down the street to meet me, an ICE van had pulled over and parked ...

The Working-Class Venezuelans at the Center of Trump’s “Crisis”

Health care

Standing Up for the Health of Black Americans

Trump’s proposed budget cuts are definitely cuts to Medicaid—and will be felt hardest by Black Americans

April 4, 2025 • by Eric T. Jones

On March 4, Rep. Al Green (D-TX) was censured by his Congressional peers for interrupting President Trump’s joint address to Congress. What was lost in the media coverage of Green’s censure is the content of his comments—he was condemning Trump for projected cuts to Medicaid, which are certain to exacerbate ...