This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
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Posts Tagged: apartheid
Best Friends
“Speaking English so well” seemed to be the key to open many doors.
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Love Thy Neighbor: Talking with Yewande Omotoso
Writer, poet, and architect Yewande Omotoso discusses her second novel, The Woman Next Door, Cape Town’s haunting beauty, and mythologies about motherhood.
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“Language Orthodoxy,” the Adichie Wars, and Western Feminism’s Enduring Myopia
Adichie is far more significant than her accusers seem to know.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Sandra Meek
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Sandra Meek about her new collection An Ecology of Elsewhere, writing landscapes, and the power of syntactic density.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Bill Cosby’s Faux Legacy
Bill Cosby was never the man, the icon, the protector and illustrator of black culture, the guide, the genius we have created in our minds.
...moreLatent Forgiveness
At The New Republic, Eve Fairbanks offers an illuminating profile of Adriaan Vlok, a former apartheid leader turned evangelist: As we stopped at a series of dusty little nursery schools, I was struck by Vlok’s overall passivity. It contrasted sharply with the attitude of other white volunteers I’ve ridden with into poor black neighborhoods, who […]
...moreNot-So-Ancient History
A first novel set in modern Zimbabwe begins: “Two days after I turned fourteen the son of our neighbor set his stepmother alight.”
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