America hates old people. Aging out of relevance, health, and a community of peers as they die off is no fun even if one has wealth or...

Before there was the record producer John Hammond (not to be confused with the white blues musician John P. Hammond), before there was...

And when I say "clueless," I'm talking specifically about African American culture. I grew up in Pasadena during the 50s and 60s. There...

Of course he wasn't "my poet." He was my friend who was also a poet. I'd had other friends who wrote poetry and who had even published...

Poetry and lynching -- not an obvious coupling. Poetry, of course, has never been only the hearts-and-flowers rhymes we now associate...

At the age of 30, my mother's first cousin, Marion Michelle, met and fell in love with the famous left-wing Dutch documentary filmmaker...

Around 1990, I had recently returned to America from a year of dissertation research on East Africa's most famous playwright whose plays...

This is a gruesome way to kick off 2023, but because of our commitment to centenaries, we must acknowledge that 1923 began on New Year’s...

During December of 1977, I found myself intensely nostalgic for the remembered rituals and celebrations of the American Christmases I had...

Being 17, the latest offering of the acclaimed French auteur, André Téchiné, at 73 is a visually gorgeous film. It tells of a lust/hate...

This coming Saturday, HBO will air a biopic of Bessie Smith, one of the highest paid Black singers of the 1920s and a foundational voice...

In 2004 a first-time filmmaker, Rodney Evans, edited and produced a narrative film, Brother to Brother , that encompassed an extended and...

One of the most unsettling features of “Kuchu” are interviews with Giles Muhame, the smirking 22 year-old editor of  Uganda’s Rolling...

“Check It” is the name of a movie, but it was first the name of a street gang of gay and trans kids of color in Washington, DC. After...

Dear White People (2014) is one of the smartest and funniest satires on screwed-up American Black/white relations ever. I can't think of...

We were talking about Christmas, about the Christmas tree, and we never called it a Chanukah bush.  I must have heard that somewhere...

Modern African nations are largely creations of Western imperialism. Once the colonial powers and their administrative authority...

The Green Book, a narrative feature about a lovable, casually racist Italian American lug driving the effete, supremely talented,...

The 2017 edition of Frameline, the San Francisco LGBT film festival, screened a gorgeously restored copy of Issac Julien’s Black queer...

August Wilson's early masterpiece " Ma Rainey's Black Bottom " debuted on Broadway in 1984. The play broke revolutionary ground by making...