To sit in conversation with Willie Birch (American, born 1942) is to submit to the very process that he has made visible throughout his long career. It is a deliberate process—you can expect to be there a while—and it is a personal process, with asides that will take you through time and across continents, touching on art, music, history, science, and more. It is, of course, the process of telling a story, and Willie Birch has a lot of stories to tell. Over the past sixty-plus years, Birch has produced sculptures (wooden, bronze, and papier-mâché, site-specific installations, immersive installations, paintings, drawings, prints, works made from found objects (sometimes only lightly adjusted, sometimes totally transformed), even a thirteen-foot-high wooden crucifix, which is still visible in situ in a church in Baltimore. While these works could not be more diverse in scale and execution, they all share one thing in common: each is designed to convey a narrative.

Even his most abstract works, the majority of which he made early in his career, are compilations of symbols, both borrowed and created, that communicate the very idea of communication, drawing attention to the ways in which languages can be both legible and inscrutable at the same time, depending on what the audience brings to them. These early works also signaled a layered approach to narrative that would persist throughout his career. There is always a narrative, which is to say that in each of his works, we can trace a particular story, ranging from the reverberations of African ancestry in America to the lived experiences of Black Americans before and after the Civil Rights Movement. And then there is the narrative, or rather Narrative: the idea that each story is part of a larger, interconnected web of storytelling. To put it another way, each of his works tells a specific story and is about storytelling more broadly. This wholistic approach to narrative makes the experience of looking at, walking through, and being confronted with Birch’s works very much like the experience of listening to him tell a story directly. What this catalog and the exhibition it accompanies offer, therefore, is an invitation to sit in conversation with Willie Birch—to look, to listen, to feel, and to experience the stories he has to tell.

Birch’s origins echoed the layered networks and personal narratives that he would later adopt as his artistic subjects. Born on November 26, 1942 (Thanksgiving night), Willie Melvin Birch emerged into a world surrounded by, and named for, the branches of his family. He was born in the back of his Aunt Tontee’s (Kate Dorsey) restaurant at 2133 Tchoupitoulas Street in New Orleans. The restaurant was directly across the street from the Mississippi River and a major train track route, both of which connected this location with much of the rest of the country, an auspicious location for an artist who would go on to explore networks, connections, lifelines, and linkages in his own work. He was named after two uncles: Kate Dorsey’s husband, Willie Dorsey, and Willie Birch Sr., his father’s brother. Birch’s mother, Anna Poindexter, and father, Wilson Birch, never married, thus he was closer to his mother’s family, in particular his grandmother, Kitty Poindexter. His early nickname was “Lil’ Poindexter.” Young Willie was clearly influenced by his immediate family, which informed his interest in the lives of his surrounding community. David S. Rubin’s excellent essay on Birch’s life traces these important connections, which are worth restating here: Wilson Birch was a longshoreman; Anna Poindexter was a cook and housekeeper for a wealthy white family in New Orleans; Willie Dorsey was a union organizer; Dan Poindexter Sr., his grandfather, was a farmer in rural Bertrandville, Louisiana; uncle Nathaniel Poindexter was a “preacher, school teacher, and community leader with whom Birch lived each summer”; another uncle, Dan Poindexter, owned a Black nightclub in Marrero, Louisiana, across the river from New Orleans; Nathaniel Dorsey, a cousin, was a community activist and assistant director of the New Orleans chapter of the Urban League.1

Dorseys, Poindexters, Birches, community organizers, farmers, food, preachers, educators, shipping and transportation, the Mississippi River, and New Orleans. This is the constellation of people, places, and things that converged to form the foundation for the young artist. It is no wonder that his career would be devoted to making connections between forces and phenomena around the world, tracing the influences and the movements of culture and humanity across time and space. Birch’s own migrations would eventually take him from the cultural nexus of New Orleans, and the small town of Bertrandville, to the metropolises of Baltimore, Amsterdam, New York, and finally back to New Orleans. Richard J. Powell has remarked on the influence of both historical African American migrations and Birch’s personal peregrinations in an essay on the work of the artist accompanying a 1995 exhibition titled From Bertrandville to Brooklyn. “As Birch’s . . . constructions attest, his various homes, travels, and experiences culminate in a body of work that, tellingly, invokes focus and wholeness, rather than schizophrenia.” Continuing on, Powell asserts that Birch’s ultimate return to the place of his birth is “confirmation of the adage that the more you see of the world, the more you are able to see and recognize yourself and your origins.”  Although Birch would go on to have a long and celebrated career in other places, his origins are rooted in New Orleans, as are the origins of the stories he wants to tell about African influence on Black American culture and history.

The exhibition Willie Birch: Stories to Tell is co-organized by the American Federation of Arts and the New Orleans Museum of Art, and curated by Russell Lord, Chief of Curatorial Affairs at the Norman Rockwell Museum.

The post An excerpt from Willie Birch: Stories to Tell appeared first on Yale University Press.

Ross Brooks—

Why has it taken so long for biologists and science communicators to embrace the boundless queerness of nature and our sexually heterogeneous evolution? The problem pre-dates Darwin. From its origins in the eighteenth century, evolutionary biology was deeply imbued with gendered, racial and classist prejudices derived from theology, law and murderous colonial ideologies and practices. The first evolutionists were mostly privileged white men who shaped their ideas in their own image, even as they conceived radical new ways of reasoning about human origins. The prolific ethnographic and natural history literature (‘the handmaidens of colonialist knowledge production’, as historian Greta LaFleur writes) and related texts of the era were thereby forged to reflect the interests of patriarchal European powers as they consolidated their brutal dominion of faraway lands.¹ In this deeply troubled ideological schema, Indigenous peoples were regarded as an evolutionary stage between monkeys and self-declared ‘civilised’ humans (epitomised by well-to-do Victorian men), while women and individuals with non-binary traits were similarly misrepresented as harking back to earlier evolutionary stages.

The problematics of early evolutionary theorising were exacerbated by the semantics of ‘hermaphroditism’. Age-old associations with monstrosity and pathology slipped unthinkingly into visions of biological degeneracy, even as intersexuality came to be considered a fundamental part of human ancestry and inheritance. The term ‘hermaphrodite’ was often used as an insult to accuse someone of gender or sexual impropriety. Physicians and anatomists applied it to all manner of mixed-sex and sex-transformative characteristics, not just unusual genitalia, even extending it to psychological and behavioural characteristics (‘moral’ or ‘mental’ hermaphroditism) including same-sex desires. Hermaphroditism, as far as most people were concerned, was a grave medical problem afflicting a minority of individuals and requiring the intervention of doctors and sometimes lawyers. The proposition that it was pervasive in the natural world and foundational to human evolution, let alone the suggestion that we all retain degrees of it, was even more inflammatory than notions of simian ancestry.

