A provocative manifesto indeed, and one that deserves a wide audience.
Princeton sociologist Benjamin takes Toni Morrison’s advice to “dream a little before you think” and runs with it.
In this brief treatise, imagination is both a noun and an imperative, and the author’s usage is “unruly.” In essence, Benjamin invites readers to consider a different world, one that the imagination of others tells us is the best of all possible worlds. It’s fruitful, for instance, to imagine not an America in which exceptional “unicorns” of color are marked as evidence that the educational system is colorblind, but instead one in which a new system of education is created to “cultivate everyone’s creativity and curiosity.” Just so, Benjamin writes, we need to collectively imagine ways to combat such things as racism, climate change, economic inequality, and the like. Sometimes the author’s language is a touch jargony, unless you like rubrics such as “transition imaginaries,” but more often she’s refreshingly direct: “We can transform the hostile environments that try to trap us—whether they are literal cages, barbed wire–encircled playgrounds, or bullet-friendly classrooms. We can imagine otherwise.” The author also examines efforts to put this kind of imagining into practice, such as a board game that turns Monopoly on its head by teaching the values of economic cooperation, and an imagined border in which steel walls give way to binational cities. One of Benjamin’s experiments, as she describes it, was a delightful remaking of daily life in isolation via beekeeping. “Not only do bees teach us that collaboration is how we survive, that decision-making should be collective…but also that we don’t have to choose between working hard and creating beautiful, sweet things.” Benjamin closes with a set of writing and thinking prompts that will enliven curricula and dinner-table conversations alike.
A provocative manifesto indeed, and one that deserves a wide audience.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781324020974
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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