Rupture as Rapture. We have nothing to lose but our chains.
A passionate argument for the continued, urgent relevance of The Communist Manifesto.
Though perhaps best known in the U.S. as an award-winning writer of speculative fiction, Miéville has both a doctorate in international relations and a long history as a Marxist. As such, he comes to the topic not as a dilettante but as a learned apostle of the communist creed. The author escorts readers through the Manifesto’s origins and publication history before launching into a summary of the document itself. (Samuel Moore’s 1888 English translation is appended for reference along with several introductions to various editions.) Miéville’s exegesis draws on both external commentators and co-authors Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’ other writings to inform it. It is when Miéville enters into dialogue with the Manifesto’s critics that his own writing comes most robustly to life. In addressing those who take swipes at the document’s religiosity, the author responds with an unabashed “So what” and leans in, exhorting readers to “incant the Manifesto, as its catechism-derived rhythms and techniques plead for you to do….Does not the Manifesto repeatedly describe its aim as rupture?…This is an eschatological moment.” This is a slim volume but by no means a light one. Miéville’s audience is assumed to have either a high degree of comfort with his 75-cent vocabulary or a dictionary (fissiparous, imbricated, apophatic, etc.). Nonetheless, his argument is persuasive, pointing to such contemporary phenomena as America’s “vicious, racialized carceral regime” as evidence of capitalism’s “excrescences”—and its sinister “adaptability.” Like Marx and Engels, Miéville offers no real road map for post-capitalist life, just the certainty that “this carnival of predatory rapacity will [never be] fit to live in.” He builds to a rapturous conclusion, thundering from his pulpit as he enlists readers among the “we who reach the tipping point where this unliveable disempowering tawdry ugly violent murderous world can no longer be lived.”
Rupture as Rapture. We have nothing to lose but our chains.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64259-893-3
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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