Darwin actively sought to mitigate the queer potentialities of his evolutionary thought by overlaying them with his manicured styling of his second major theory of evolutionary change – sexual selection – which was deeply embedded in Victorian gender and sexual stereotypes. Simply stated, he deployed sexual selection theory, set out at length in The Descent of Man, to explain the development of secondary sexual characteristics that seemed to offer little advantage to an individual’s survival and might even hinder it (the peacock’s striking, but cumbersome, tail being the classic example). He posited two mechanisms by which sexual selection worked: the competition of males as they vie for reproductive access to females either through physical combat or courtship displays, and the ability of females to choose their mates. The flamboyant peacock’s tail came to be, Darwin insisted, because peahens find it sexy.

At least, that’s how the standard account of Darwin’s construal of sexual selection tends to go. However, as we’ll see in later chapters of this book, he struggled to maintain such a simplistic view of the theory and was prompted, not least by a host of queer creatures, to modify it. Still, his unyielding emphasis on male competitiveness and female capriciousness ever detracted from the nuances and variations that he necessarily, if sometimes partially, structured into his evolutionism. Extended to humans, he enshrined a chronic misogyny into his evolutionary schema, asserting, for example, that: ‘The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than woman can attain – whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands.’²

It’s now generally recognised that Darwin’s selective and laboured descriptions of aggressive males and fussy females in Descent were made to order, reflecting hegemonic Victorian gender roles for an appreciative bourgeois readership (as Joan Roughgarden puts it, ‘Darwin’s theory of sexual selection is locker-room bravado projected onto animals and then retrieved as though a fact of nature’).³ In Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection, historian Evelleen Richards charts some key aspects of Darwin’s modelling of sexual selection which he pieced together from disparate ideological trends and selected observations of animals (especially birds) and people. His familial and cultural background informed his attitudes towards courtship and reproduction and these were reinforced by his marriage to his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, who maintained orthodox views about women’s domestic and social roles. As Richards puts it, there was ‘no inconsistency between Darwin’s personal experience and his theoretical argument’.⁴ The enduring image of Darwin as the epitome of the bearded Victorian paterfamilias, including his embodiment of an unassailable upper-middle-class masculinity, his long and happy marriage and numerous children, is one that fits, in all its banal simplicity, to a substantial, and unusual, degree. For all his piercing insights and conceptual innovations, Darwin’s evolutionism, especially as it took in humans, was, in so many ways, a science of himself.

Consequently, even as he worked to accommodate intersexualities and transformations of sex in animal bodies within his evolutionary thought in the most innovative ways, Darwin’s personal standpoint and mindset exerted a muting influence on how he structured and presented the queerer dimensions of his science, with deeply regrettable consequences. The union of a female animal with a male to produce offspring, preferably without the complication of promiscuity, comprised Darwin’s idealised vision of sexual evolution. In contrast, he often portrayed queer bodies, mental characteristics and behaviours as anomalous, empirically insignificant, developmental misfits, reproductive failures and evolutionary sexual throwbacks, even as dual-sexed and sex-transformative phenomena were useful to him. Extended to humans, he further deployed derisory terminology largely derived from medieval theology. Aside from ‘hermaphrodite’, terms he used include ‘aberrant off spring’, ‘utter licentiousness’, ‘evil habits’, ‘promiscuity’, ‘vice’, ‘unnatural crimes’, ‘immorality’ and ‘vitiated instincts’. Responding to his ideas and writings, others, including personal correspondents and critics, echoed his queerphobia, deploying terms such as ‘unnatural love’, ‘grosser copartneries’, ‘paiderastia’, ‘sodomy’, ‘profound moral corruption’, ‘nameless crimes’, ‘gross profligacy’ and ‘hideous sexual criminality’.

Greater awareness of queerness in the natural world did not, therefore, lead to a more enlightened view of queer people. Instead, mounting empirical evidence for intersexualities, transformations of sex, diverse courtship and reproductive repertoires, and nonreproductive sexual behaviours fuelled a backlash against the view that nature is inherently ordered and a suitable benchmark for what is ‘normal’, and emboldened the view that it is essentially chaotic and in need of domestication and shaping for human purposes. Such mercurial ideological maneuvering had devastating consequences.

1. Greta LaFleur, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 4. See also, for example, Rudi C. Bleys, The Geography of Perversion: Male-to-Male Sexual Behaviour outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination (Cassell, 1996); Sita Balani, Deadly and Slick: Sexual Modernity and the Making of Race (Verso, 2023); Banu Subramaniam, Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientifi c Legacies of Colonialism (University of Washington Press, 2024). ︎
2. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols (London, 1871), 2:327. ︎
3. Joan Roughgarden, ‘Challenging Darwin’s Th eory of Sexual Selection’, Daedalus 136, no. 2 (2007): 35. ︎
4. Evelleen Richards, Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection (University of Chicago Press, 2017), 61. ︎

Ross Brooks (he/him) is an independent historian of science and a foundational thinker in queer history and the history of sexology. He regularly speaks on the queer history of science at events across the UK, and he features in the pioneering documentary Queer Planet.

The post An Excerpt: Darwin and the Queer Origins of Life appeared first on Yale University Press.

What drew you to Paule Marshall as a subject, and why did this feel like the right moment in your own life to take on this project?

