These varied essays explore the language of racial misrecognition (a.k.a. "passing"), the subjectivity of black writers in the unblack Pacific northwest, the failure of urban renewal, black and Asian comedy as a counterweight to official multiculturalism, the poetics of hip hop turntablism, and the impact of the Obama phenomenon on the way we speak about race itself.
Musgrave writes of family, writing, travel, sex and death as interpreted through her real-life adventures with her outlaw husband, Stephen Reid, and her teenage girls, taking us from the Queen Charlotte Islands to Panama City.
Making a strong case for the importance of the individual--a core tenet of the transcendental movement--Emerson assails conformity with a series of sharp observations.
A frank and fascinating exploration of race and racial identity In a book that begins with a series of lynchings and ends with a series of apologies, Eula Biss explores race in America. Her response to the topic is informed by the experiences chronicled in these essays -- teaching in a Harlem school on the morning of 9/11, reporting for an African American newspaper in San Diego, watching the aftermath of Katrina from a college town in Iowa, and settling in Chicago’s most diverse neighborhood.
