Category: Arts & Humanities

“It’s tempting to take these great figures of history, these creative and brilliant individuals, and see in them what we want to see,” said Steven Nadler, author of “Rembrandt’s Jews” and a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “With Rembrandt, it’s not just tempting, it’s also comforting, to see him as a friend of the Jews at a particular historical period when Jews did not have a lot of friends in many places.”

The publishing industry was also influenced by Adichie’s style, says Ainehi Edoro, founder of literary blog Brittle Paper and associate professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Before her, African fiction often came packaged with a kind of ethnographic weight – expected to ‘explain’ Africa to a western audience,” she says. “But Adichie’s work wasn’t performing ‘Africanness’ for an outsider’s gaze; it was literary, intimate, contemporary. She helped shift expectations – both in publishing and among readers – so that the next wave of African writers didn’t have to over-explain, dilute or justify their stories.”

Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, an assistant professor of history at University of Wisconsin-Madison, knows the album better than the average listener.

That’s because he’s the mastermind behind the visualizers highlighting Puerto Rican history that accompany each track on the album. Bad Bunny’s team reached out to Meléndez-Badilloafter his book “Puerto Rico: A National History” published last year.

Dubbed his “most Puerto Rican album ever,” the record was released with 17 informative visualizers that outlined key moments in Puerto Rican history. Each installment was written by professor Jorell Meléndez-Badillo of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who used his own academic book, “Puerto Rico: A National History,” as a reference.

What started as an impromptu lunch (at two square tables pushed together; the round table came a year later) proved to be such delicious fun that the group returned at 1 p.m., and practically every day thereafter, inviting new lunch companions, until it dissolved in the early 1930s,” wrote University of Wisconsin history professor Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen in the New York Times.

Bad Bunny, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, knows his music knows no borders, so, alongside the project, he also released visualizers going over the history of Puerto Rico with the help of Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, assistant professor of Latin American and Caribbean history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“I’ve always wanted to take academic knowledge outside the ivory tower, and this project has allowed me to share our history on a global platform,” Meléndez-Badillo tells Teen Vogue in Spanish. “Art can’t be decontextualized from the moment it’s produced. There’s no way to escape Puerto Rico’s colonial reality, where we deal with blackouts, displacement, and the appropriation of our historical memory daily. Like a committed Puerto Rican, Bad Bunny is using his platform to amplify the conversations taking place in Puerto Rico.”

This “love letter to Puerto Rico,” as one headline about the album puts it, isn’t just entertainment. Working with Jorell Meléndez-Badillo of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of “Puerto Rico: A National History,” Bad Bunny includes 17 mini-history lessons about the island, one for each song.

“[Bad Bunny] was really interested in having that sort of historical component, so people were not only listening to the songs on YouTube, but learning their history while they do so,” Meléndez-Badillo told the Los Angeles Times.

The songs on the album were released with visualizers on YouTube, each one of them including historic messages written by Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, a professor of Latin American and Caribbean history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, highlighting different eras of Puerto Rico’s political past and its social justice heroes.

Jeremy Morris teaches media and culture at UW Madison and explained that people care about their most listened to music because it tells the story of a year in their lives. “It’s a part of your identity, it helps you express who you are and it helps you understand yourself right?” he said. “It’s very personal and it’s an intimate form of media. You spend a lot of time in a year if you’re someone who likes listening to music, it means a lot to you.”