Mary Helen Washington: I came of age in the 1950s, a decade marked by conservative cultural norms that required young women, including young black women, to think of their lives in terms of boundaries and limitations. We were expected to be pure, proper, and respectable, “a credit to the race.” Like all young women of that era, I knew that the repercussions for violating those norms were severe. It was liberating to encounter Paule Marshall’s 1959 novel Brown Girl, Brownstones, a coming-of-age novel about Brooklyn-born, Barbadian-American Selina Boyce, who rebels against those 1950s norms of respectability and propriety. Selina defies her family and community, initiates a sexual affair, chooses art over a practical career, and despite these violations, remains exuberant as she is described walking down the streets of Brooklyn with “a strong graceful lift to her head” and “an almost irrepressible vitality in her stride.” In contrast to the humiliation and banishment many women characters suffer for sexual experimentation, Selina’s sexual life becomes an expressway to empowerment. Three years later, Marshall published her 1962 story “Brooklyn,” about a young black woman student who resists the sexual advances of a white male professor, first with words that silence the professor and then with actions that sabotage his power. “Brooklyn” was 50 years ahead of the #MeToo movement. Determined to make her women characters “centers of power,” Marshall published five novels over the next fifty years and produced an entirely new canon of black women: Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1968),  Praisesong for the Widow (1983)  Daughters (1991), andThe Fisher King (2000). These novels show women as political actors, professional career women, writers, activists, travelers, some married with children; some single, straight and gay. Their lives are their art, creative acts of assertion and agency, chiseled out of their courage and daring and intelligence. One male critic of Marshall’s work was disturbed by this feminist vision. He complained that “No matter the odds,” Paule Marshall’s fictional women “never lose.” He was right: Marshall’s women characters are fighters, not losers. Her fiction has rightly been called the “beginning of contemporary black feminist writing.”

You describe Marshall as both a major literary figure and someone who resisted recognition—why is her story so important and timely now?

MHW: Paule Marshall did not so much resist recognition as she was misrecognized and, for many years, she was systematically deprived of her rightful stature in the African American canon. When Brown Girl, Brownstones was published in 1959 by Random House, the publishers did little to make it a commercial success; in fact, the head of Random House told her not to expect too much because black or ethnic novels never did well. Ten years later, Black Arts Movement proponents severely criticized Marshall’s second novel The Chosen Place, The Timeless People. The novel’s interracialism, its representation of homosexuality, and its “foreign and exotic” setting in the Caribbean violated the sensibilities of some U.S. Black nationalists. In the 1970s, a black Ivy League college student questioned whether Marshall, a Barbadian-American, could represent African Americans. The writer Toni Cade Bambara had to step in and inform the student that “Paule Marshall is a writer of the black diaspora.” In every instance, Marshall was ahead of her time, disrupting the narrow, national, heteronormative meanings of blackness. Her stories and characters sweep across the Atlantic Ocean from Brooklyn to Barbados, and Brazil, to Grenada and Carriacou and Paris to show black people on the world stage and blackness as global. Marshall produced a kind of international cultural revolution by showing people of color all over the world united around the beauty of blackness, and around a common heritage as people of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. These diasporan settings—South America, the Caribbean, Paris, and New York—allowed her to explore the lives of black, queer, and mixed-race characters. Internationalists like Marshall gave us a preview of current colonial and racist politics. Her character Merle, for example, delivers a scornful critique of the U.S. as that place where, “they treat the black people, the very ones who made the bloody country rich in the first place, so badly,” and “every time you look around, they’re warring against some poor, half-hungry country somewhere in the world.”

Marshall had meaningful connections with figures like Langston Hughes and Malcolm X. How did those relationships shape her career and confidence?

MHW: The famous poet Langston Hughes showed up unannounced in 1959 at the Brooklyn book party to celebrate Marshall’s first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones. He became her lifelong mentor, congratulating her on every publication and scolding her for not writing more: “Paul-ee,” he pleaded, “Do you know I have a book out for every year you’ve been alive?” Hughes boosted Marshall’s career by inviting her to accompany him on an all-expense-paid State Department tour to Paris and Copenhagen in 1965. In many ways Hughes and Marshall were kindred spirits. The jazz- and blues-loving Hughes would have appreciated Paule’s portrait of the young girl Selina, who was drawn to the bohemian life of Times Square and Brooklyn’s Fulton Street. Like Hughes, Marshall celebrated the beauty of blackness and looked to expand that identity by exploring the black lives beyond the U.S. In their private lives, however, both Hughes and Marshall were inclined to hiddenness; they kept their sexual lives veiled, allowing their writing to express what they concealed. Hughes may have compensated for the shabby treatment Marshall received from Ralph Ellison, the most prominent black writer of the period, who, she wrote, “cut me dead every time we’ve been in the same room.” Another part of Marshall’s hidden life was her friendship with the radical Muslim leader Malcolm X. He encouraged Marshall to write even during the racial turmoil of the 1960s, and he turned to her as a trusted confidante when he was under FBI surveillance for his political and religious views. Paule’s friend James Baldwin did not make any public commentary on her work, but he recognized its power and influence and wrote to her privately in 1969 after the publication of The Chosen Place, The Timeless People: “But it’s been a very long time since any book, even books I admire, have stirred me so, and so surprised me, and made me so rejoice: girl, you have really started something.“

Your work involves uncovering unpublished materials, looking for the silences, tracing connections among relationships and navigating the contours of her life. What was your research process like and how do you decide when an interpretation is trustworthy?

MHW: A biographer’s most trustworthy tools are generosity, compassion and humility. No one can know another person’s life. The biographer has bits of paper, old notes, the flawed recollections of friends and relatives, all of which are fallible, biased and fragmentary. When Paule’s son Evan Marshall offered me all her papers, I was ecstatic. I had access to the papers of one of the most famous black writers in the U.S., but when I began interviewing people for this biography, I discovered that Paule was a very private and reserved woman, not given to intimacies, at great pains to hide anger, disappointment, and her sexually nonconforming life. Yet, these are the issues in the lives of nearly all of her women characters. After several months of digging through Paule Marshall’s papers in the storage facility in Richmond, Virginia, I discovered a diary she kept while in China in 1983 and her ancient iBookG4 computer buried at the bottom of a packing box and, since no password was needed, I had easy access to some of the most revealing documents of Marshall’s life. In the China diary, Marshall hints at her attraction for women, later confirmed by her son Evan, to whom she confided: “I love women and I love men.” On the computer was a list of the people she called “the thieves” in her life, a catalog of people who, she said, “stole my self worth.”  The list included a guidance counselor who urged her to attend a commercial high school instead of an academic one; the speech teacher who discouraged her because she had a slight lisp; her Irish friend Mary who refused to walk with her at graduation. Others who made the list were former lovers and husbands, who were attracted to her independence but in the end wanted a traditional wife, and Marshall herself, who cited her own failings in this list, especially as a mother who was not always available for her child. The computer also included a 41-page account of her second marriage, the “Haitian misadventure,” as she called it. This account of a ten-year marriage is entitled “en passant-Haiti,” which translates as “by the way” or “a detour,” as if the marriage were a passing encounter, another oblique gesture that masks “the black body in pain.” Marshall died before she could publish these poignant stories, which would have allowed us to see her interior struggles, the muted anger and the personal pain. Many scholars of black women’s writings have written about the “veil of secrecy” that drives black women to hide their vulnerabilities. In Marshall’s case, I decided to reveal those secrets because they are the keys to unlocking the meanings of her fiction, a kind of divining rod, alerting the reader to her daring representations of female desire and black intimacy.

