September Reading

An American Utopia: Frederic Jameson

I finally caught up with Jameson's latest. Fascinating proposals, but strangely, to my mind, disconnected from on the ground activist struggles. I think there's a place for an intellectual to open up new speculative ideas that might not be part of the discourse, but I'm not sure what that does without the writer drawing out the connections. For instance, I don't know how we imagine Jameson's idea of an optimal superstructure of personal and sexual license without thinking about theoretical discourse on queer utopias. I don't know how to think about universal health care by way of conscription without thinking about ways race, gender and disability could sustain zones of exclusions through the transformation to the new system. So I'd like to imagine a new book like this, doing the same utopian work (which I do think is beneficial) less seemingly structured in its interests with a now dated high marxist refusal to think seriously with intersectionality. What if Jameson had thought with scholars of Race and Reconstruction, like David Roediger, whose most recent work actually gestures to how post-civil war veteran status created conditions in terms of both race and disability for zone of freedom from whiteness, and how the contest played out over land and rents for the creation of an interracial democracy?

I will admit to not yet reading the supplementary essays, so I don't know the degree to which these questions get addressed, but I think it could have been a more powerful, and political useful, if its speculations were connected/thought through history and experience.

Yaa Gyasi - Homecoming

The first big epic of the season for me. Was excited to read this one, and I'm very interested in Gyasi's formal challenge of writing a transatlantic familial epic through the fragmented memories of diaspora, but I feel the execution is a little mixed. The first half of the book can feel a little like a guided tour through tropes in modern African and neo-slavery fiction, since the stories are so quick and don't push to far past what other authors have done with similar historical settings, but with more insight and detail. However, in the second half, the story-telling to me feels more original and complicated, as it deals more directly with the themes of loss and recovery of a past that the first half sets up. I particularly thought the post reconstruction story of H (a southern convict mineworker) and Akua's story of flight from an abusive missionary only to be persecuted by her new Asante tribal community in Ghana tapped into difficult histories of guilt and failed attempts to build solidarities in the face of being drowned by racism and oppression, in ways I hadn't quote seen in previous fiction, while drawing careful implicit parallels between colonial Africa and segregation in the states. I can foresee this being an excellent book to teach, regardless of my slight disappointment, simply because it covers so many large themes in the traditions of African-American Lit and African Lit, while bringing them together in a unique transatlantic work.