Unburnable: A Novel

Average customer rating:

Takes a while to get started

Chimamanda Adichie's comments on Unburnable

A Must Read

Not a Fluff Read!

Long Story Short

Unburnable: A Novel
Marie-elena John
Manufacturer: Amistad
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0060837578
Release Date: 2006-04-11

Book Description

In this riveting narrative of family, betrayal, vengeance, and murder, Lillian Baptiste is willed back to her island home of Dominica to finally settle her past. Haunted by scandal and secrets, Lillian left Dominica when she was fourteen after discovering she was the daughter of Iris, the half-crazy woman whose life was told of in chanté mas songs sung during Carnival: Matilda Swinging and Bottle of Coke; songs about a village on a mountaintop and bones and bodies; songs about flying masquerades and a man who dropped dead. Lillian knew the songs well. And now she knows these songs -- and thus the history -- belong to her. After twenty years away, Lillian returns to face the demons of her past, and with the help of Teddy, the man she refused to love, she will find a way to heal.

Set partly in contemporary Washington, D.C., and partly in post-World War II Dominica, Unburnable weaves together West Indian history, African culture, and American sensibilities. Richly textured and lushly rendered, Unburnable showcases a welcome and assured new voice.

Customer Reviews:

Takes a while to get started.......2007-09-07

I took a little while for me to get into this book. I, quite frankly, didn't care about Lillian the main character until I was almost a third of the way through. The most dimensional and complex characters were of course Matilda and Iris. Once the novel's focus shift primarily to them, it becomes a page turner. If you feel like investing the time to get to the heart of this tale, give it a read.

Chimamanda Adichie's comments on Unburnable.......2007-07-23

Chimamanda Adichie (Half of a Yellow Sun, Purple Hibiscus: A Novel) had these wonderful things to say about UNBURNABLE in the book review section of London's Guardian newspaper on Saturday June 23, 2007:

"I read Marie-Elena John's novel Unburnable on the plane from New York to Copenhagen. I laughed aloud so often reading this wondrously intelligent book about Dominica and the United States and Africa, about gender, class and race, about love and sexuality, that the bespectacled man sitting next to me put his Wall Street Journal down and leaned over to see what the title was. He asked what it was about. I could have told him how it dealt honestly with issues without ever forgetting to keep character and soul as its centre, but instead I told him a tiny anecdote from the book about black women and thongs. And I much enjoyed his blush."

A Must Read.......2007-03-27

This is a great book to kick back in silence and just immerse yourself into suspense, deep thinking, and a few tears. I was just a little disappointed with the ending, but all in all this was a great read.

Not a Fluff Read!.......2007-01-14

I have been blessed enough in the last week to read not one but TWO great books this one being the greater. I will admit I wasn't wrapped up in the book by page two but by page ten I was all caught up in this story. Marie-Elena John is an EXCELLENT story teller. Her words are beautiful and her descriptions come off the page so effortlessly. I could've easily believed this was her third novel instead of her first. I laughed, I cried and I called all my friends and advised them to please read this book. I did not know anything about Dominica before picking up this novel and now I cannot learn enough. This book intrigued me to no end and I cannot wait to read future publishings from Marie-Elena John. This story is not in the least predictable and her knowledge on the subject matter is outstanding! If you are looking for a mind challenging novel that will shock and educate you at the same time then look no further.

Long Story Short.......2006-11-08

Interesting story, you have to continue to read this book and not stop or you might get side tracked if you put it down for too long.

Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora

Average customer rating:

The Darkness Matters
A look into the history of Black writers in Spec Fic.
Excellent Sci Fi
Worthy of a Hugo.
Get this book!

Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora

Manufacturer: Aspect - Warner Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0446525839

Amazon.com

Dark matter: the nonluminous matter, not yet detected, that nonetheless has detectable gravitational effects on the universe.

Dark matter: the Afro-American presence and influences unseen or unacknowledged by Euro-American culture.

