Afrogeek Bookshelf

I thought my sabbatical would be full of lazy days spent reading whatever my heart desired. Instead, I've mostly been writing (which should not at all be read as a complaint) and reading things related to that writing. All that said, here's an update on what I have been reading:

I love Pride and Prejudice. Love it love it in a crazily cliche girly way. I am also terrified of zombies. Don't give me your logical "zombies aren't realy" arguments. Zombies are scary. Imagine my surprise, then, when I started Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and found myself utterly charmed by it. It's exactly what it sounds like: zombies in the P&P universe. Elizabeth and her sisters are Shaolin trained fighters of the "unmentionables" and Darcy is pretty handy with a blade and rifle himself. The plot and setting of the story is exactly the same as the original, only with more zombie goodness. I haven't finished it yet, but I'm enjoying it so far.

I am endlessly fascinated by discussions of black intellectuals not only because of the work that I do, but also because I am a black intellectual. Houston Baker's provocative title, Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era, immediately caught my eye when it was first published, but I'm only now getting a chance to read it. He posits MLK as the quintessential black public intellectual and measures the likes of Michael ERic Dyson, John McWhorter, Cornel West, and Shelby Steele against that standard. You can imagine how they fare. Baker is a great combination of agile thinker, engaging, playful writer, and snarktastic wit. His book, aside from being both painfully smart and delightfully catty, is also a great resource for those interested in the concept of race man/woman. This book is changing the way I'll teach King/Dubois/Baldwin in the future.

And finally, I am re-reading Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin. I'm writing about this book for a project completely unrelated to my book on Baldwin. I haven't re-read it since graduate school. The Baldwin book (or the Bal-damn book, as my husband as taken to calling it) has made it really hard to remember what I love about Baldwin, his work has been such a huge weight on my shoulders for so long. But this novel is a good reminder. If you haven't read it--the story of 14 year old John Grimes' religious conversion as well as the story of the adults who in his life (and that is such a inadequate description of this book about religion and blackness and racism and urbanity and the difficulty of becoming a whole human being capable of love)--you should rush right out and get it.

James Baldwin: Witness and Prophet

Okay, so I'm cheating a little bit here. I'm writing a book on James Baldwin and I've already posted my favorite passage from him elsewhere in this blog. But it's my blog and it's genius passage, so I'm going to post it again. From "Autobiographical Notes" in Notes of a Native Son:

"I do not like people who like me because I am a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt. I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one’s moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright. I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done.

I want to be an honest man and a good writer."

Derrick Bell, legal scholar and writer (and perhaps the subject of tomorrow's post) says that American racism is permanent, yet the fight against racism is both necessary and meaningful. What's great about Baldwin's work is that you see him, over the course of a very long and incredibly prolific career, come to this same conclusion. In his essays we see his hope in the civil rights movement, his belief that racial divides could be crossed. And then we see his grief when that hope his lost, this anger and frustration after King and Malcolm X and Medgar Evers are killed. We watch as he goes from being the darling of American intelligentsia to being the whipping boy of black nationalism. What's particularly compelling to me about Baldwin isn't that his prose is often breathtakingly beautiful and his insights spot on. It's that Baldwin never gives us anything less than an honest view of the world and himself, warts and all. He has no agenda, no ideological drum to beat. Make no mistake--he is political. He wanted civil rights as much as the next black man. But he also wanted to be an honest man and a good writer. And these desires often conflicted. That conflict is there on the page for all of us to see and his work taken as a whole is one of the most brilliant portraits of the artist we have in the Enlgihs language.

I recommend: Notes of a Native Son and Giovanni's Room.