Welcome to Litsy!

I‘m posting one book a day from my massive collection. No description, no reason for why I want to read it (some I‘ve had so long I don‘t even remember why!). Feel free to join in!

#ABookADay2024

Simply put: this book is amazing. Bell has touched on a lot of topics that have never sat well with me around racism that I now have some voice to. His parables about racism‘s permanence in America and how issues need to be reconciled not resolved is, for lack of a better term, eye opening.

While his style is pretty corny he is able to state his points with pristine clarity. He wanted EVERYONE to read this not just intellectuals.

In the wake of US election results, in the midst of other local activism planning, I‘m finding some small comfort in looking through my shelves to find books which will inspire me to keep going, keep fighting. These are books I‘m going to move up my TBR for the near future. I‘m sure I‘ll add to the stack as I look through my library more. Are there any books y‘all are thinking about these days?

I think the thing that is most interesting but also most upsetting about this book is that it was written in 1995 but is still so relevant. Obviously hooks is brilliant, but it means that the state of discourse around art, race, and gender has really not progressed much in the past 30 years.

Next

I‘m posting one book a day from my massive collection. No description, no reason for why I want to read it (some I‘ve had so long I don‘t even remember why!). Feel free to join in!

#ABookADay2024

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

^p78 twisting language to preserve white character‘s agency & perspective in “To Have and Have Not.” Wesley can‘t even yell “Fish!”—Harry has to “saw he had seen” the fish.
“A better, certainly more graceful choice would have been to have the black man cry out at the sighting.” Observations, small details.

P30 “The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.”

Strong piece. “American Africanism” as an OTHERED Blackness, a “fabricated presence” as foil for white characters. 1992

P77 “Eddie is white, and we know he is because nobody says so.”

P93 “Studies in American Africanism, in my view, should be investigations of the ways in which a nonwhite, Africanist presence and persona have been constructed—invented—in the United States, and of the literary uses this fabricated presence has served.”