Dark Matter: the first anthology to illuminate the presence and influence of black writers in speculative fiction, with 25 stories, three novel excerpts, and five essays.

This anthology's critical and historical importance is indisputable. But that's not why it will prove to be the best anthology of 2000 in both the speculative and the literary fiction fields. It's because the stories are great: entertaining, imaginative, insightful, sharply characterized, and beautifully written. The earliest story in Dark Matter is acclaimed literary author Charles W. Chesnutt's "The Goophered Grapevine" (1887), in which an aging ex-slave tells a chilling tale of cursed land to a white Northerner buying a Southern plantation. In "The Comet" (1920), W.E.B. Du Bois portrays the rich white woman and the poor black man who may be the only survivors of an astronomical near-miss. In George S. Schuyler's "Black No More" (1931), an excerpt from the satirical novel of the same name, an African American scientist invents a machine that can turn blacks white. More recent reprints include science fiction master Samuel R. Delany's Nebula Award-winning "Aye, and Gomorrah..." (1967), which delineates the socio-sexual effects of asexual astronauts; Charles R. Saunders's heroic fantasy "Gimmile's Songs" (1984), in which a woman warrior encounters a singer with a frightening, compelling magic in ancient West Africa; MacArthur Genius Grant recipient Octavia E. Butler's powerful "The Evening and the Morning and the Night" (1987), in which the cure for cancer creates a terrifying new disease of compulsive self-mutilation; and Derrick Bell's angry, riveting "The Space Traders" (1992), in which aliens offer to trade their advanced technology to the U.S. in exchange for its black population. Other reprints include "Ark of Bones" (1974) by author-poet-folklorist Henry Dumas; "Future Christmas" (1982) by master satirist Ishmael Reed; "Rhythm Travel" (1996) by playwright-poet-critic Amiri Baraka (who has also written as LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amiri Baraka); and "The African Origins of UFOs" (2000) by London-based West Indian author Anthony Joseph.

Most of the stories in Dark Matter are original; these range even more widely in their concerns and themes. In the generation ship of Linda Addison's "Twice, at Once, Separated," a Yanomami Indian tribe preserves its culture in coexistence with technology, while visions tear a young woman from her own wedding. Bestselling novelist Steven Barnes examines degrees of privilege and deprivation when an African American woman artist is trapped in an African concentration camp in his unflinching contribution, "The Woman in the Wall." In John W. Campbell Award winner Nalo Hopkinson's sexy, scary "Ganger (Ball Lightning)," two lovers drifting apart try to reconnect through the separation of virtual sex. A mystic power awakens in the devastated future of Ama Patterson's gorgeous and tough "Hussy Strutt." An artist's infidelity changes two generations in Leone Ross's astute, magic-realist "Tasting Songs." In Nisi Shawl's sharp, witty mythic fantasy "At the Huts of Ajala," the spirit of a modern woman must outwit a god before she is even born. Others contributing new stories are Tananarive Due, Robert Fleming, Jewelle Gomez, Akua Lezli Hope, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Kalamu ya Salaam, Kiini Ibura Salaam, Evie Shockley, and Darryl A. Smith. --Cynthia Ward