Mary Helen Washington is distinguished university professor emerita in the English department at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of the prizewinning The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s. She lives in Silver Spring, MD.

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Geoffrey Gresh—

On 2 May 2026, Japan’s Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi, delivered a foreign policy speech at Vietnam National University in Hanoi, Vietnam. The speech was framed as an updated vision of Japan’s Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) for the future. In the speech, Takaichi stated, “More than 400 years ago, from the South China Sea, through the Taiwan Strait, and on to the East China Sea, Japanese and Vietnamese people engaged in dynamic trade. Together, we have enjoyed the blessings of free and open seas.”

For the past decade, Japan’s government has carried out FOIP, a strategic vision originally championed by Takaichi’s predecessor and mentor, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Successive Japanese governments have sought to uphold and reinforce FOIP’s values of a rules-based world order and its significant maritime characteristics. Abe once posted on the occasion of Japan’s “Marine Day” that “Based on a shift in thinking from ‘a country protected by the sea’ to ‘a country that protects the sea,’ Japan is determined to maintain stable sea lanes and defend our maritime interests within our territorial waters and EEZ.”¹

In Takaichi’s May speech, she spoke of three updated priorities for her government in carrying out a FOIP of the future: “First, building economic infrastructure for the age of AI and data including strengthening supply chain resilience for energy and critical materials. Second, co-creation of economic growth opportunities through public-private collaboration and rule sharing. Third, enhancing cooperation in the field of security to ensure regional peace and stability.”

Takaichi’s third priority promotes maritime security explicitly. Toward the end of her speech, she noted, “Regional peace and stability are fundamental prerequisites for economic prosperity, and regional supply chains are underpinned by the safe and open navigation of sea lanes. Maritime security [is] a key element of FOIP. Japan has consistently supported maritime security through the enhancement of maritime law enforcement capacities of Southeast Asian countries.”

For more than a decade, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) has helped shape Japan’s relationship with Southeast Asia as a “vital artery” for its East-West and Southern Economic Corridor. Japan’s government also views the Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as an equal partner at the heart of promoting a Free and Open Indo-Pacific. For its part, ASEAN launched the “ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific” (AIOP) in 2019 that shares many of Japan’s principles tied to FOIP, such as promoting “maritime cooperation, connectivity, the Strategic Development Goals, and the economy.”

Regional port development has become an important component of this broader geoeconomic strategy. JICA has been a leading pioneer for the government, promoting enhanced maritime connectivity and shipping corridors that focus on energy, food, automobile manufacturing, and other maritime commercial elements needed to fuel Japan’s economy and global transportation networks. Japan’s investments in regional ports have the extra benefit of increasing and improving regional maritime trade flows. As the current war in Iran has demonstrated, access to natural resources such as oil, gas, and fertilizer to grow food will remain essential as Japan seeks greater food and energy self-sufficiency.

The delivery of Takaichi’s speech in Vietnam, a critical member of ASEAN, symbolizes the growing importance of Japan’s ties to Vietnam specifically. Japan’s government has labeled its relationship with Vietnam as a “Comprehensive Strategic Partnership.” Due to strained relations between China and Vietnam over disputed islands in the South China Sea, Japan’s government has sought to leverage this tension to its advantage. Among its diverse development programs, Japan’s government and official agencies, such as JICA, have been significantly involved in developing Vietnam’s maritime economy and infrastructure projects.

Since launching its Quality Infrastructure Initiative several years ago, Japan has prioritized Vietnam as a top investment country—with expected projects already totaling around $209 billion in financing and aid. Through JICA’s geoeconomic investments, it has also helped open the door to additional private sector investments and trade opportunities with Japanese shipping, logistics, and terminal-operating companies. As Japan’s government places greater emphasis on economic security amidst growing Chinese regional economic and diplomatic aggression, Vietnam has seen some of the region’s supply chains shift to its domestic manufacturing hubs—and as Japan invests further in Vietnam’s port development, this will only improve maritime trade and transportation links between Vietnam and Japan, and other regional hubs.

Vietnam will remain a comprehensive strategic partner to Japan for years to come as both countries continue to jointly promote regional prosperity and stability. This also holds for Southeast Asia and the broader Indo-Pacific region. As Takaichi concluded in her Vietnam speech, “FOIP does not impose anything on anyone. It has grown flexibly, accepting a diversity of voices and adapting to the times….We all strive together for the peace and prosperity of the region, hand in hand. In this way, resilient countries that own their choices cooperate, and together build a Free and Open Indo-Pacific as the foundation for their peace and prosperity.”

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the National Defense University, the Department of War, or the U.S. Government.

1. “Message from Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on the Occasion of “Marine Day”,” Prime Minister of Japan and His Cabinet, Government of Japan, July 12, 2013, https://japan.kantei.go.jp/96_abe/statement/201307/12uminohi_e.html. ︎

Geoffrey F. Gresh is professor of international relations at the National Defense University, Washington, D.C., and author of To Rule Eurasia’s Waves.

The post Japan’s Updated Vision for a Free and Open Indo-Pacific appeared first on Yale University Press.

What is your relationship with André Levinson’s work and what led you to do this translation?

John Goodman: In 2016, David Vaughan, the eminent Frederick Ashton scholar and long-time archivist of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, suggested I consider translating some of Levinson’s French publications. When I took up his suggestion, I quickly became fascinated by Levinson’s work and resolved to do whatever I could to make it more accessible. The first order of business was to publish a translation of Dance Today, arguably his finest and most important book.

Why is Dance Today considered a foundational text in dance criticism?

JG: Actually, it has not hitherto been so considered, at least not in any full-throated way. Dance historians quote from it frequently. Moreover, in 1991 Joan Acocella and Lynn Garafola published a landmark collection of early Levinson translations from the 1920s which includes half a dozen texts later incorporated into the book, a couple of which have since been anthologized more than once. But the book as a whole, which Levinson constructed carefully along thematic lines using his portions of his columns and essays, has long been neglected, even by the French. I think it is one of the few classics of dance criticism. First, it is the richest and most interesting account of dance performance in Paris in the 1920s, when the artform was undergoing epochal change, not least through a growing acceptance of a formalist approach to dance theater in which conventional narrative is sidelined or even eliminated. Akim Volynsky is now widely regarded as the critical godfather of this way of thinking, but the reality is more complicated. While access to Volynsky’s work was limited to readers of Russian, Levinson began to publish regularly in French in 1922 and rapidly became something of a celebrity, not just in Paris but in all the European capitals. It was his verbal conception of dance formalism, arguably more intellectually rigorous than that of Volynsky—it had evolved in dialogue with early Russian Formalist literary theory—which had the greatest impact on public awareness in the West. Moreover, unlike Volynsky, Levinson covered not just ballet but the whole gamut of dance performance on view in Paris, which gave his views added heft.

