Equitable Representation in Medical Textbooks

Erasure is the act of denying or refusing to acknowledge that people’s race and lived experiences in America differ through socioeconomic, historical, political, and legal factors. This concept of colorblindness, also known as erasure, is counterproductive when it results in the inability to recognize the need to include diverse representation and instead results in the…

Chinatown Poem

  —   “Chinatown Poem” is an original cento written using language taken from billboards, commercial shop signs, advertisements, and other elements of the linguistic landscape of Boston’s Chinatown neighborhood. The poem explores Chinatown as both a site of diasporic cultural production and a space where racist tropes and stereotypes about Asian people circulate and…

Coffee with a Colleague: Bioethicist Keisha Ray, PhD

Keisha Ray, PhD, is an Associate Professor of medical humanities and bioethics at McGovern Medical School in Houston, Texas. She is also an associate editor at the American Journal of Bioethics. Sarah L. Berry // This interview series features educators, scholars, artists, and healthcare providers whose work is vital to the growth of the health…

Representations and Discourses of Vietnamese and North African Women in French Colonial Postcards, Part II

Clothing in Postcards of Algerian and Moroccan Women In many ways, garments were a marker of disparity between Vietnamese and North African colonial portraiture. In Algeria and Morocco, postcards were often organized around the veiled—or rather, unveiled—woman, a theme central to Orientalist art and photography. Colonialist photographers, such as Jean Geiser, Rudolf Lehnert and Ernst…

Representations and Discourses of Indochinese and North African Women in French Colonial Postcards (1880s-1920s), Part I

In the opening of his influential book Orientalism, Edward Saïd exposed the dominance and hegemony of Western authors and artists in shaping and formulating the fundamental narratives about the ‘Orient’, emphasizing the binary and self-consolidating character of colonial discourse: A very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and…

Tropical Insects and the Colonial Entomopoiesis of Pestilence

In the era of human-induced climate change, insects have become the preeminent emissaries of Death, morphing the proverbial scythe into tiny tentacles of destruction. The invasion of tropical insects into the Global North has emerged as a key narrative template of the climate apocalypse: articles in scientific and journalistic outlets register the harrowing threat of…

Preventing Language Death in the Guatemalan Highlands

“Richin man nkäm ta qach’ab’äl: So that our language doesn’t die” What does it mean to say that a language is dead? Or that a language is dying? According to linguist David Crystal, “to say that a language is dead is like saying that a person is dead. It could be no other way—for languages…