slavery
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The Rumpus Interview with Kim Brooks
Kim Brooks discusses her debut novel, The Houseguest, her approach to character and historical narrative, and the value of engaging readers with larger social issues through literature.
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The Conversation: Joshua Bennett and Camonghne Felix
What scares me in the current work is how much I trust the concept, what I’m trying to achieve.
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The Conversation: Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib and Paul Tran
The sitting down to write, convincing myself that my voice matters, even though there are so many telling me that it doesn’t.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Thoughts on My Ancestry.com DNA Results
There were chains. History books always describe the chains.
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National Amnesia
Race is an important and central issue in the United States, but what about abroad? It appears that both the United States and the United Kingdom are witnessing one of those moments when we confront what Toni Morrison said in…
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The Rumpus Interview with Margo Jefferson
Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Margo Jefferson talks about her new memoir, Negroland, and about growing up in an elite black community in the segregated Chicago of the 1950s and 1960s.
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The Rumpus Interview with Melissa Gira Grant
Melissa Gira Grant talks sex workers’ rights, labor politics, the novelty of women’s sexuality, and her book, Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work.
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
(Dan Weiss is out on tour with his band The Yellow Dress. He’ll be back on August 3rd.) The historical quagmire of a plantation tour. When your father’s dark side is really, really dark. Also, the dark side of the Nobel prize.…
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Novelist Brings Slavery to California
In an interview with NPR, novelist and funnyman Paul Beatty discusses his novel The Sellout, and what’s on his mind when creating a world where plantation culture is reborn in California. The novel focuses on Bonbon, an African American man…
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Rewriting History
Salon has published an excerpt from Edward E. Baptist’s new book about the relationship between slavery and the development of capitalism in America. In it, he identifies the ways in which the American master narrative has written slavery out of…
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Escaping Global Slavery, Almost
Njong Emmanuel Tohnain, imprisoned in a Chinese factory that produced shopping bags for Saks Fifth Avenue, wrote notes (some in English and others in French) inside five bags pleading for help from the wealthy consumers on the other side of…
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The Rumpus Review of 12 Years A Slave
In 12 Years a Slave, a period piece transforms into drama without distance and intellectual arguments about slavery’s connection to the present.