Since the mid-1980s, Andrea Fraser, the 2025 Happy and Bob Doran Artist in Residence, Yale University Art Gallery, has worked in the realm of institutional critique, investigating and revealing the ways in which organizations, groups, and individuals hold and wield power. Frequently challenging the biases of arts institutions, her videos, performances, and texts deftly combine careful research with incisive, often humorous, delivery.

Onitsha Market Literature—named after a city east of the Niger River—emerged in the early 1950s. The popular pamphlet style soon spread to other centers throughout the then British colony of Nigeria. These ephemeral publications circulated widely throughout the busy marketplace, and writers intended them to be both educating and entertaining for the common people.

1975 marks the momentous end of the Vietnam War—when the U.S. military formally withdraws its troops and North Việt Nam begins to occupy its southern counterpart. Both events are memorialized in American visual memory, in which images of U.S. helicopters leaving scores of desperate people behind and a tank bulldozing through National Unification Palace in Sài Gòn are iconic mnemonics of the war and its close. In other words, much of our understanding of “Vietnam,” my own included, has been narrated through visuality and spectacle.

Yale Library DEIA and the MLK25 Citywide Read Planning Committee are partnering with churches across the New Haven and Greater Connecticut area to engage in a civic discourse on the written works of Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II. We are hosting a collaborative virtual Bible study session led by Yale staff members on Thursday, January 30, from 5:30pm to 7:00pm. This session will focus on Dr. Barber’s perspective on the history of civil rights in the United States and the role religion has played in shaping that history.

In Almost Futures: Sovereignty and Refuge (UC Press, 2024), I question practices of sovereignty at the heart of modern understandings of what it means to be human in a history imagined as moving ever closer to human mastery at its end. If colonialism and imperialism subjugate others by treating them as less than human in this progressive historiography, nationalist and liberation movements have sought to reverse such dialectics, yet stayed well within this understanding of the human defined by sovereignty.