What were the biggest challenges in translating Levinson’s distinctive blend of dance criticism, theory, and commentary?

JG: The juxtaposition of these three elements attains a contrapuntal richness in Levinson’s writing which, while often encountered in European literary criticism, was unprecedented in French dance criticism. This aspect of his writing presented few translation problems. What proved trickiest was capturing Levinson’s idiosyncratic French voice. His writing often tends toward prose poetry. He had taught French literature at the University of St. Petersburg; he was a passionate admirer of Gautier, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé, and French poetic diction imbues the writing in Dance Today. So does an acute awareness of French poetic meter; the stately rhythms of the alexandrine often shape Levinson’s prose here. And then there is his love for archaic French definitions, his tendency to exploit meanings that had largely fallen into disuse, doubtless an aftereffect of his philological training. He must have kept the venerable Littré dictionary on his bedside table! Nonetheless, the rhetorical range of his French writing is considerable. It often has a conversational quality, and he can be quite witty. Getting all this into viable English certainly made the task of the translator interesting!

This is the first complete edition, in any language, since 1929. What makes this book so significant for scholars and dance enthusiasts?

JG: Its status as an extraordinary dance chronicle looms large here. Paris was the capital of Western theatrical dance at the time, and Levinson saw everything there, not just the more obvious candidates—the Ballets Russes, the Paris Opera Ballet, and the Ballet Suédois, Loie Fuller and Isadora Duncan, Pavlova and the great Spanish dancer La Argentina—but also vaudeville numbers, floor shows, early modern dance programs, and performances by exponents of the venerable dance traditions of India and Cambodia, not to mention Josephine Baker and the Revue Négre. His eloquent descriptions of Josephine’s dancing, for example, are often quoted, but their full complexity, particularly in relation to contemporary racist views, cannot readily be accessed outside of the context provided by the book. And let me again stress Levinson’s extraordinary eloquence, which is evident in every sentence he wrote. It is inextricable from the sharpness and breadth of his critical intelligence, which he sometimes wielded in deliberately controversial ways. Like Baudelaire, he embraced the impossibility of objective criticism, and he made no secret of his bias toward the dynamic qualities intrinsic to ballet technique. He had come to this position, however, only after an adolescent infatuation with the much freer interpretive dance of Isadora, and he offered substantive defenses of his pro-ballet stance often and at length. But he did this while repeatedly testing its aesthetic viability against that of the alternative dance options that were then available in Paris. Contemporary readers will surely disagree with many of his arguments (I certainly do), but he lays them out skillfully for consideration, sometimes in polemical ways which make the aesthetic debates of the time come alive. His mind was well stocked with protein from the Russian and Western intellectual traditions and his formal sense was highly developed, so sparring with him can be an exhilarating exercise—even today, when the beneficial effects of the ongoing dialogue between ballet and modern dance are largely taken for granted.

The book spans ballet, modern dance, and global traditions. How does this breadth reflect the cultural dynamics of interwar Paris?

JG: Admittedly, Paris at the time was a roiling cultural melting pot, but the more interesting question about Levinson’s French dance criticism entails shifting the discussion away from passive reflection toward dynamic agency. It concerns the ways in which Levinson inflected his dance writing to make its interventions in contemporary cultural debates more persuasive, more effective. After World War I, “the classic dance,” as he preferred to call ballet, was caught up in charged political debates in France around the “classical” formal and cultural values central to the “return to order.” This phrase was the watchword of the moment there, which saw a collective rejection of the more disruptive aspects of prewar European artistic practice. The status within advanced education of the “humanities,” as opposed to the more positivist scientific disciplines, notably sociology, was an especially fraught subject in these debates. (The parallels here with recent developments in Western academic culture are uncanny.) In 1920s Paris, Levinson found himself generally allied with the cultural politics promulgated by the reactionary political league Action Française. While he stood against its program on many fronts (he was no monarchist, despite his anti-Soviet stance), he was not above exploiting his temperamental affinities with its cultural wing to advance his own aesthetic agenda. In assessing the efficacy of this move, readers should bear in mind the nature and extent of the fame of Charles Maurras, the league’s figurehead. He had first become known as a poet in the century’s early years, and he was still highly regarded as such; in 1925, his new poetry collection sold 75,000 copies in seven days. In any case, Levinson’s status as a promulgator of advanced, even modernist aesthetic stances, notably that of “abstract” or plotless dance, is cussedly complicated, rather like that of T. S. Eliot—and that of, say, George Balanchine. But I would argue that this makes his critical work even more interesting, especially in the heterogeneous present moment of dance culture and practice.

Your edition includes extensive annotations. How do these notes enhance the reader’s understanding of Levinson’s work?

JG: Levinson’s dance writing is rife with erudite allusions, and many of the dances and performers he discusses are now obscure. Moreover, when the review columns from which Dance Today was largely constructed were first published in Comoedia, the remarkable performing arts daily of the time, they often appeared below identifications of the various artists involved, information which does not always figure in the texts themselves. On the premise that it made sense for our readers to know the basic pertinent facts, I opted for relatively copious annotations. I also provide a few references to pertinent secondary sources and, where appropriate, alert readers to puns in the French that I could not get into English. All along, my aim has been to facilitate maximal accessibility to the richness of the original.

What role does a translator play in shaping how a historical figure is understood by new audiences?

JG: When their work is successful, they can significantly shape and expand an author’s legacy through advocacy and clarification. Such is my hope for the present edition, which was conceived as an extension of the process of rehabilitation initiated thirty-five years ago by Joan Acocella and Lynn Garafola. The pantheon of great writers on Western theatrical dance is small. Levinson deserves a prominent place within it, and Dance Today is arguably the most significant jewel in his dance-critical crown.

André Levinson emigrated from Petrograd, Russia, to Paris, where, writing in French, he became a prolific and controversial cultural critic, most notably of theatrical dance. John Goodman is a translator from French whose catalogue includes books by Diderot, Le Corbusier, and the French art theorist Hubert Damisch.