Book Description

Dark matter: the nonluminous matter, not yet detected, that nonethelesshas detectable gravitational effects on the universe.Dark matter: the Afro-American presence and influences unseen or unacknowledgedby Euro-American culture. Dark Matter: the first anthology to illuminate the presence and influenceof black writers in speculative fiction, with 25 stories, three novel excerpts,and five essays.This anthology's critical and historical importance is indisputable. But that'snot why it will prove to be the best anthology of 2000 in both the speculativeand the literary fiction fields. It's because the stories are great:entertaining, imaginative, insightful, sharply characterized, and beautifullywritten. The earliest story in Dark Matter is acclaimed literary authorCharles W. Chesnutt's "The Goophered Grapevine" (1887), in which an agingex-slave tells a chilling tale of cursed land to a white Northerner buying aSouthern plantation. In "The Comet" (1920), W.E.B. Du Bois portrays the richwhite woman and the poor black man who may be the only survivors of anastronomical near-miss. In George S. Schuyler's "Black No More" (1931), anexcerpt from the satirical novel of the same name, an African American scientistinvents a machine that can turn blacks white. More recent reprints includescience fiction master Samuel R. Delany's Nebula Award-winning "Aye, andGomorrah..." (1967), which delineates the socio-sexual effects of asexualastronauts; Charles R. Saunders's heroic fantasy "Gimmile's Songs" (1984), inwhich a woman warrior encounters a singer with a frightening, compelling magicin ancient West Africa; MacArthur Genius Grant recipient Octavia E. Butler'spowerful "The Evening and the Morning and the Night" (1987), in which the curefor cancer creates a terrifying new disease of compulsive self-mutilation; andDerrick Bell's angry, riveting "The Space Traders" (1992), in which aliens offerto trade their advanced technology to the U.S. in exchange for its blackpopulation. Other reprints include "Ark of Bones" (1974) byauthor-poet-folklorist Henry Dumas; "Future Christmas" (1982) by master satiristIshmael Reed; "Rhythm Travel" (1996) by playwright-poet-critic Amiri Baraka (whohas also written as LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amiri Baraka); and "The AfricanOrigins of UFOs" (2000) by London-based West Indian author Anthony Joseph.Most of the stories in Dark Matter are original; these range even morewidely in their concerns and themes. In the generation ship of Linda Addison's"Twice, at Once, Separated," a Yanomami Indian tribe preserves its culture incoexistence with technology, while visions tear a young woman from her ownwedding. Bestselling novelist Steven Barnes examines degrees of privilege anddeprivation when an African American woman artist is trapped in an Africanconcentration camp in his unflinching contribution, "The Woman in the Wall." InJohn W. Campbell Award winner Nalo Hopkinson's sexy, scary "Ganger (BallLightning)," two lovers drifting apart try to reconnect through the separationof virtual sex. A mystic power awakens in the devastated future of AmaPatterson's gorgeous and tough "Hussy Strutt." An artist's infidelity changestwo generations in Leone Ross's astute, magic-realist "Tasting Songs." In NisiShawl's sharp, witty mythic fantasy "At the Huts of Ajala," the spirit of amodern woman must outwit a god before she is even born. Others contributing newstories are Tananarive Due, Robert Fleming, Jewelle Gomez, Akua Lezli Hope,Honor+e Fanonne Jeffers, Kalamu ya Salaam, Kiini Ibura Salaam, EvieShockley, and Darryl A. Smith. --Cynthia Ward

Customer Reviews:

The Darkness Matters.......2004-07-30

This is a collection that the literary world needed badly. Typical 'speculative fiction' (encompassing sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and other literary persuasions) often features humanity uniting against common enemies or disasters. But for people of color, the alternative present or near-future utopia/dystopia in any speculative story probably won't be so rosy. Technological advancement, alien contact, or astronomical disasters probably won't eliminate prejudice and inequality, as the writers of African descent collected here show us in consistently hard-hitting ways.

The settings and themes of these short stories are uniformly fascinating and thought-provoking for any intelligent reader. As with any collection of works from various writers, the quality of the stories varies a bit, and this book does have a few bumps in the road that deserve the thumbs-down for heavy-handedness. Examples include the predictable melodrama of 'The Woman in the Wall' by Steven Barnes, or the poorly-plotted conspiracy theories of 'The Space Traders' by Derrick Bell. However, these are minor quibbles, and even these stories contribute to the sheer fascination of this book as a whole.

