RaveThe NationMore than just a curio of African American literary history, Wright’s tale of how one Black man experiences police violence and is plunged into a life-changing existential crisis as a result is, sadly, still as relevant today as it was when Wright wrote it ... The surrealist, fantastical, and gothic elements of both his story and The Man Who Lived Underground serve to underscore how bizarre and unnatural such a governmental structure should seem. The publication of Wright’s long-lost novel, one hopes, will remind us that there are other ways of seeing the state and the market and, ultimately, other ways of governing ourselves and supplying the necessities of life.
Claudia Rankine
PositiveThe NationRankine’s representation of loneliness was always political as well as personal ... as Rankine tells us in her new collection, Just Us, the inclusion of her words did not lead to the inclusion of her person ... Rankine’s antidote to this loneliness was and continues to be conversation—a strategy on full display in Just Us ... What separates Just Us from these historians’ work is its focus on personal experience and thought. By chronicling her experiences as a means of bringing America’s racism to the surface, she asks readers to consider those larger structures of power and violence as well as how so many of them, as individuals, have contributed to sustaining a racist society ... it should come as no surprise that Just Us delves into her ambivalence toward the nation that elected Donald Trump ... Accordingly, Rankine’s representations of racism in Just Us tend to be interpersonal. Although she has discussed unconscious and implicit bias throughout her work, Just Us is the book in which she discusses both forms of bias most explicitly and at the greatest length. It is also the book in which she turns most profoundly to the ways in which whiteness—and especially notions of white innocence—lead white people to forget the role that racism plays in enabling their success ... Her commitment to the emancipatory possibilities of conversation can, at times, make Just Us a frustrating read ... it becomes clear that Rankine sees these conversations as doing a particular kind of work.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
PositiveThe NationCoates may have turned away from his teachers’ belief that learning about moments of black triumph in the past might change the lives of black people in the present, but The Water Dancer does breathe new life into stories of black Americans struggling to end the country’s long history of racial violence and inequality. The novel adds to the historical scholarship by imagining those parts of the struggle that scholarship cannot access. But it does something else as well: It insists that emancipation was only the first step toward black liberation—that freedom is a process. Indeed, as Hiram observes at The Water Dancer’s end, the war for Elm County, for Virginia, and for the nation is only beginning.
Zora Neale Hurston
PositiveThe NationBarracoon, a work unpublished in Hurston’s lifetime, captures both her anthropological spirit and her capacity for storytelling and narrative ... Kossula’s story reminds us that Emancipation did not end those assaults on the communities and families of African Americans, but rather enabled their continuation through other means. A combination of xenophobia and police impunity led to the death of one of Kossula’s sons. A railroad company killed another without making the slightest effort at compensation. Poor medical care guaranteed the death of several other children. And grief likely killed his wife. An assault on African families was not just foundational to the black presence in America during the long era of slavery; it continued in the years after Emancipation.
