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August 04

New comment on k.wing's review of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Steve wrote: "K.Wing--you totally need to see the movie, if you haven't already. So life-affirming, so excruciatin...more "

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March 11

New comment on Justin's review of The City in Which I Love You (American Poets Continuum)

Steve wrote: "I had heard that from someone who gave a report on him in class...so which were your favorite poems?...more "

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January 01

New comment on Justin's review of Clapton: The Autobiography

Steve wrote: "Hey man--my dad just read this and really enjoyed it. He couldn't believe how frank Clapton was abou...more "

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December 10

New comment on Brandy's review of Crossing to Safety (Modern Library Classics)

Steve wrote: "Oh man, Brandy--you're gonna love this book! SO good. Once you finish you'll have to read Dr. Caroli...more "

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November 03

New comment on Justin's review of Life of Pi

Steve wrote: "Thank you! Someone who didn't go ga-ga for it. I didn't find it as life-changing an experience eithe...more "

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July 12

Steve gave

to:
Love Medicine (Paperback)
by Louise Erdrich

my rating:

read in June, 2007

Steve said: "Before I had yet read Karen Manuelito’s examination of the intersection of interests between indigenous “womanisms,” highlighting particularly the commonalities between the experiences of African American and American Indian women, I noted the ...more Before I had yet read Karen Manuelito’s examination of the intersection of interests between indigenous “womanisms,” highlighting particularly the commonalities between the experiences of African American and American Indian women, I noted the similarities between the emphases on female experience in Morrison’s Beloved and Erdrich’s Love Medicine. It’s not by accident that Morrison’s is one of the strongest voices in the chorus of praise on the back cover of the novel, noting that “(t)he beauty of Love Medicine saves us from being completely devastated by its power.” Indeed, that tension between stylistic passages of lyrical beauty and heart-rending and impossibly brutal content becomes the hallmark of each author’s narrative. In each work, the principal female characters have had to suffer oppression and misunderstanding both from the outside “white” world and within their own relationships with husbands, sons, and lovers. Erdrich and Morrison each ultimately put forward the possibility of an empowered female subjectivity through privileged access to the community of other women.

Manuelito utilizes a number of theorists to support her own contention that Alice Walker’s notion of “womanism” is particularly helpful in understanding the particular experiences of women of color. As Janet Montelaro notes of Walker, “by foregrounding maternal subjectivities in her novel, Walker creates a prose fiction that conforms to her definition of womanist: it represents not only African-American women’s dependence on and support for each other, but also their commitment to self-esteem and their resistance to obstacles that would deny them a meaningful role in the creation of culture” (178). This seems to underline several common threads in Morrison’s and Erdrich’s works—they center many of their narratives on the specific struggles of women as their characters chart a balance between the prerogatives of nurturing, protecting, and providing for children, and the need to establish a strong sense of self-worth and individual dignity. There are correspondingly many different facets of womanhood available to strong women of color (such as Mother, Othermother/Othersister, Grandmother, Mother as Spiritual Leader, and Warrior) that aren’t as readily accepted within Euro-Western traditional roles.

Many of these unique facets appear in the story of Marie Lazarre (later Kashpaw). When we first encounter her, she’s a fourteen-year old girl pitting herself against the worst excesses of a colonizing form of western Christianity, embodied in the abusive and monomaniacal nun Sister Leopolda. Although the white authority figure makes use of familiar stereotypes that she borrows from the “civilization-savagism paradigm” to which Manuelito alludes, continually racializing the Devil as Indian—a figure who resides in the wilderness outside the convent—Marie resists the damaging internalization of this rhetoric by linguistically turning the tables on her oppressor. She does this by controlling the telling of events through her own narration and by uncovering the true motive behind Sister Leopolda’s efforts to gain Marie’s soul—the raw exercise of domination. Her description of the convent’s exterior demystifies it and strips it of its holy and God-ordained aura: “Gleaming white. So white the sun glanced off in dazzling display to set forms whirling behind your eyelids. The face of God you could hardly look at. But that day it drizzled, so I could look all I wanted. I saw the homelier side” (44-5). ...less "

