The history of modern African fiction is essentially 100 years of branding disaster. In marketing African fiction, the conventional practice among publishers both in Africa and the west has been to simply tag a novel to a social issue. “Such and such a novel explores colonialism.” Done. “So and so offers a searing representation of the scourge of misogyny.” Done. “Corruption takes center stage in so and so’s novel.” Done.
African fiction is packaged and circulated, bought and sold not on the basis of its aesthetic value but of its thematic preoccupation.
.. Here are the opening sentences of the Amazon blurb of Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.
A postmodern visionary and one of the leading voices in twenty-first-century fiction, David Mitchell combines flat-out adventure, a Nabokovian love of puzzles, a keen eye for character, and a taste for mind-bending, philosophical and scientific speculation in the tradition of Umberto Eco, Haruki Murakami, and Philip K. Dick. The result is brilliantly original fiction as profound as it is playful. In this groundbreaking novel, an influential favorite among a new generation of writers, Mitchell explores with daring artistry fundamental questions of reality and identity.
Compare this to the only opening sentence of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah.
A powerful, tender story of race and identity by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the award-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun.
.. To reduce all the flirty, humorous beauty of Adichie’s novel to “a tender story about race” is just wrong and borderline patronizing. But it also demonstrates the inherent bias in the way readers are invited to encounter African novels.
..‘I’m wary of “getting tagged”’: author Helen Oyeyemi
The Supreme Court Extremism of Clarence Thomas and Chuck Grassley
.. like many Republicans, he’s having a hard time explaining why he will not even give a hearing to Merrick Garland, President Barack Obama’s choice to replace Justice Antonin Scalia on the Court. In defense of his position, Grassley gave a speech on the Senate floor that was close to breathtaking in its intemperate incoherence. The speech was an extended attack on Chief Justice John Roberts, who had recently expressed the unexceptional view that the Court should stay out of partisan politics as much as possible.
.. This hostility to Roberts comes in the face of the Chief Justice’s down-the-line conservatism in nearly every other case of his decade in office. Roberts joined the majority in Citizens United and in Shelby County (which eviscerated the Voting Rights Act), and he dissented in Windsor, the case that invalidated the Defense of Marriage Act, and Obergefell, which brought same-sex marriage to all fifty states. The decisions Grassley disagrees with are “political,” whereas the ones he likes are, presumably, just good judging. The crudeness of Grassley’s attack on Roberts, from a senator who claims to want to avoid a politicization of the court, is astonishing.
.. the Court approved a voting-apportionment process—currently used by every state—that requires all legislative districts to have an equal number of people. Conservatives had demanded a system where states could require districts of equal numbers of voters, so state legislators could ignored the numbers of non-citizens, children, disenfranchised felons, and others not eligible to vote in every district.
.. The Court responded to this obvious injustice by finding that, under the Fourteenth Amendment, courts must require that districts be drawn according to the principle of one person, one vote. No Justice has challenged this basic idea.
Now Thomas has done so, writing that the Court “has failed to provide a sound basis for the one-person, one-vote principle because no such basis exists.” His opinion excavates, as Thomas often does, his understanding of what James Madison intended when he wrote the Bill of Rights. In Thomas’s view, this history amounts to an almost total abdication by the Framers in favor of the rights of the states. By ruling that the Constitution requires the states to follow a one-person, one-vote principle, Thomas writes, “the Court has arrogated to the Judiciary important value judgments that the Constitution reserves to the people.”
.. In his opinion, Thomas ignores racial discrimination—and thus the central reason the Court, in the nineteen-sixties, imposed the one-person, one-vote rule. Thomas’s blindness to the realities of American life—and concomitant obsession with his understanding of the Framers’ intent—reflects his bizarre jurisprudential views.
Hey, Everybody, It’s Not Okay to Denounce Trump Anymore
MSNBC Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough, back on February 29:
Donald Trump’s failure to explicitly disavow the Ku Klux Klan and former Grand Wizard David Duke is “disqualifying,” Joe Scarborough declared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Monday.
“It’s breathtaking. That is disqualifying right there. To say you don’t know about the Ku Klux Klan? You don’t know about David Duke?” the co-host said during the opening segment of the show after remarking upon Trump’s feigned ignorance of the group and Duke during an interview with CNN on Sunday, two days after he explicitly disavowed the group in a news conference.
The “most stunning thing” about the latest development, said Scarborough, a southerner himself, is that the latest maneuver “isn’t buying him a single vote.”
“I mean is he really so stupid that he thinks Southerners aren’t offended by the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke? Is he really so ignorant of Southern voters that he thinks this is the way to their heart — to go neutral, to play Switzerland when you’re talking about the Klan?” Scarborough asked. “And to say he doesn’t know enough information about the Klan to condemn them — exactly what does Donald Trump expect to learn in the next 24 hours about the Klan.”
Scarborough also wrote that day:
Why would the same man who claims to have “the world’s greatest memory” say “I don’t know anything about David Duke” just two days after he condemned the former Klansman in a nationally televised press conference? And with that amazing memory, how could Donald Trump have forgotten that he himself refused to run for president as a Reform Party nominee in 2000 because ”Klansman” David Duke was a member of that same party?
These are questions that have no good answers for a Republican Party on the verge of nominating a man who sounds more like a Dixiecrat from the 1950s than the kind of nominee the GOP needs four years after losing Hispanics by 44 percent, Asian Americans by 47 percent and black Americans by 87 percent.
Sunday’s distressing performance is just the latest in a string of incidents that suggest to critics that Donald Trump is using bigotry to fuel his controversial campaign . . .
The harsher reality is that the next GOP nominee will be a man who refused to condemn the Ku Klux Klan and one of its most infamous grand wizards when telling the ugly truth wouldn’t have cost him a single vote.
So is this how the party of Abraham Lincoln dies?
One month later, and Joe Scarborough is a lot madder at conservative critics of Trump than the candidate himself — even though the arguments mirror the ones the MSNBC host made back at the end of February.
.. These rules, in most cases, are on the state party’s web site or at a site like GreenPapers. They’re not secret. They’re not locked away in the warehouse that has the Ark of the Covenant.
.. You would think that the guy who touts himself as a masterful dealmaker would have learned to read the fine print by now.
American Anger: It’s Not the Economy. It’s the Other Party.
Data on the nation’s economic recovery, people’s reactions to current economic conditions and their overall sense of satisfaction with life doesn’t suggest Americans are angry.
.. The increasing alignment between party and racial attitudes goes back to the early 1990s. The Pew Values Survey asks people whether they agree that “we should make every effort to improve the position of minorities, even if it means giving them preferential treatment.
.. Democrats are now much more supportive (52 percent) of efforts to improve racial equality than they were a few decades ago, while the views of Republicans have been largely unchanged (12 percent agree).
.. But recent work by Stanford University’s Shanto Iyengar and his co-authors shows something else has been brewing in the electorate: a growing hostilitytoward members of the opposite party. This enmity, they argue, percolates into opinions about everyday life.
.. Partisans, for example, are now more concerned that their son or daughter might marry someone of the opposite party (compared with Britain today and the United States in 1960). They also found that partisans are surprisingly willing to discriminate against people who are not members of their political party.
.. Disagreements between people about nominations for the Academy Awards, for example, may now become emotional as well as political if they involve racial attitudes because of the sorting of these attitudes by party and the contempt people feel for the other side.