RaveFinancial Times[A] brilliant crime novel that doubles as a meditation on the nature of black geography ... So careful is Whitehead’s mapping that the novel could double as a script for a walking tour of Harlem ... The brilliance of Harlem Shuffle is the way it yanks readers down from the top of the tour bus, away from the high-gloss clubs and cabarets that lured visitors uptown, and on to the sweltering pavement ... Whitehead leaves us with the notion that to map Harlem is to follow the perpetually changing routes of its makers and takers.
Claudia Rankine
MixedThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Rankine’s commitment to conversation as the threshold of political transformation is rooted in a deep investment in the possibility of rewiring the social contract, the unspoken agreement about civility that is also a formative democratic principle ... That Just Us concentrates on white people thinking about whiteness is not surprising, but its infrequent engagements with Black people might give the reader pause, not least for their bluntness ... Taking liberties to ask questions even, and especially, when they are not welcome seems to be at least half of her goal. Yet given the insufficiency of the conversation as a substitute for politics (and given that if conversation and democracy are twinned forces, then right now they are equally impotent), evident here as elsewhere in Just Us, her methodology is hard to get behind. This summer, following the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, white people were encouraged to engage in difficult, discomfiting conversations about their own privilege. Just Us adopts a similar liberalism, equating conversation with political action, even as this equation strips urgency away from calls for anti-racist practices ... Impressions and impressibility might seem a small thing to dwell on from a book overflowing with anecdotes, cultural references and data (a hybridity that shows Rankine at her best) ... I can’t help thinking of Morrison’s clearing as the kind of unnamed, unsanctioned place that can foster the transformative relations Rankine dreams of. It is only in such a space, clear of a social contract built on bodily debasement and the idea of a \'them\', beyond the purview of whiteness, and without the desire for either intelligibility or legibility, that we might be able to impress on each other in truly transformative ways – to just be us.