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July 07

Steve gave

to:
The Namesake (Paperback)
by Jhumpa Lahiri

my rating:

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Steve gave

to:
Interpreter of Maladies (Paperback)
by Jhumpa Lahiri

my rating:

read in July, 2007

Steve said: "Regarding "When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine" (bear with me--this is from a paper I'm writing for class): There are two ways that Lahiri’s story suggests the full weight and particularity of South Asian American experience can be erased or ot...more Regarding "When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine" (bear with me--this is from a paper I'm writing for class): There are two ways that Lahiri’s story suggests the full weight and particularity of South Asian American experience can be erased or otherwise ignored. The first is through a conservative and willful avoidance or fear of multicultural realities, in order to preserve an imaginary unity and monolithic stability of American identity. This is represented within the tale by Lilia’s American education, which refuses to accommodate any overt signs of difference or “otherness” in its understanding of national identity.

Lisa Lowe laments this all-too common situation when she describes a kind of “immigrant marginality” that continues to mark Asian-American experience. As she puts it, “the Asian is always seen as an immigrant, as the ‘foreigner-within,’ even when born in the United States and the descendant of generations born here before...the Asian American, even as a citizen, continues to be located outside the cultural and racial boundaries of the nation” (5-6). Rajini Srikanth echoes this assertion, claiming in her essay, “When Empathy Disappears: The Disconnect between African American and Asian American Muslims,” that African-American problems, while often ignored or unheeded by those in power, still fall within the range of acceptable American cultural history. The legacy of slavery and its haunting effects, as described by Chesnutt in his stories, is distinctly 'our' heritage. As Devon Carbado argues, "people of African ancestry became American via slavery. Slavery substantially diminished, if not eliminated, the formal status of Africans as foreigners" (qtd in Srikanth, 106). Srikanth goes on to say that "the unequivocal reading of the black body as 'American'—both in social identity and legal citizenship—is denied the Asian American" (106).

The second way that unique experience can be avoided or falsified is through a kind of ethno-cultural commodification of South Asian identity, the exercise of an Orientalist gaze that reduces and essentializes South Asian American identity via a kind of panethnic lumping. This is represented in the way that most reviewers of Lahiri's work have tokenized her as representive of all South Asian American experience. According to George Yudice, this is one of the pitfalls of America's recent fascination with multiculturalism and the academy's embrace of area studies--the commodification of the exotic: "Initially a means to 'empower' excluded or marginalized minorities, multiculturalism soon became a quick rhetorical fix of symbolic inclusion and very little material gain" (221)....less "

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June 15

Steve gave

to:
The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers (Penguin Classics)
by Henry James

my rating:

read in June, 2007

Steve said: "The desperate maneuver to pin down and “solve” the problem of human ambiguity is taken again and again by James’s unreliable narrators, often with disastrous consequences. James, however, as a consummate Realist author, appears to see the ambig...more "

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from k.wing

10/01/2007 06:16AM

I am very excited to read her! And yet, I have so many things on my list right now. I did buy a Melville book of three short stories, one of which you suggested to me, and I am excited to start that one up as well. The book I am reading now is hilarious and fun to read, but for some reason it is taking me forever. Hopefully I can finish it today so I can move on to this other stuff.
Hope you are doing well!

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from k.wing

05/11/2007 07:59AM

Oh man is Nabokov a fabulous writer. And I hear that he wrote this novel in English - it's not translated?!?! I have to read Lolita with my little pocket dictionary at my side.
So far, I am on page 30, and still attempting to entertain the idea of a 'nymphet'. It's stomach-shifting subject matter, yet is written in such an odd and intelligent way... it's quite a juxtaposition to feel both attracted and repulsed at the same time while reading this book!

Are you in Virginia already? :(

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from Josiah

05/02/2007 11:25PM

Yeah bike riding. I'd say that's one of my interests as well.

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