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Jieun Baek—

In most societies, loyalty allows for some measure of privacy. A citizen may vote for a party while disagreeing with its leader. A believer may attend church while wrestling with doubt. An employee may praise an institution in public while criticizing it over dinner. Even in highly conformist environments, there usually remains a small but meaningful distance between what one believes and what one is required to show.

In North Korea, that distance is profoundly dangerous.

The North Korean state does not merely demand obedience. It demands visible, disciplined, emotionally legible devotion. Loyalty is expressed through language, posture, attendance, tears, silence, and timing. It is not enough to avoid criticizing the regime. One must appear grateful to it. One must know when to applaud, when to mourn, when to praise, when to lower one’s eyes, and when to repeat the correct formulation with apparent conviction.

A particularly revealing example came from interviewees who described the weekly Life Review Session, also known as a self-criticism session. On Friday afternoons, colleagues sometimes privately warned one another that they would publicly criticize them the next day and asked them not to take it personally. The next day’s criticism was not necessarily an expression of sincere ideological conviction. It was a required performance. The prior warning was the more honest exchange. In that small space between private reassurance and public denunciation, one can see the logic of feigned fealty.

This is especially true for North Korean elites—those who are groomed to serve Kim Jong Un and the Korean Workers Party. Their lives are often imagined from the outside as lives of privilege and luxury: Pyongyang apartments, better schools, foreign travel, access to imported goods, and proximity to power. All of that is true. But privilege in North Korea is never guaranteed. It is conditional, revocable, and politically monitored. The closer one stands to the center of power, the more carefully one must perform loyalty to it.

This makes North Korea difficult to read. Official images show a country of radiant devotion: cadres taking notes before Kim Jong Un, scientists weeping with gratitude, families bowing before portraits, officers applauding in perfect unison. The spectacle is meant to communicate unity. But outward loyalty and inward belief are not the same thing.

I think of this distinction through a simple “Feigned Fealty” matrix¹:

The category that most interests me is not the open dissenter. In a system as coercive as North Korea’s, open dissent is usually punished long before it can become politically meaningful. The more revealing category is the person who performs loyalty flawlessly while privately doubting, resenting, or fearing the system. I call this feigned fealty: the disciplined outward enactment of devotion without the inward substance of belief.

Feigned fealty should not be mistaken for hypocrisy or cowardice. In North Korea, performance is a survival skill. To cry at the right moment, repeat the right phrase, attend the right meeting, and keep skepticism from crossing one’s face may protect not only one’s position, but one’s children, parents, siblings, and spouse. The performance is not ornamental. It is self-preserving.

This is one reason elite grievances matter. North Korean elites are not merely beneficiaries of the regime. They are also trapped by it. Their privileges bind them to the system, but those same privileges expose them to surveillance, purges, denunciation, and execution. In my book, Privileged but Powerless, 100 percent of the North Korean escapees I interviewed were born, raised, worked, or studied in Pyongyang, giving them firsthand knowledge of the regime’s privileged center. And through those interviews, 100 percent identified their foremost fear as the possibility that they, or members of their families, could be unexpectedly executed. Elites know better than most citizens how the regime works. They also know how quickly status can evaporate, and how little protection privilege provides when political winds shift.

Authoritarian systems often look strongest where they are most choreographed. North Korea’s public rituals of unity may include sincere believers. But they may also include exhausted performers, frightened beneficiaries, and careful skeptics who know the script too well to deviate from it. When a regime depends on people who can perform loyalty without believing in it, its greatest strength begins to resemble a hidden weakness. Privileged but Powerless shows that North Korean elites have grievances that are real and widespread. The question is not whether these grievances exist; the question becomes when, and under what conditions, will they become politically consequential.

Jieun Baek is an adjunct faculty member at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. She is the author of North Korea’s Hidden Revolution and researches elite discontent and regime instability in authoritarian states, particularly North Korea and Burma.

1. Baek, Jieun. Privileged But Powerless: How North Korean Elite Grievances Reveal the Regime’s Greatest Weakness (Yale University Press, 2025), 130. ︎

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James K.A. Smith—

Call it what you will—our age of polarization, an epoch of epic uncertainty, or a cultural moment plagued by distraction and dis-information. Under any of these descriptions, we are trying to name something we feel in our beleaguered collective psyche.

One of the reasons I wrote Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark is my conviction that we will only begin to really grapple with what plagues us if we recognize this as a spiritual condition. I do not mean this in a narrowly “religious” sense. Rather, we will only begin to address these maddening phenomena if we attend to deeper challenges for the human spirit. We are up against something that technocracy can’t fix. I want to venture a diagnosis of this spiritual condition and then explain why, surprisingly, we might find a remedy in ancient mysticism.

Diagnosis: Our “Spiritual” Condition

We are awash in knowledge and overwhelmed by a flood of information. We have unimaginable libraries of data available in our pockets. In such a world, we feel pressured to demonstrate that we are “in the know.” Knowledge has become both currency and identity.

Yet because our society is organized as an information economy, we are also vexed by mis- and dis-information. In an age of AI slop and digital duplicity, we can’t even believe our own eyes anymore. Hence, a sad paradox: somehow, we know more than we ever have before and yet we feel less confident that we know what’s true. So despite astronomical amounts of information and knowledge, we trust one another less and less. We are more suspicious than ever. There are always people and movements willing to capitalize on these conditions, to leverage our collective suspicion to serve their own ends. These people we call Cynics.

And does it not feel like we are more occupied than ever before? The unending blitz of information has made us more distracted than ever. Entire industries exist to occupy our attention (in both senses of the word). The point of that “occupation” is to either colonize our attention for consumption or carve us up into factions of tribal animosity. We become merely “branded” by labels we’ve acquired, whether its Prada or Lululemon, Republican or Democrat, or “us” versus “them.” 

Our spiritual condition, then, is one of engineered distraction that occupies our attention in order to make us complacent consumers and clannish competitors, carved up into warring classes and identities.

This, I want to suggest, is fundamentally de-humanizing. By de-humanizing us, this spiritual environment also breeds animosity and undercuts solidarity. When we are reduced to consuming, branded animals, the acquired “identities” that differentiate us become more important than the rational and spiritual commonalities we share as human beings. The goods of the Enlightenment are being systematically dismantled.

