Trying out a new weekly: Efforts to compile the things I’m reading for class, life, and otherwise.
Organizing Concepts and questions this Week:
- Realism and its relationship with postmodernism.
- What is a realist novel?
- What is an author?
- How can a book open up new discursive categories and practices?
- Continuing interest in Ken Warren’s project of “What Was African American Literature?
The Intuitionist, Colson Whitehead: A racial allegory set in the framework of Elevator Inspector-speak. Pitting “Empiricists” against “Intuitionists,” Whitehead’s novel offers a meditation on the vocabularies that constitute our everyday lives, while at the same time (I think) mirroring the racial/linguistic criticisms of Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo. Great coincidence to have read both of these books in the same week: they represent pictures of postmodern conceptions of race at very different historical moments (Reed in 1972 and Whitehead in 2000).
Landscape for a Good Woman, Carolyn Kay Steedman: Steedman’s famous blockbuster academic autobiography offers a means of giving voice to working class women. As far as autobiographies go, it pushes the protagonist/author fairly far to the margins in the interest of creating a discourse for unrepresented class and gender groups. Interesting to read this book in relation to The Economist’s recent cover article on women in the workplace, We Did It. Women now constitute 51% of the labor force in America. Is this really Mission Accomplished? What about Equal Pay? What about the fact that 84% of custodial single parents in America are Women who must often work two or three jobs?
Kind of a riff, but there’s something not-so-vaguely patriarchal about The Economist’s claim, especially the Rosie the Riveter cover. I don’t know what you all think about that.
Great articles:
A Risky Proposal: The New Yorker’s take on Gay Marriage and Perry v. Schwartzeneggar. Great as a primer on the state of affairs in California and the implications for civil rights in the United States if this thing goes to the Supreme Court. Required reading for anyone who wants to augment their vocabulary for engaging in this conversation. Aka, ideally, everyone.
How America Can Rise Again, Jim Fallows, The Atlantic: Jim waxes poetic upon his return from China. Can America rise? Interesting to read next to Foreign Affairs’ story The Future of Taiwan, detailing the history and prospects for US-Chinese relations vis-a-vis the island-across-the-strait.
Album this Week:
Fear of a Black Planet, Public Enemy: Thinking a lot about conspiracy (as it relates to Mumbo Jumbo) this week. But also had just read Fredric Jameson’s The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism and Henry Louis Gates’ The Signifying Monkey again, both of which were published around the same time as Public Enemy’s album was released. Where are we, we of Barack Obama’s America, in terms of conceptions of racial categories? How do we define ourselves as belonging to race these days? Who’s talking about this?