My favorites include the supremely moving Jazz Age vampire story 'Chicago 1927' by Jewelle Gomez, an outstanding look at the human costs of cloning in 'Like Daughter' by Tananarive Due, the creepy erotic thriller 'Ganger (Ball Lightning)' by Nalo Hopkinson, and the heartbreaking dark fantasy of 'Gimmile's Songs' by Charles Saunders. Of historical interest we have 'Aye, and Gomorrah...' from the master Samuel Delany, the groundbreaking 'The Goophered Grapevine' from way back in 1887 by Charles Chesnutt, and the very chilling 'The Comet' by W.E.B. DuBois (I had forgotten that DuBois wrote fiction, and his important stories are ripe for rediscovery). Kudos to Sheree Thomas for creating this hugely important, haunting, and illuminating anthology. [~doomsdayer520~]

A look into the history of Black writers in Spec Fic........2004-01-31

Writers of African descent have played a long and important role in the history of speculative literature, even though that's not always recognized, either in the past or today. But this book opened my eyes to how much wonderful talent has gone underappreciated until now. Often raw, but always colorful and deep, many of the stories in this collection have the quality to be compared with the masters of the past and present. As both a reader and a writer, this collection inspired me greatly.

I highly recommend it to anyone who's a true officianado of speculative literature.

Excellent Sci Fi.......2003-10-05

I am 56 and have been reading sci fi/fantasy since, oh, about 10. This is one of the best collection of stories I have ever read. You'll be glad you read it. The fact of the color of the writers is interesting, but not important. I have read so much sci fi, and even taken a writing course. The bottom line - this is great science fiction.

Worthy of a Hugo........2002-04-02

I've long suspected there were more writers of color out there besides Octivia Butler and Samuel Delany. Ms. Thomas introduces a rich collection spanning decades. My only question is when will volume 2 be published? If you love SF, add this brilliant work to your collection.

Get this book!.......2002-03-13

A huge sci-fi and fantasy reader I am also getting ready to be a high school teacher of special ed, reading & English. This is a book that will go on my list of books to write lesson plans about and to make sure my students read. The one complaint I have about this book is that I'd read the Butler, Delany & Saunders already. Couldn't we have gotten new stories for this historic anthology? But other writers were a revelation to me.
A great book! Nalo Hopkinson's story about a (...)gone amuck, Tannarive Due's story about the very human side of cloning and Steven Barnes' chilling almost apocalytic picture of a modern African state after a coup are all terrific reading-- and why my students -- and you -- should be excited!

Average customer rating:

Australian SF Reader
My favorite book
A great meditation on mortality and immortality
Entertaining and thought provoking
It changed my life ( and reading habits )

Diaspora: A Novel
Greg Egan
Manufacturer: Eos
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback

General | Science Fiction | Science Fiction & Fantasy | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 0061057983

Amazon.com

In the 30th century, few humans remain on Earth. Most have downloaded themselves into robot bodies or solar-system-spanning virtual realities, escaping death--or so they believe, until the collision of nearby neutron stars threatens life in every form.

Diaspora, written by Hugo Award and John W. Campbell Memorial Award winner Greg Egan, transcends millennia and universes in the tradition of Poul Anderson's Tau Zero, Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix Plus, Camille Flammarion's Omega, and Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men. Diaspora is packed with mind-bending ideas extrapolated from cutting-edge cosmology, physics, and consciousness theory to create an astonishing hard-SF novel inhabited by very strange yet always believable characters. Diaspora is why people read SF. --Cynthia Ward

Book Description

The boldest and most wildly speculative writer of our time, Greg Egan has envisioned a quantum Brave New World -- a masterful saga of a time when not only human life, but fleshly reality itself, will be nothing but a memory...

It is the thirtieth century.The "world" has evolved into a vast network of probes, satellites, and servers knitting the solar system into one scape from the outer planets to the sun. Humanity, too, has reconfigured itself. Most people have chosen immortality, joining the polises to become conscious software. Others have opted for disposable, renewable robotic bodies that remain in contact with the physical world. A few holdouts stubbornly remain fleshers struggling to shape an antiquated existence in the muck and jungle of Earth.

And then there is the Orphan, a genderless digital being grown from a mind seed.

When an unforeseen disaster ravages the fleshers, it awakens the polises to the possibility of their own extinction from bizarre astrophysical processes that seemingly violate fundamental laws of nature. It is up to the Orphan and a group of refugees to find the knowledge that will save them all--a search that will lead them on a quantum adventure to a higher dimension beyond the macrocosmos....