In diagnosing this as a “spiritual” condition, it seems important to recognize here in the United States, a strange outlier in the story of secularization, that religion is no guaranteed inoculation against this spiritual condition. Indeed, in too many ways, Christianity in the U.S. reflects and sometimes even foments this spiritual condition.

A Prescription: Un-knowing

How to respond to this spiritual condition then? What do we need?

We must begin with a humble admission: we can’t think our way out of this mess. More knowledge will not save us. I know this might sound crazy up front, but we won’t solve the problem of disinformation with…more information. (You’ve tried that with your uncle at Thanksgiving. How did that work out?) We must first treat the root cause of our distrust. That is going to take something other than knowledge. And as a Christian, I would add this admission: any adequate prescription will need to heal both our shared spiritual condition and heal contemporary Christianity.

The prescription I propose, which animates Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark, is two-fold.

First: instead of amassing more knowledge and information, we need to be on a quest for wisdom.

Our hunger for knowledge has mostly been a penchant for mastery and control. But that posture toward the world and one another has only increased our anxiety and suspicion.

Modernity has taught us that we are res cogitans, “thinking things,” reducing us to data processors. Maybe now that AI is taking over that less-than-human task, we might be free to finally be the lovers of wisdom we are called to be. Plato reminds us that wisdom begins in wonder. Wonder is a posture of curiosity without mastery. This is why I think we all need more philosophy in our lives—the love (phileo) of wisdom (sophia).

Second: the pursuit of wisdom requires us to learn the art of contemplation. This is where we have something to learn from the mystics.

Wisdom is available only for those in a posture to receive it and who dwell in a silence quiet enough to hear sophia’s whispers. So, if we need wisdom to undo our spiritual condition in late modernity, we need to cultivate the capacity for contemplation to open us up to wisdom. In other words, to open up a path of loving wisdom, we are going to have to cultivate the capacity to resist both distraction and consumption.

For the mystics, wisdom is found only on the other side of un-knowing. This is why I think the contemplative tradition of Christianity is a resource for countering our spiritual condition in the twenty-first century. We don’t need more information; we won’t heal our distrust and suspicion with more knowledge. Instead, the mystics invite us to consider a more radical therapy: we must learn how to find solitude, listen to silence, and dwell in the darkness of un-knowing if we are going to be awakened to the wonder that is wisdom.

The mystics universally attest to a surprising—wonder-full—result of walking this path: People look different. This is the wager of the mystical path: that the love of wisdom leads, ultimately, to the wisdom of love.

James K. A. Smith is professor of philosophy at Calvin University. He is the award-winning author of a numerous books, including You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit and On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts. He lives in Grand Rapids, MI.

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Michael Scott—

In the run-up to the 2024 UK General Election, a UK university poll found that half of young people surveyed were dissatisfied with how democracy works in the UK.¹ In a 2025 UK Youth Poll (for those aged 16-29) the results again underlined young people’s concern about the state of democracy.² This is not a UK-specific response, but one that can be paralleled in many countries for a variety of political, economic and historical reasons. The nuance of these polls is that most young people are not calling for the rejection of democracy in favor of more authoritarian styles of government, but instead for a better system of democracy that can deliver meaningful change.

Such findings might make us reflect on the origins of democracy as a political system in ancient Athens and what we might take from it as we seek to reinvigorate and perhaps reinvent democracy in the 21^st century. Modern politicians often talk about the link between ancient and modern democracy as if it was an unbroken chain. But the reality is of course that, for most of the centuries between the invention of democracy in ancient Athens and its wide adoption in the modern world, the reaction to ancient Athens’s political system has been one of revulsion. Even in the debates of the Founding Fathers in America, as the Papers of James Madison show, ancient Athenian democracy was rejected as an exemplar for the new American Constitution, with participants famously stating that “had every Athenian been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”³

I have recently written a biography of the Athenian statesman Themistocles, who grew up in the early heady days of Athenian democracy. He was just sixteen when Athens threw off its final version of tyrannical rule and instead embraced a system of “equality before the law,” that would evolve into a system of “demokratia” or  “people-power” over the following thirty years. Themistocles came from a family of no special consequence, and it was in large part only because of this changing political system around him that he was able to break through to play a major political role, serving, for example, as its chief magistrate just after his thirtieth birthday.

But what Themistocles also bore witness to was an extraordinary surge in aggressive political people-power in the decade after he was chief magistrate. During the 480s BCE, the sources bear witness to the first use of “ostracism” in ancient Athens. We are not sure whether the process of ostracism had been in existence since the adoption of the new “equality before the law” system twenty-plus years previously, whether it had technically existed even before that, or whether it was brought into being for the first time during the 480s. But what’s clear is that the Athenians embraced it in the 480s with gusto. Of all the attested ostracisms during the whole of the fifth century BCE, half of them take place in the 480s. This was the ostracism decade.

But what was it? Ostracism involved the Athenian people coming together to agree first on whether an ostracism vote was required. If they agreed that it was, then everyone wrote the name of one person they would like to see ostracized from Athenian politics. They wrote that name on small, discarded fragments of pottery known in ancient Greek as “ostraca” (from where the name of the vote—and our word ostracism—comes). The votes were counted and the person with the most votes was banished from Athens for 10 years. It’s not difficult to see why the Founding Fathers characterized ancient Athenian democracy as mob rule.

Early votes in the 480s show the Athenians were mostly focused on expelling those still associated with tyranny; later in the decade, they targeted those associated with Athens’s enemies. But increasingly, this mechanism was used to expel those who had simply become too big for their boots —those who thought the system was about them rather than them serving the system, and its people. Themistocles’ name during the 480s appears on these ostraca —but never quite in high enough number to top the table.

What prompted the sudden take-up of ostracism in the 480s in Athens? Some point to the increased need for security occasioned by the Persian invasion at Marathon in 490 BCE and the incursions of other local foes. No doubt there is something in that. But perhaps it was also occasioned by a feeling of disillusionment in the system—now more than two decades old—and its ability to deliver on its promises and effect real change. Ostracism has been categorized as enabling the Athenian political system to let off steam, to signal its key grievances and problems; and at a basic level, to let everyone just formally say what—or rather whom—was bothering them.

Many have suggested that ostracism could provide an inspiration for the kind of reforms the young would like to see today, as a lightning rod to reinvigorate democracy and enable it to deliver on its ideals. For ancient Athens, the turbulent politics of the 480s, combined with Athens’ survival—and indeed glorious victories—against the Persians in 480 and 479 BCE, set in train the emergence of a triumphal era of democracy across the following decades. Perhaps something similar might result again today, hopefully from political reform alone, without the need for major conflict alongside it. But politicians beware: Themistocles did eventually top the ostracism vote and found himself out of Athens in the late 470s BCE. He, for all his experience of Athenian politics, had seemingly forgotten the single most important rule of Athenian politics: it’s not about you, it’s about the people.

