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This Week in Books
March 28, 2009 in book reviews
Currently Reading
(Postethnic America by David Hollinger)
This book has really helped me define what I find so frustrating and discouraging about race studies in academia. The whole discussion has become mired in politically-correct talk, such that the simplest idea must be couched in increasingly tentative and vague language. Don’t talk about identity, talk about affiliations. Don’t even talk about race, talk about ethno-racial blocs. It’s not that I disagree that our identities ought to be voluntary rather than prescriptive, or that I don’t recognize that race is a completely arbitrary and socially-constructed idea. It’s just exhausting to keep up with what is permitted in the discussion of race/ethnicity/culture/affiliation/whatever.
Nevertheless, I’m finding Hollinger’s writing to be remarkably clear, and it serves as both a good primer and refresher course for the developments that have taken place in race studies from the ’60s through the year 2000. I would actually recommend this 200-page (with generous line spacing) book for the casual reader.
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Currently reading
The Double Game
Seating Arrangements
The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist
Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Ever-Ending Earth
The Flame Alphabet
Big Questions
Letters from Hawaii
The Adventures of Augie March
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
Last Man in Tower
Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen
Lost Steps
Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s & 40s
Vintage Murakami
A History of the Modern World
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I need to read this. I have completely checked out of the race discussions in the feminist blogosphere and elsewhere because I cannot keep up with what is OK and what is not and it seems that there is no acceptable contribution from me (as a white person) to the conversation. Actually, even saying just that is cause for dramarama and criticism in that world, for various exhausting reasons I don’t have the energy to detail. It becomes easier, sadly, to just check out.
[...] having finished the refreshingly uncluttered Postethnic America, I sped through Carolina de Robertis’s debut novel, The Invisible Mountain. A friend of mine [...]