An engaging analysis of the persistent vestiges of colonialism.
A South African psychologist surveys the lasting legacies of systemic racism in this debut book.
Borrowing from Albert Camus’ apothegm regarding the aftermath of Europe’s bubonic plague—the “rats had never left but went underground”—author Karani argues that, although we may live in a post-colonial world, colonialism’s legacy of systemic racism is still with us in “embedded mindsets.” Believing that “overcoming colonialism’s insidious impact requires freeing the oppressed mind,” the author offers readers a historical survey of colonialism and racist ideology from European enslavement of Africans through the killing of George Floyd and police response to Black Lives Matter protests. Interspersed throughout are more theoretical assessments that explore, for instance, anti-intellectualism in the United States and the toll of racism on Black mental health. Karani’s astute observations arise not only from his extensive research (the book includes 300-plus endnotes) and scholarly background as a clinical psychologist and professor, but also from personal experience. South Africa’s apartheid regime forcibly closed his father’s retail business in 1959, effectively condemning his family to poverty. Young Karani followed the leadership of Steve Biko and other revolutionaries who formed the Black Consciousness Movement. This “self-identification” as Black in a nation that divided colonized people into competing racial categories “empowered” Karani to pursue advanced academic degrees and convinced him that previously colonized people must dismantle the mental shackles and other ideological constructs left in colonization’s wake. Additionally, Karani’s later immigration to Canada, his current home, revealed an equally painful legacy of sustained discrimination toward Black immigrants and an even worse history of genocide against Indigenous citizens despite its comparative stability as a liberal democracy that nominally supports multiculturalism and human rights. This work is particularly adept at condensing longue durée history across multiple periods and continents, as well as complex colonial and post-colonial theories, into an accessible, well-written narrative accompanied by textbox vignettes and charts.
An engaging analysis of the persistent vestiges of colonialism.Pub Date: Dec. 16, 2022
ISBN: 9781039139862
Page Count: 276
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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