Unfair and Lovely: Exploring the World of Skin Lightening
Most girls have fond memories of sneaking into their parents’ room, aged 6 or 7, to play with their mother’s makeup. You could barely reach the dressing table, but once you’d climbed onto a stack of books, you just about managed to reach her fancy red lipstick. You inspected your new plaything
Exorcising Mississippi’s Cemeteries
“Mississippi had no art except in cemeteries”. These words of Eudora Welty’s, a comment on her photographs of graveyards around the state, have strangely buried themselves in me. It is not that the general sentiment is unfamiliar. Southern artists frequently motioned towards themselves as awkw
Not this
We’d been arguing for a while already before I became aware of the plant growing over the windowsill, reaching into the room through the open space left by the raised window as the light outside assumed red evening angles and multiplied the dimensions of things, its exploring fronds so distant fro
Busybodies of the Small Town
My grandmother is eighty-one years old and hasn’t yet learned how to sit still. This afternoon she’s delivering poinsettias to a woman from her church whose husband is unwell, then going to the fruit shop, the deli, the butcher’s. She’s talking – in that current-quick way of hers ̵
The Problem with Facebook
Like most people my age, I used Facebook throughout my teens. I still check the site every day, several times a day. Realistically, I check it several times an hour. Yet using Facebook never sat easily with me. It put me on edge, and I always vaguely meant to consider the exact reasons for these [&h
On Jerusalem
You don’t have to have strong views on politics, or Donald Trump, or the Palestinian question, to acknowledge the sheer idiocy of the US president’s latest bout of verbal diarrhoea. In 1995, Congress passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act, a law for the purposes of initiating and funding the relocatio
Civil Rights and Black Panther
‘I don’t remember when exactly I read my first comic book, but I do remember exactly how liberated and subversive I felt as a result.’ – Edward Said When the fictional superhero Black Panther debuted in Fantastic Four #52 in the summer of 1966, the Civil Rights movement was in full swing
Women of the Left Bank
Paris in the 1920s: bohemian, artistic and sexually liberated. This impression of the ‘les années folles’, as the French call it, is a well-established one and ingrained in our conception of Modernism. Even today, the idealised myth continues in popular culture. The success of Woody Allen’s f
Build-a-bear identities: the quest of finding home for the third-culture kid
“So where are you from?” Fresh-faced in a foreign country, the question pops up as frequently as you might imagine. Likewise, a definite answer usually follows. “I’m from [insert country here].” However, for the people who identify as a “third-culture kid” an answer would necessarily n