A thoughtful, timely contribution to a controversial debate.
A multiplicity of being.
The daughter of a Tunisian father and Québécoise mother, Abdelmoumen grew up in Montreal and lived in France between 2005 and 2017 before returning to Canada, where she has continued her career as a writer, scholar, and editor of a literary journal. In this insightful memoir, the first of her books to appear in English, Abdelmoumen reflects on race, ethnicity, cultural appropriation, and her own multiple identities. The relationship between James Baldwin and William Styron is central to these reflections: In France, reading Baldwin for the first time, she was surprised to discover that he and Styron had been lifelong friends. Styron, the grandson of slave owners, and Baldwin, the grandson of a slave, “were both consumed with the problem of racial inequality.” When Styron expressed interest in writing a novel about the rebel slave Nat Turner, Baldwin encouraged the project. The Confessions of Nat Turner won a Pulitzer Prize but incited fierce objections from some prominent Black writers. A white man, they claimed, could only promulgate “white southern myths, racial stereotypes, and literary clichés.” Baldwin disagreed, but he, too, later came under censure for not being “Black enough.” Abdelmoumen considers other efforts by white men to portray Black experience: John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me, Ron Stallworth’s Black Klansman, and Abel Meeropol’s song about lynching, “Strange Fruit.” The idea of cultural appropriation, which has become an incendiary issue, seems to Abdelmoumen misguided. “Mistaking an ethnic checklist for a person’s identity is problematic,” she asserts, “as is the ensuing assumption that a person with a certain identity is necessarily knowledgeable about all related topics.” Diversity, she claims, should describe not minority status, but a society that acknowledges the complexity “that comes from all the different facets” of each person’s identity.
A thoughtful, timely contribution to a controversial debate.Pub Date: March 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781771966269
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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