Customer Reviews:

Australian SF Reader.......2007-08-04

A castastrophic astronomical event means living on Earth is a no go. As in a black hole zapped my planet.

Thus created is the Diaspora, and humanity separates into people that live in different modes. In virtualities, as robots, or points on between.

The main thrust here is these extreme posthumans trying to work out what is still important. For example, do we make children - how do we make them, what do we make them? Things like that.

My favorite book.......2007-07-03

What a cool story. I'm a big fan of hard science fiction, and this is about as hard-science as they come. I've read this twice, and I still marvel at some of the wild ideas in there.

A great meditation on mortality and immortality.......2007-02-14

I haven't read science fiction in years, and this happened to be one of the first new books I picked up. When I was younger, I read science fiction for its escapist qualities, but a lot has changed since then. Diaspora is as much an introspective journey as it is an entertaining romp through new worlds.

That said, there's no getting around the fact that this is a difficult book to get into. On the very first page, the author invents a new set of pronouns: "vis" and "vers," as analogs for a virtual "his" or "hers." Since an early usage of the word "Vis" is capitalized, I first thought it was a posessive name: "Vi's" or "Violet's" with the apostrophe missing. Science fiction authors often invent new nouns or adjectives, but new pronouns were a bit much for the first page. Once I began to follow what was occurring, however, Diaspora made for a wonderful journey.

Other than escapism, science fiction can be viewed simply as another backdrop for the only drama that counts, the human experience. Any argument can be done as a "reductio ad absurdum," an idea taken to an extreme and perhaps illogical conclusion. It is for this reason that science fiction is often used as vehicle for delving into the human psyche. Through an exploration of simulated reality and transhuman experience Greg Egan does just that. Because the human mind can ponder neither oblivion nor infinity, both are nearly absurd from our perspective, resulting in a paradox: oblivion itself is a sort of infinity. In an examination of that question, Egan takes the reader on a journey into the bounds of existence, and embraces its logical conclusion. Diaspora serves as an ontological lesson in the guise of fiction.

While the journey and its conclusion are both wonderful, and it is a pity that the novel appears to be out of print, I can't say it is a surprise. Diaspora is hard science fiction, with an emphasis on science. Without a mathematical background and knowledge of multi-dimensional topology, I would imagine that the book would make for a tough read. If you're comfortable reading a book that uses concepts like the tesseract in a pursuit of what Greek philosophers called "logos," though, Diaspora makes for a mindbending adventure.

Entertaining and thought provoking.......2006-11-13

As a reader unfamiliar with the scientific basis for Greg Egan's ideas in this novel, I simply decided to suspend my disbelief and accept the science presented as facts revealed.... Wow, what a roller coaster ride! His writing style seems so clear and non-manipulative that I found it easy to accept ideas I hardly understood. My pleasure was not so much from learning the "hard science" but from simply basking in the presence of a higher (and benign) intelligience. I can relate with some reviewers who complain of a lack of drama in the story which is why I rate this a 4 instead of a 5, yet for some reason I didn't mind compensating for that in my own mind. After the human race has evolved to the point where there is neither a need nor desire for anything from the material world, where there is no competition for anything, then the real basic _human_ needs emerge: what is the meaning of my existence? What kind of world do I want to create for myself and others? Though I see this higher level drama being played out as a subtext; Egan doesn't discuss it directly and some readers may miss it or not care. I think the main appeal to this novel is the depth of abstraction Egan is capable of; as one character puts it "nothing is uncompehensible." Which is the oxymoron: "sentient software" or "non-sentient software"?

It changed my life ( and reading habits ).......2006-09-09

I Thank Greg Egan every night for writing this book.

He never pulls back or waters it down. It is hardcore.

I love it!

