An eye-opening, relevant discourse on the unfortunate fallout of an American catastrophe.
An update on the residual societal repercussions from 9/11 on the South Asian American population.
Reverberations from 9/11 in the Sikh culture have been fully felt for more than a decade, writes Prashad (South Asian History/Trinity Coll.; Arab Spring, Libyan Winter, 2012, etc.) in this natural extension of his The Karma of Brown Folk. The author begins in the months following 9/11 as South Asian immigrants (and those even remotely resembling them) became the objects of retaliatory violence in the form of hate crimes and abject discrimination. South Asian businessmen were pulled from trans-Atlantic flights, angry street intimidation proliferated, and random detainments by police became as commonplace as the notion of racial profiling—all contributory byproducts of The Patriot Act. Though “the turban has always provoked anxiety,” writes Prashad, once the shock of 9/11 subsided, what remained were concerted efforts to curb misconceptions about South Asian people, which continues to be a challenge amid a debate over an unemployment-hobbled economy and corporate outsourcing to India. Incorporating personal experiences, the author examines Indian migratory ebbs and flows, how and why South Asian American immigrants became “united by fear,” and the chronological timeline of political activism that united them, regardless of affiliation. Prashad’s diatribes on foreign policy and America’s “imperial ambitions” may overwhelm readers seeking a generalized prognosis, but the author also includes such universally digested statements as, “Everybody dies, but not everybody lives.”
An eye-opening, relevant discourse on the unfortunate fallout of an American catastrophe.Pub Date: June 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-59558-784-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2012
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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