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.
Houston Baker Jr. came up with a pithy chiastic phrase to describe how black artworks and writings negotiated this tension: “the mastery of form and the deformation of mastery.”
We, who were once symbolically remanded to the racial Salon des Refusés and exhibited as animals at the colonial fairs, have stormed the palace of the Occident and crowned ourselves victorious in that gilded place.
itself a bricolage of raw street knowledge and confected “street dreams,”
