Jess Martinaitis

The task, impossible at times, is to dialectically hold two uncomfortable truths: that people who have been exposed to indoctrinating narratives most of their lives are not at fault for that, and that they are simultaneously responsible – assuming exposure to free information and accessibility – for examining the validity of those narratives. To... See more

In 1975, Muhammad Ali gave a lecture at Harvard University. After his lecture, a student got up and said to him, "Give us a poem." And Mohammed Ali said, "Me, we."

This raises immediately the question of whom one is writing ‘for’. My own, short answer is that I have never had a reader in mind. I have ideas, people, events, shapes, and I write ‘for’ those things, and hope that the completed work will be of interest to others.

It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.

The Germans, of course, have a long word to describe this process of collectively coming to terms with their gruesome past: Vergangenheitsbewältigung

As its title suggests, Unnamed Figures not only illuminates Black appearances in the visual culture of this period but also asks how our encounters with them are shaped by the erasure of Blackness from art and archives.

The black American writer Richard Wright once wrote that black and white Americans were engaged in a war over the nature of reality.

Writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by an urge to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge – which gives rise to profound uncertainties – that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be... See more

It’s no secret: Black culture drives pop culture. It is “the original avant-garde,” as Felipe Luciano, a former TV producer, has said. But I sometimes wonder if appropriation is a prerequisite of Black culture going mainstream.