Born in a Mighty Bad Land: The Violent Man in African American Folklore and Fiction (Blacks in the Diaspora)

Average customer rating:

Thug culture threatens Black America
Brisk and Original Study
a most compelling study
a most compelling study
From the Author

Born in a Mighty Bad Land: The Violent Man in African American Folklore and Fiction (Blacks in the Diaspora)
Jerry H. Bryant
Manufacturer: Indiana University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Folklore & Mythology | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0253215781

Customer Reviews:

Thug culture threatens Black America.......2006-03-17

My title comes from the 1/16/2006 newspaper article by Cynthia Tucker in the San Francisco Chronicle. This book by Jerry Bryant gives historical background on the "bad man" image and why it finds support in the Black community. "The popularity of thug culture is among the most serious of modern-day threats to Black America . . ." says Cynthia Tucker. The sad fact is that the victims are likely to be young black men.

This is a great book that should be read by all people interested in reducing violence in their communities.

Brisk and Original Study.......2003-07-03

A really interesting overview and analysis of the "baad man" as a central figure in African-American literature, tracing the origins from his earliest appearances in myth and folklore. Lively, literate without being pedantic, and full of interesting and surprising examples. Real insights into such major figures as Richard Wright and Toni Morrison, along with a fascinating section on the sources and achievements of Ice-T and the contemporary rappers that I, never a rap fan, found really eye-opening..

a most compelling study.......2003-07-02

Jerry Bryant has written a most compelling study of the African-American male using history, poetry, song, literature, along with myth and fact. This is a must read for anyone interested in, deeply or just superficially, the ways and the cultural whys and wherefors of the black man in american...yesterday and today. It is done with sensitivity and thoughtfulness and worth anyone's time...and it is damned readable!

a most compelling study.......2003-07-02

From the Author.......2003-04-06

This is a book about African American "badmen" like Stagolee, John Hardy, Railroad Bill, and Devil Winston and how this archetypal figure gets taken up by black novelists, convict "toasters" and gangsta rappers. It tells the story of the defiance of this black folk hero and how middle class novelists and commercial rap artists soften and exploit an originally spontaneous figure of freedom that first emerges at the end of the nineteenth century. Jerry Bryant is professor emeritus of English, California State University, Hayward. By the way, the 5-star rating isn't vanity, it's just that some rating is required by Amazon and I figured it would be counter-productive to give my book anything less. JB

White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel.

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White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel.
Catherine Jurca
Manufacturer: Princeton University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0691057354

Book Description

This is the first book to analyze our suburban literary tradition. Tracing the suburb's emergence as a crucial setting and subject of the twentieth-century American novel, Catherine Jurca identifies a decidedly masculine obsession with the suburban home and a preoccupation with its alternative--the experience of spiritual and emotional dislocation that she terms "homelessness." In the process, she challenges representations of white suburbia as prostrated by its own privileges.

In novels as disparate as Tarzan (written by Tarzana, California, real-estate developer Edgar Rice Burroughs), Richard Wright's Native Son, and recent fiction by John Updike and Richard Ford, Jurca finds an emphasis on the suburb under siege, a place where the fortunate tend to see themselves as powerless. From Babbitt to Rabbit, the suburban novel casts property owners living in communities of their choosing as dispossessed people. Material advantages become artifacts of oppression, and affluence is fraudulently identified as impoverishment. The fantasy of victimization reimagines white flight as a white diaspora.

Extending innovative trends in the study of nineteenth-century American culture, Jurca's analysis suggests that self-pity has played a constitutive role in white middle-class identity in the twentieth century. It breaks new ground in literary history and cultural studies, while telling the story of one of our most revered and reviled locations: "the little suburban house at number one million and ten Volstead Avenue" that Edith Wharton warned would ruin American life and letters.

