Synthesizing the remarkable work over the last 15 years of scores of cultural historians, theorists, and critics who have been engaged in documenting and analyzing the ubiquitous legacy of blackface minstrelsy and racial posing in 20th-century American culture, Gubar has assembled a comprehensive catalog of cross-racial iconography. The paradox that despite our preoccupations with social divisions by race, the identities and psychologies of black and white Americans are inextricably interdependent is nowhere more evident than in modern popular culture. Gubar, coauthor with Sandra Gilbert of a groundbreaking work of feminist literary criticism, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), examines the pervasive role of cross-racial impersonation in the development of American melodrama (beginning with Uncle Tom's Cabin) and musical theater, motion pictures (D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation and Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer), popular radio shows (Amos 'n' Andy), and new journalism (John Howard Griffith's 1960 study Black Like Me), as well as in European experimental literature, painting, and photography. She also clearly identifies the ethical issue at the center: ``How can white people understand or sympathize with African-Americans without distorting or usurping their perspective?'' Of course, who is the subject and the object of the gaze has a great deal to do with whether the act of ``racechange'' is transgressive or regressive, but there are persistent ambiguities in the act. Gubar appreciates and articulates multilayered complexities and ironies that evolve along with American cultural expression, although occasionally she comes up with an interpretation that seems overdetermined. Gubar addresses the major issue of why potentially liberating acts of racial masquerade so often end up serving racist ends and are only now being used to envision postracist ways of being and seeing. This is an important book for the way it highlights an active but underacknowledged field of cultural inquiry, and a study bound to prompt further debate. (96 photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-19-511002-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997
Though cheerleading occasionally grates, Plouffe offers good fodder for readers willing to put in the effort and follow his...
Barack Obama’s former campaign manager and senior adviser weighs in on what it will take to defeat Donald Trump and repair some of the damage caused by the previous election’s “historically disturbing and perhaps democracy-destroying outcome.”
Plouffe (The Audacity To Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory, 2009) managed Obama’s successful campaigns in 2008 and 2012. His unsurprising goal in 2020 is to take down Trump, and he provides a detailed guide for every American to become involved beyond just voting. Where the author is not offering specific suggestions for individual involvement, he engages in optimistic encouragement to put readers in the mindset to entertain his suggestions. Plouffe wisely realizes that many potential readers feel beaten down by the relentlessness of Trump’s improper behavior and misguided policies, so there is plenty of motivational exhortation that highly motivated readers might find unnecessary. When he turns to voting statistics, he’s on solid ground. Plouffe expresses certainty that Trump will face opposition from at least 65 million voters in the 2020 election. One of the author’s goals is to increase that number to somewhere between 70 and 75 million, which would be enough to win not only the popular votes for the Democratic Party nominee, but also the Electoral College by a comfortable margin. Some of that increased number can be achieved by increasing the percentage of citizens who vote, with additional gains from voters who vote for the Democratic nominee rather than symbolically supporting a third-party candidate. Plouffe also feels optimistic about persuading Obama supporters who—perhaps surprisingly—voted for Trump in 2016. As for individual involvement prior to November, the author favors direct action. Door-to-door canvassing is his favorite method, but he offers alternatives for those who cannot or will not take their opinions to the streets, including campaigning via social media. And while the author would love to change the Electoral College, he wisely tells readers they must live with it again this time around.
Though cheerleading occasionally grates, Plouffe offers good fodder for readers willing to put in the effort and follow his advice.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-7949-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Literature knows few champions as ardent and insightful—or as uncompromising—as Gornick, which is to readers’ good fortune.
Gornick’s (The Odd Woman and the City, 2016) ferocious but principled intelligence emanates from each of the essays in this distinctive collection.
Rereading texts, and comparing her most recent perceptions against those of the past, is the linchpin of the book, with the author revisiting such celebrated novels as D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, Colette's The Vagabond, Marguerite Duras' The Lover, and Elizabeth Bowen's The House in Paris. Gornick also explores the history and changing face of Jewish American fiction as expressions of "the other." The author reads more deeply and keenly than most, with perceptions amplified by the perspective of her 84 years. Though she was an avatar of "personal journalism" and a former staff writer for the Village Voice—a publication that “had a muckraking bent which made its writers…sound as if they were routinely holding a gun to society’s head”—here, Gornick mostly subordinates her politics to the power of literature, to the books that have always been her intimates, old friends to whom she could turn time and again. "I read ever and only to feel the power of Life with a capital L," she writes; it shows. The author believes that for those willing to relinquish treasured but outmoded interpretations, rereading over a span of decades can be a journey, sometimes unsettling, toward richer meanings of books that are touchstones of one's life. As always, Gornick reveals as much about herself as about the writers whose works she explores; particularly arresting are her essays on Lawrence and on Natalia Ginzburg. Some may feel she has a tendency to overdramatize, but none will question her intellectual honesty. It is reflected throughout, perhaps nowhere so vividly as in a vignette involving a stay in Israel, where, try as she might, Gornick could not get past the "appalling tribalism of the culture.”
Literature knows few champions as ardent and insightful—or as uncompromising—as Gornick, which is to readers’ good fortune.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-28215-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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