After the success of “I Am Not Your Negro,” HBO gave Peck carte blanche for his next big project. What resulted is a sweeping meditation on colonialism and the nature of truth itself.
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Tag Archives: colonization
Decolonizing the Hunt for Dinosaurs and Other Fossils
Younger paleontologists are working to overcome some historical legacies of their discipline and change how people learn about natural history.
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Uprooting Colonialism From the Fossil-Finding Field
Younger paleontologists are working to overcome some historical legacies of their discipline and change how people learn about natural history.
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Napoleon Isn’t a Hero to Celebrate
Institutions in France should pay more attention to their country’s history of slavery instead of honoring an icon of white supremacy.
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In a Palace of Colonialism, a ‘Quiet Revolutionary’ Takes Charge
The academic and historian Pap Ndiaye wants to turn around an institution with a problematic legacy so it tells the story of France’s immigrants.
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How the Dead Hand of Imperialism Continues to Influence World Politics
Samir Puri’s “The Shadows of Empire” examines how the legacies of empires remain important in the “first empire-free millennium.”
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Lucky Luke, the Comic Book Cowboy, Discovers Race, Belatedly
For the first time in the Franco-Belgian comic book classic, Black characters have full-fledged roles and are drawn without the racist depictions that marred the genre.
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Heating Up Culture Wars, France to Scour Universities for Ideas That ‘Corrupt Society’
The government announced an investigation into social science research, broadening attacks on what it sees as destabilizing American influences.
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The Sinking of a Bust Surfaces a Debate Over Denmark’s Past
An artists’ group, criticized as vandals for dumping the bust of an 18th-century king, Frederik V, into Copenhagen Harbor, says it wanted to draw attention to Denmark’s role in slave trading.
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A Painter Explores His Royal Roots
Roméo Mivekannin’s great-great-grandfather was an African king whose treasures were looted by colonial forces. As France prepares to return some of the artifacts, the painter is examining how the past shaped his own identity.
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Report Aims at ‘Reconciling’ France and Algeria, Its Former Colony
A government-commissioned study offers proposals to address longstanding grievances. But it does not recommend an official apology and skirts the issue of systemic torture by French troops.
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Humboldt Forum in Berlin Finally Opens (Kind of)
A modest ceremony inaugurated the troubled museum, one of the most expensive and ambitious culture projects in Europe. The only thing is, you can’t go in.
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Return Looted Art to Former Colonies, Dutch Committee Tells Government
The Netherlands should show “a willingness to return” items taken without consent, and to do so without conditions, a report said.
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U.K. Conservation Society Details Links to Colonialism and Slavery
The National Trust said a third of the properties it manages had direct links to colonialism or slavery. Some have a “hugely uncomfortable” history, it said.
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The Forgotten Colonial Forces of World War II
“There’s a scattered memory of their sacrifice all over Europe.” The Allied powers relied on colonial troops to defeat the Axis, but their contributions are not often recognized.
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Roanoke’s ‘Lost Colony’ Was Never Lost, New Book Says
A new book aims to settle a centuries-old question of what happened to a group of English colonists. Archaeologists said that its theory was plausible but that more evidence was needed.
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French Magazine Sparks Outrage Over Racist Depiction of Black Lawmaker
Danièle Obono, a French-Gabonese lawmaker, was portrayed as an enslaved African in a fictional narrative that she described as a “political and racist attack.”
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Junipero Serra’s Sins
In California, protesters have toppled statues of Junipero Serra, whose missions brutalized Native Americans. How should we think of him now?
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Colonialism Made the Modern World. Let’s Remake It.
This is what real “decolonization” should look like.
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For French-Algerian Families, Virus Disrupts Cherished Summer Ritual
Holidays in Algeria are a cornerstone of the cross-cultural identity of many French people with roots there. This year, they are stuck at home, and the pain is acute: “It’s sacred for us to leave.”
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Belgium’s King Sends Letter of Regret Over Colonial Past in Congo
The first acknowledgment by the royal family of the European country’s brutal actions in central Africa stopped short of an outright apology. It comes as Belgium begins to publicly reckon with the abuses.
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George Floyd’s Killing Forces Wider Debate on France’s Slave-Trading Past
Rather than tear down statues, some argue that the past should not be obliterated, but remembered and explained.
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From Columbus to Confederates, Anger About Statues Boils Over
From Virginia to New Mexico, protests over police brutality have brought hundreds of years of American history bubbling to the surface.
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Edward Colston’s Toppled Statue Glorified Slavery
The removal of a slave trader’s statue in England begins a conversation about how we are shaped by our past and how it configures the present.
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Going Viral, or Not, in the Milky Way
Is the pandemic a rehearsal for our own cosmic mortality?
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The 500-year-old bones of African slaves tell a traumatic story
Enlarge (credit: San José de los Naturales, Osteology Laboratory, (ENAH) / R. Barquera)
Archaeologists found the bones of three young African men in a 500-year-old mass grave in what is now Mexico City. The chemical makeup of their bones sheds light on their earlier lives in Africa, and forensic analysis reveals hard, painful lives and young deaths.
How the dead speak
Archaeologists unearthed the mass grave in 1992 while digging a new subway line in Mexico City. Five hundred years earlier, the site had been the grounds of the Hospital Real de San José de los Naturales. The Spanish colonizers had built the hospital to treat indigenous people—that’s what “los Naturales” means in Spanish—but these three men were African, not North or Central American. Their bones radiocarbon-dated to the 1500s CE, which makes them part of an important but often anonymous group of people: the first African people abducted in their homelands and brought across the Atlantic Ocean to European colonies in the Americas.
Of the 10 to 20 million people transported to the Atlantic over the next 300 years, nearly 150,000 of them ended up, like these three men, in the colony of New Spain. Like countless other oppressed and otherwise overlooked people throughout human history, they left behind no written accounts, no artifacts to hint at their lives, and no names. Only their bones tell their stories.
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