Writings on Black Women of the Diaspora: History, Language, and Identity (Garland Reference Library of the Humanities)

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Writings on Black Women of the Diaspora: History, Language, and Identity (Garland Reference Library of the Humanities)
Lean'tin Bracks
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Library Binding

United States | Short Stories | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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History | Women's Studies | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

Book Description

Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, and Mary Prince represent the best of African American women writers who draw on the tortuous legacy of their people as a source for their art, revealing and defining themselves as they create compelling narratives that illuminate their roots, their heritage, and their unique culture. The themes that suffuse their writing are family, community, strong women, cultural memory, oral history, and slavery. By analyzing the works of these four remarkable writers, the study shows how today's black woman can take control of her destiny by coming to grips with an obscured and distorted past. These original essays articulate the way in which historical awareness, sensitivity to language, and an understanding of stereotypes can empower enduring artistic visions in a world that is largely indifferent to marginal voices.

From Nation to Diaspora: Samuel Selvon, George Lamming And the Cultural Performance of Gender

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From Nation to Diaspora: Samuel Selvon, George Lamming And the Cultural Performance of Gender
Curdella Forbes
Manufacturer: University of West Indies Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Caribbean & Latin American | History & Criticism | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Barriers Between Us: Interracial Sex In Nineteenth-century American Literature (Blacks in the Diaspora)

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Library Copy

Barriers Between Us: Interracial Sex In Nineteenth-century American Literature (Blacks in the Diaspora)
Cassandra Jackson
Manufacturer: Indiana University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0253345111

Customer Reviews:

Library Copy.......2007-08-27

I bought this book b/c my girlfriend from high school wrote it. It is perfect for my personal library.

Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination (Contraversions: Critical Studies in Jewish Literature, Culture, and Society, 12)

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Wandering Jews

Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination (Contraversions: Critical Studies in Jewish Literature, Culture, and Society, 12)
Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi
Manufacturer: University of California Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Jewish | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0520206452

Book Description

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi's sweeping study of modern Jewish writing is in many ways a long meditation on the thematics of geography in Jewish culture, what she calls the "poetics of exile and return."
Until the late nineteenth century, Jews were identified in their own religious and poetic imagination as wanderers and exiles, their sacred center-Jerusalem, Zion-fatefully out of reach. Opening the book with "Jewish Journeys," Ezrahi begins by examining the work of medieval Hebrew poet Yehuda Halevi to chart a journey whose end was envisioned as the sublime realignment of the people with their original center. When the Holy Land became the site of a political drama of return in the nineteenth century, Jewish writing reflected the shift, traced here in the travel fictions of S.Y. Abramovitsh, S.Y. Agnon, and Sholem Aleichem.
In "Jewish Geographies" Ezrahi explores aspects of reterritorialization through memory in the post-Holocaust writing of Paul Celan, Dan Pagis, Aharon Appelfeld, I.B. Singer and Philip Roth. Europe, where Jews had dreamed of return, has become the new ruined shrine: The literary pilgrimages of these writers recall familiar patterns of grieving and representation and a tentative reinvention of the diasporic imagination-in America, of course, but, paradoxically, even in Zion.

Customer Reviews:

