Too often schools are tasked not simply with caring for their students but with repairing an entire social order. Schools can do so much we do not ask of them, like developing solidarity, fostering political responsibility, and ensuring a love of learning for its own sake. Yet the one thing we are most insistent they accomplish, the ensuring of “equal opportunity,” is something even the best school is simply not capable of achieving. – Hedgehog Review
Tag: 08.27.20
Hobby Lobby/Museum Of The Bible Deal To Return Looted Antiquities Is Unfair To Iraq
“Exploitative and degrading” is how one Iraqi newspaper described the current draft Memorandum of Understanding between the Iraqi government and the Museum of the Bible along with the family-owned chain store that funds it. “The Daily Beast has consulted with experts in Iraqi archaeology, international law, and art crime about this document. Here are some of the problems they identified with it.” – The Daily Beast
A New Shakespearean Theatre Recreation In Connecticut?
The theater in Stratford, Connecticut, modeled on Shakespeare’s Globe theater in London, burned down in January 2019 as the result of arson. The theater building had not hosted an indoor performance in decades, though the surrounding lawn has continued to be sacred ground for Shakespeare fans, with performances by a summertime Shakespeare Academy and local outdoor Shakespeare troupes as well as community festivals. – Hartford Courant
The Racial Anxiety Behind Music Reaction Videos
Sure, they’re joyful, but … “the viral popularity of this display of intergenerational sympathy — Black 20-somethings professing love for a white boomer’s pop-rock chestnut — may also tell us something else about the ambient tensions and neuroses that are, you might say, in the air.” – The New York Times
Need Some Reading Direction?
Here the map of Black-owned bookstores in the U.S. And the recent uptick (well, massive increase) in business “is both ‘lucrative’ and ‘bittersweet,'” say some owners. – Oprah Magazine
How To Keep The Memory Of WWII Alive Now?
It’s 2020, so video games, of course. “History games can spark interest in learning more, says Bob Whitaker, a professor of History at Collin College and host of the podcast History Respawned, where historians talk about history-themed video games.” – Time Magazine
The Complexities Of Black Speculative Fiction Can’t All Fit Under Afrofuturism
The term was coined, by a white writer, in 1993. It might have been a good start, but there are issues: “It lacks room to conceive of Blackness outside of the Black American diaspora or a Blackness independent from any relationship to whiteness, erasing the long history of Blackness that existed before the centuries of violent oppression by whiteness — and how that history creates the possibility of imagining the free Black futures.” Hence the terms, coined and popularized by writer Nnedi Okorafor, Africanfuturism and Africanjujuism. – Los Angeles Review of Books
Getting Anti-Black Language Out, While Retaining The Core Ideas And Beauty, In Shakespeare
This may not be easy, and a lot of theatre artists may not want to think about it – but a Google Doc can help. “If there’s an instance where the word ‘slave’ does harm and the word ‘knave’ doesn’t, I think you can change it. I don’t know if that word did harm to Shakespeare’s audiences, but it can to ours. In an instance like that, I believe that making a substitution is actually closer to honoring Shakespeare’s original intention.” – Howlround
Rewriting Irish Dancing’s Weirdly Strict Gender Rulebook
Trans dancers are challenging the conventions. Hayden Moon says it’s not easy: “I’d spent years learning to be high on my toes and not make any noise and never let my heel touch the ground, doing all of these very pretty kicks and leaps and jumps. And then all of a sudden I was getting told by my dance teacher that I wasn’t loud enough.” (And that’s the least of the challenges he’s faced in the Irish dance world in Australia.) – Dance Magazine
Why Do Writers Get So Little For Movie Rights?
How realistic is it for writers to get rich from selling adaptation rights? “It’s just not,” says Joanna Nadin, whose YA novel Joe All Alone was adapted into a Bafta-winning 2018 television series. “It’s unrealistic to think any aspect of writing can make you rich.” – The Guardian