Usually, when I open a new book that touches on the socially aware and community-engaged art which has been the through-line of my life, I feel an anticipatory cringe. So often, the work is tendentious in some reactive way, far from my lived experience—more an artifact of someone’s academic resume than a genuine contribution. Knowing …
Revenge or restitution? I’ve been thinking of Paulo Freire’s powerful notion of a thematic universe. He wrote that every epoch is characterized by “a complex of ideas, concepts, hopes, doubts, values and challenges in dialectical interaction with their opposites.” This complex, interacting whole—our thematic universe—weaves the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. Conventionally, historians propose …