Wandering Jews.......2001-01-06

In recent years, a seemingly endless variety of poetic and political signifiers have been invoked in attempts to describe the experiences of dispossession, minorities, and regions: border, creolization, transculturation, transnationalism, hybridity. These spatial/historical paradigms are often at the crux of cultural debates in much the way that W. E. B. Du Bois's concept of double consciousness would have once occupied center stage. At the top of the list ranks diaspora (and frequently the somewhat elusive diasporic) which is the focus of journals such as Diaspora and Transition as well as a wide range of academic periodicals that have devoted special issues to the theme. But in one way or another, these permutations and mutations of diaspora can be traced to a late nineteenth-century movement among Jewish historiographers, who sought ways to account for the Jews' persistence over the long span of centuries in a variety of lands that were not their homeland. Unfortunately, the rapidly increasing ways that "diaspora" has been appropriated, has led to an unfortunate increase in intellectual fuzziness and rhetorical imprecision to which even the rigorous field of Jewish Studies is far from immune. Fortunately for the latter, Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi's ambitious new study offers both theoretical rigor and innovation, taking the critique of literary Homecoming to a more sophisticated discursive space that will raise essential questions for future investigations of many of the poets and writers considered here. Although Jewish diasporism has often been a focus of Jewish literary analysis, nothing like this book has ever been attempted. Offering a wealth of original translations of abundant prooftexts, rich biographical and literary detail, Ezrahi has produced a consistently lively and erudite work. Divided into two major sections, "Jewish Journeys" and "Jewish Geographies" this book examines the tension between "Jewish story and territory" (139). Ezrahi's touchstone, Yehuda Halevi's "Songs of Zion" provides the essential metaphors of displacement, desire, voyage, and Return that guide her provocative readings. For Ezrahi, the essential terms that haunt the Jewish literary imagination to our own age were embedded in the Kabbalistic texts of Halevi's medieval contemporaries where the theosophical orientation shifts "from a geographical locus to the mobile body of the Jew, leading to later Kabbalistic and eventually Hassidic notions of individual salvation and symbolic rather than concrete connections with a sacred center" (49). In her shrewd analysis of the "diasporic journey" encoded here, Ezrahi is keenly attentive to the creative polarizations that continually reverberate between the metaphorizing and concretizing forms of narrative. For Ezrahi, the diasporic Jew imaginatively transforms the theological dynamic of deferral into profoundly skeptical visions of incomplete pilgrimages and mimetic culture. Ezrahi sees in the Jewish writer's faithful occupation of mimetic, rather than original space, a profound struggle against "contemporary complacencies" as well as "utopian desires" (53) that pose the true dangers to the Jewish spirit: "Herzl's 'if you will it, it is not a dream,' the emblem of the Zionist emergence from the 'dream-state' of the aggadically minded, reflects a cultural challenge of the highest order... 'will,' the fuel that empowers the imagination, is meant eventually to supersede it" (91). In contrast, Ezrahi makes a compelling case for a surprising continuum in the Jewish narrative journey and her study constitutes an ingathering of a highly disparate group of writers whose works (modernist and postmodern alike) nonetheless share a certain primordial trajectory: the literary "decoding of Jewish fate" invariably culminates in a "basic, primordial exilic pattern" in which "the topos of the journey to the Holy Land [is] a tale of the endlessly deferred end" (194). Ezrahi's readings of the spiritual and intellectual struggles encoded in Pagis and Celan's post-Shoah responses to the disenchanted universe are particularly stirring. For instance, in the latter's doomed search for a redemptive encounter with "an Other who has not come" Ezrahi notices the exile's mimicry of the "Zionist intoxication with a return to the primordial self" but finds that such recovery invariably reverts to "the legendary geography of the aimless and endlessly proliferating Jewish journey" (151). Also of note is Ezrahi's analysis of the Israeli poet and medieval scholar Dan Pagis's late works. In the latter's deeply wounded poetics of fragments she discovers "unfathomable depths poised at the borders of language...enigmatic signals sent directly to the reader" (176). Zion remains unattainable destiny rather than the place of arrival. There are also impressive readings of a number of novels by the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld, some of which are still unavailable in English translation. Of particular note is the author's fascinating "Epilogue," an iconoclastic and evocative meditation on the competing claims of nationalism and what the author regards as the truly sacred. No future study of canonical Jewish literature will be sufficient without reference to this luminous study.-Ranen Omer-Sherman, author of Diaspora and Zionism in Jewish-American Literature

Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain

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Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain
Susheila Nasta
Manufacturer: Palgrave Macmillan
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Book Description

The figure of the diasporic or migrant writer has recently come to be seen in the West as the 'Everyman' of the late modern period, a cultural traveler who can traverse national, political and ethnic boundaries. Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain seeks to place individual works of now world famous writers such as V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Sam Selvon or Hanif Kureishi within a diverse tradition of immigrant writing that has evolved in Britain since the Second World War. It also locates their work within an historical, cultural and aesthetic framework which has its roots prior to postwar migrations and derives from long-established indigenous traditions at 'home' and 'abroad'.

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