New posts are for history as fiction!

breaking the cycle

Ross Wilcox embodies toxic male violence. Ross' violence has no purpose other than to continue a series of pointless conflicts sparked by his own fear and insecurity. The cycle of violence goes back to Ross' father, an abusive man who put his own wife in the hospital for losing a couple postage stamps. But how did Ross' father become so violent? It's likely that he also had a traumatic past that forced him into a pattern of male violence. Jason struggles to cope with Ross' ruthless bullying because it seems that there's no right way to respond: anything he does will get him more hurt. In fact, there is no possible response that could make Ross stop because he is so firmly entrenched in a violent system. Ross is incapable of gratitude, even when Jason kindly returns his wallet, because he doesn't know how to express those emotions. But no matter how badly Jason has been bullied, he is able to empathize with Ross because he recognizes that Ross is trapped. ...

Painting metaphorically

Ellison often uses metaphorical language to convey subtler points about his narrator's situation. My favorite example of this technique is when the narrator is hired to paint samples of Optic White for the Liberty Paint Company. First of all, the company's emphasis on complete whiteness is a play on how the white world expects conformity. The paint helps to enforce society's "white is right" rhetoric by whitewashing universities and government monements, which symbolizes how education and public history are controlled by white power. The narrator points out that black-owned space such as the Golden Day are free from this whitewashing because they don't accept white authority. During the paint factory scene, the narrator must navigate the same questions of submissiveness and subversiveness that his grandfather raises. He ruins the second batch of samples when he attemps to do his job right, and Kimbro is only satisfied by the samples that appear to have be...

Butler's postmodernism

Octavia Butler's Kindred might not appear as startlingly postmodernist as other novels we've read ( Mumbo Jumbo, for example) but her writing presents a powerful challenge to the kind of unilateral, hegemonic narrative that postmodern texts sought to deconstruct. The story unfolds on a Maryland plantation decades before emancipation, grounding Dana's experience in a time when slavery would have felt virtually inescapeable. Dana realizes that the rift between her time and Rufus' time is more than temporal or spatial, but the two environments she's pulled between demonstrate completely different assumptions about humanity. She and Kevin first seek to understand their new environment through their history books from back home, which provide essential information about past laws and regulations. However, the knowledge found in history books can't capture the real experience of living as a slave on Weylin's plantation. Recounting facts about such a brutal era...

Goddamn Lyotard!

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