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THE TOOLS BELONGING TO what Audre Lorde called “the white fathers” are master frameworks that continue to shape the world we live in. But those same tools are always being picked up by others, by people who have stories to tell that their masters never suspected and audiences the masters don’t know…

Toni Morrison’s apothegm that “the function of freedom is to free someone else”?

The calling of Matthew is also known as his “vocation,” a word that reminds us here of the original etymological significance of a sacred interpellation, literally a calling from the divine.

Only when we have raked the image over in this way can we allow ourselves to focus on the most obvious feature, one of undeniable interest: the presence of the slave in his own work. For Juan de Pareja (in a move from the master’s repertoire familiar in figures as distant as Giotto and as recent as…

Suppose I were to read Juan de Pareja’s Saint Matthew as carefully as Foucault does Velázquez’s Las Meninas. What can I say? Where will my discourse fit, or fail to fit? Foucault recognizes that a tour de force requires its analogue in writing, and dutifully obliges. What would be my mirroring gest…