In The Color Black, Beeta Baghoolizadeh traces the twin processes of enslavement and erasure of Black people in Iran during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She illustrates how geopolitical changes and technological advancements in the nineteenth century made enslaved East Africans uniquely visible in their servitude in wealthy and elite Iranian households. During this time, Blackness, Africanness, and enslavement became intertwined—and interchangeable—in Iranian imaginations. After the end of slavery in 1929, the implementation of abolition involved an active process of erasure on a national scale, such that a collective amnesia regarding slavery and racism persists today. The erasure of enslavement resulted in the erasure of Black Iranians as well. Baghoolizadeh draws on photographs, architecture, theater, circus acts, newspapers, films, and more to document how the politics of visibility framed discussions around enslavement and abolition during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this way, Baghoolizadeh makes visible the people and histories that were erased from Iran and its diaspora.

Drawn from a decade of writing and conversations by Arab American poet and writer Philip Metres, Dispatches from the Land of Erasure redefines the writer’s role as a catalyst for justice and a resister of empire. Gathering together a wide range of writing and writers, particularly from Arab and Black diaspora, Dispatches reports on what white imperial culture attempts to erase, while uplifting the voices and people who resist that erasure, offering a vision of a more just and peaceful world.

With keen insight into the lived experience of Arab Americans and other historically marginalized communities, the book explores the struggle for a just peace through reading Palestinian Arab and Israeli Jewish writers of conscience who contend with the wall of silence around the issue of Palestine. Further, Dispatches illuminates how to write a poetry of peace and justice, and how poetic activism and activist poets situate themselves in communities seeking change. Divided into four sections—Erasing the Erasures: Writing While Arab, The Poetics of Palestine, The Poetics of Justice, and The Poetics of Peacebuilding—Dispatches weaves personal essays, cultural criticism, group chats, interviews, literary analysis, reviews, and roundtables that include luminaries like Mosab Abu Toha, Hayan Charara, Sahar Khalifeh, Marwa Helal, Erika Meitner, Naomi Shihab Nye, Craig Santos Perez, and M. NourbeSe Philip. Together, the book models the crucial need for robust dialogue to overcome the echo chamber that limits the growth and reach of social movements and to dream of a future beyond the land of erasure.

The untold stories of resilience in Hmong American education

Re-membering Culture is a deep exploration of the intricate dynamics of cultural memory and education, centering the experiences of Hmong American students and educators. Arguing that the school, as a product of coloniality, perpetuates the marginalization and erasure of non-Western epistemologies, author Bic Ngo sheds light on the subtle yet impactful process of structured forgetting within the American education system. This politics of forgetting, in turn, contributes to the fragmentation of Hmong cultural heritage, identity, and community.

Based on a high school in an urban center with a considerable Hmong immigrant community, Ngo’s work draws on extensive ethnographic research with Hmong American community leaders, school administrators, parents, teachers, staff, and high school students to understand how they navigate the terrain of Western pedagogy while attempting to retain and preserve Hmong knowledge systems. Exploring a range of school experiences, Ngo traverses students’ challenges in balancing school with family life and the everyday cultural racism encountered in the classroom as well as grassroots efforts to preserve culture, including the establishment of a Hmong Cultural Club.

Highlighting these experiences and voices, Ngo provides a nuanced understanding of the challenges Hmong Americans face within an assimilationist society while contesting the dominant anti-immigrant narratives of refugee suffering and poverty. Through these practices of (re)storytelling, resurgence, and refusal, she underscores the agency of the Hmong American community, illuminating how the critical consciousness fostered by re-membering serves as a powerful tool in confronting white hegemonic ideologies in education.

 

 

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