1. Royal Holloway, University of London, “Survey Finds That Nearly Half of Young People Are Unhappy with UK Democracy,” July 4, 2024, https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/about-us/news/survey-finds-that-nearly-half-of-young-people-are-unhappy-with-uk-democracy/ ︎
2. “University of Glasgow – Glasgow Social Sciences Hub – Young People Believe in Democracy but Fear for Its Future, Finds Survey of Youth.” n.d. https://www.gla.ac.uk/explore/glasgowsocialscienceshub/resources/all/headline_1167843_en.html. ︎
3. “The Avalon Project : Federalist No 55.” n.d. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed55.asp. ︎

Michael Scott is professor of classics and ancient history and pro-vice-chancellor for international affairs at the University of Warwick, UK. He is the author of several books, including Delphi: A History of the Center of the Ancient World; Ancient Worlds: A Global History of Antiquity; and X Marks the Spot: An Adventurous History of Archaeology, as well as writer and presenter of multiple documentaries for BBC, ITV, National Geographic, and SBS. www.michaelscottweb.com 

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This year marks the 250^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. This semiquincentennial of the establishment of the United States of America is being celebrated throughout the country by a slew of exhibitions, reenactments, documentaries and publications that focus on the Revolutionary War as well as many other chapters of American history. But the 250^th anniversary is also being marked by controversy, as the Trump administration has been working to censor accounts of US history in Smithsonian museums, at national historical sites, and on government websites; to defund revisionist scholarship and cultural projects; and to promote its own slate of official commemorations. In one of many such controversies, the US National Park Service removed wall texts about slavery that had been hanging in the President’s House, part of the Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia. The removal of these wall panels created national news coverage, grassroots resistance from local activists, and a lawsuit filed by the city of Philadelphia.

Episodes like this one illustrate how significantly histories of early America have been reenvisioned over time as well as the importance of race in the public’s understanding of those histories. In the 1930s, Colonial Williamsburg similarly helped reshape popular perceptions of the Revolutionary War, in part through its depiction of racial hierarchy. Often considered the first living history museum in the United States, Colonial Williamsburg restored the town of Williamsburg, Virginia to its appearance during the eighteenth century, when it had served as the capital of the Virginia colony. While Massachusetts had long occupied pride of place in histories of the American Revolution, Colonial Williamsburg recentered Virginia and the South more generally as crucial theaters of US independence. This recentering aligned with Lost Cause ideologies of the period, which sought to reconcile North and South by repositioning southern history as national history. Colonial Williamsburg, like other cultural artifacts of the Lost Cause, encouraged White Americans from outside the South to identify with historic White southerners as their own cultural ancestors and to understand southern history as part of the larger collective national heritage. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the financier and philanthropist who funded Colonial Williamsburg, even received an award from the New York Southern Society, an organization devoted to commemorating “Southern social life manners, and character,” for showing how the “history and traditions of the Southern States are inspirations for a better national life.”

What enabled White Americans from all over the United States to identify with Virginia’s eighteenth-century past was the immersive, uncanny experience of visiting Colonial Williamsburg. The organization reconstructed and restored hundreds of historic buildings; moved unsightly electrical and telegraph lines underground; pushed modern highways, businesses and utilities outside the historic area; and replaced eleven thousand linear feet of modern sidewalks with those of “authentic” materials like brick and oyster shell. Through this marshalling of twentieth-century technologies and industrial capital, Colonial Williamsburg gave visitors the novel experience of strolling down eighteenth-century streets and looking out of eighteenth-century windows onto eighteenth-century views. One tourist even described walking around the site all day until his feet began to feel “authentic 18^th century.” At Colonial Williamsburg, visitors drew on their own bodily senses to feel history all around them as an immersive experience, in which the past truly seemed as if it had been revived or brought back to life in the present. This created an uncanny slippage between past and present, between representation and reality, but one that enabled twentieth century tourists to take on the subject positions of historical figures—to imagine themselves as “founding fathers” or their “ladies” as they strolled the streets of Colonial Williamsburg.

One of the reasons why White visitors could slip into the past so easily at Colonial Williamsburg  was because it presented early America as recognizably familiar. Colonial Williamsburg’s designers catered to the public’s preconceived notions about the aristocratic elegance and gracious living of the colonial era, and they employed racial hierarchy to create a particularly convincing illusion of the past. Black costumed interpreters worked at Colonial Williamsburg as coachmen and kitchen staff to portray the enslaved workers of the antebellum period and to reinforce the elite status of the White costumed interpreters who represented the “planter gentry” or “southern belles.” As tourists’ accounts and marketing images of Colonial Williamsburg make clear, the presence of such Black workers was celebrated by White visitors and furthered the impression of a complete historical ecosystem. But the contrast between Black and White costumed interpreters also reinforced inequalities that 1930s Americans were used to, strengthening the sense that Colonial Williamsburg was recognizably true and authentic. In this way, Colonial Williamsburg legitimized racial inequality as historically long-standing and naturalized it as a conventional norm.

Colonial Williamsburg’s commitment to aligning with White visitors’ expectations of the past made history feel recognizably familiar and convincingly authentic. The recent events at the President’s House in Philadelphia show what can happen when historic sites do not align with visitors’ expectations. Jeffrey Anderson, a member of the first Trump administration who visited the site in 2025, was so appalled by its emphasis on slavery that he published a censorious article that year called “Hijacking America’s Story,” which he said he’d “like to think” influenced Trump officials to target the site for scrutiny. But removing the site’s acknowledgement of slavery led local historical groups and residents to their own acts of protest, including posting alternate signage, leaving flowers to mourn the loss, writing reactions on the empty placards, and signing on to open letters. Similar activism has had dramatic impacts on the racial politics of Colonial Williamsburg, from the Civil Rights leaders who pressured the organization to desegregate its facilities in the 1950s to the staff members who staged a controversial reenactment of a slave auction in the 1990s. As we commemorate the semiquincentennial of the United States, we can remember not just the history of the nation but also its history of historical revision, and the ways in which its citizens have worked repeatedly to center their own stories. 

K. L. H. Wells is associate professor of American art and architecture in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

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