Left History (E-Journal - York University)
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Shatema Threadcraft, The Black Female Body and the Body Politic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
Full text linkRobeson Taj Frazier, The East is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
Full text linkSamson A. Bezabeh, Subjects of Empires/Citizens of States: Yemenis in Djibouti and Ethiopia (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2016).
Full text linkCarina E. Ray, Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015).
Full text linkContested Images: Debates on Nudity, Sexism, and Porn in The Body Politic, 1971–1987
Full text linkThis article examines debates on nudity, sexism, and pornography in the Canadian gay and lesbian newspaper The Body Politic, tracing its use of images and people’s responses to them over time. In the 1970s, concerns about sexism and the objectification of the body shaped discussions over sexual and erotic imagery. In the 1980s concerns about pornography were more current, since they mirrored the then-contemporary debates over pornography and censorship. Drawing upon archival sources and oral histories, the article argues that TBP’s visual culture—particularly its sexual and erotic imagery—played a key role in the paper’s community-building project. The article also shows how responses to images reflect a deep ambivalence, and the conflicting perspectives shaping the paper’s production and reception. While liberationist politics, feminist theory, and ideas of a “gay community” influenced the paper throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the meanings that people ascribed to such concepts were diverse and sometimes incompatible
Karen Routledge, Do You See Ice? Inuit and Americans at Home and Away (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).
Full text linkLooking for Avrom Yanovsky: An Exploration of the Cultural Front
Full text linkThis is a preliminary exploration of the work of Avrom Yanovsky (1911–1979) as a cultural producer associated with the radical left in Canada. The historical sieve of cultural selection has not favoured him, but the name “Avrom,” with which he signed most of his work, is a recurring signifier in the historical memory of the Canadian left. Researchers in the field are often aware of the many political cartoons he published in Communist newspapers such as The Worker and others from the early 1930s onwards. In addition to cartoons, Yanovsky’s cultural output included portraits, sketches, illustrations, stage sets, costumes, banners, murals and other art. He invented original characters and stories for Canadian comic books and worked on animated films and documentaries. He undertook publicity and labour education projects for unions and was also prominent in the Canadian Society of Graphic Art. An exponent of Yiddish culture, he was active in the cultural life of the United Jewish People’s Order and a familiar figure at their summer camps. He was widely known for his popular “chalk talks,” which he modelled on the practice of J.W. Bengough, the politically engaged cartoonist of an earlier generation. Yanovsky shared Margaret Fairley’s views on the responsibilities of the artist-revolutionary, and his occasional writings focused on the centrality of culture in any strategy to promote radical social change
